vetsoapfan

She just seemed to zone out and go on somnambulistic cruise control.

I've always thought Jed Allen would have been great as Mike Bauer. He could play all sorts of different "colors," romance, anger, vulnerability, sweetness, strength, and was more natural and less stiff and reserved than Don Stewart. (Tht being said, I would have kept Stewart on the show as my first choice.) Well, I mean as a personal preference. TGL was horribly gutted by then, or maybe by 1986, and in my heart, I would have preferred to see the old gal go out with some semblance of dignity, rather than watching rabid crows picking at the rotting corpse. Of course, as it turned out, the show rebounded in the early 1990s under Nancy Curlee, so at that time, I was glad it had endured the dark years of the 1980s. I saw that with the right PTB, it still could have been saved. Alas, after Curlee left, the show never again had effective behind-the-scenes personnel who understood it or the audience, and it plunged back into its long, long decline. I thought PFS's brief tenure on TGL was wonderful. She instantly seemed to "get" so many of the characters and wrote lovely scenes for them. The sense of community was also there. I was aghast when she was fired, and the endless revolving door of much-less-talented writers took over. I could have have accepted Coster as Mike, although my first choices would have been Don Stewart or Jed Allen. No other actor but Hulswit would have been acceptable to me. God yes!

Scott Phillips on SFT was Simon's strongest role, IMHO. I enjoyed his work on that show. While I found the actor's storyline on ATWT to be laborious and tedious, I felt that Simon showed enough signs of life while working there to be acceptable. I always thought Jacqueline Schultz was colorless and drippy, however, and hated when she was cast as a ridiculously de-SORASed Patti on SFT. I would have hated seeing her cast as Hope Bauer.

Axing the principle Bauers in the 1980s, killing off Maureen Bauer and Ross Marler in the 1990s, foisting all the sci-fi crap onto the once-erudite soap, populating Springfield with so many irrelevant and disposible faces in its dwindling years...TPTB had been making painfully atrociously decisions at TGL for a loooong time. I was ready for/expecting it to be euthanized by 1985. God, yes! Peter Simon and Nancy St Alban were dull as dishwater; Ed and Michelle were basically useless as remnants of the core family without the likes of Mart Hulswit and Rachel Miner (or even Joie Lenz) in the roles. Rick became an unnecessary talk-to as he hovered around the backburner, and O'Leary's mugging made me yearn to see a new actor take over the part. I always regarded RVV as "Chuck Tyler pretending to be Ed Bauer." He was totally miscast on TGL. I liked Peter Simon on SFT, and felt he was good on ATWT, but he was abrasively lethargic and colorless as Ed. This was NOT the Ed Bauer I had watched for 20 years. They never should have written Hope off at all, but particularly with Bert, Hillary and Maureen dead, we needed a beloved Bauer woman aboard the sinking SS Springfield. It kinda looked like TIIC were sabotaging the show right into the grave.

I'm sorry to hear about your family members' food poison, @slick jones . Hope they feel better by now.

Leaving Peter Simon's Ed in Springfield was probably TPTB's way of turning the audience against the Bauer family for good, since PS's version of the character would bore anyone to tears.😒 I referred to PS's Ed as "the fake Ed" for 27 years, LOL, while I referred to Johnny, Lacey, Jack and Lainie as "the retcon Bauers who do not exist."☹️

Okay; thanks. I appreciate you letting me know.

Drats. The chat transcript will not open for me. I hope I did not miss any previously-unreported gossip/facts.

Thank you so much. I'm going to check it out.

Sorry, what chat are you talking about? Any discussion of BTS drama from the years TGL got decimated would interest me very much. Was this a Youtube chat, or what? Thanks in advance.

We are very fortunate to have @Reverend Ruthledge sharing these beautifully-written synopses with us. They preserve history which would otherwise go unrecorded and end up forgotten, and allow us to experience the richest years of the show.🥰

No, actually, I haven't checked out the channel yet. I appreciate the heads-up!

That is so interesting. I love the rare times when soaps do stuff like that. Unfortunately, it draws a blank for me. I do not remember anything like it, and the hefty scrapbooks I kept chronicling the show's history does not include any information about Mark Lenard making a return engagement to the show. I wish there were a definitive way we could find out the answers to your questions.

Thank you @Franko and @DRW50 . I always love seeing curio pieces like this, but would probably miss them if kind folks did not post them and alert me to them!

Ernest, who was the first member of the family to be introduced in 1964 was also the last to go. He remained in Bay City after everyone else had left (or, in the case of his brother, died). When his romance with Janet Matthews fizzled, he also left town.