vetsoapfan

Woohoo! The boys are back in town!

On soaps, I loathe all things sci-fi and supernatural. Those stories cripple and ultimately kill the shows. They destroy the |reality bubble" between the soaps and the audience, which allows viewers to feel as if they are watching the daily lives of characters who could be their family and friends. The low-brow, campy dreck may titillate viewers momentarily, or make them laugh ("Wow, I can't believe they are doing anything so stupid, hahahahaha!"), but people who watch the shows for that sort of material always want more and more of the same, and daytime TV cannot sustain it. The shows alienate longtime viewers and cannot hold onto the newer, camp-loving audience members, so it's a lose-lose situation. Margaret Reed (Shannon) gave an interview once, in which she discussed the brain-dead "castle stories on ATWT (The haunted painting! Lilith and the Shrunken Head!). She said everyone hated that stuff. The actors did not want to play it and the writers did not want to write it, but they had no choice. It sounds like that awful material was foisted onto the show by the typically idiotic PTB.

Any amount of time with Laura on canvas was too much. She was played by Carolyn Ann Clarke who had been so abrasive and icky on TGL. There are very few performers whom I simply cannot stomach watching, and she is one of them. (Mo Bernard and Steve Burton are two more, from daytime TV's current canvas.)

We must all endeavor to keep the hot guys coming.

Woohoo, Faulkner!

Laura!!!! AAAAAAAACK!!!!! How I loathed that character. And not even in a fun, I love-to-hate-her way, either. I just loathed Laura and wanted her off the show. Just wait, you'll see.

Cool. Thank you. Have you read anything of hers which you could recommend?

Come on, posters! We cannot let this great thread wither away.

Well, that's cool. I had my own Classic Movie marathon over the holidays, and watched many vintage favorites like The Thin Man, It's a Wonderful Life (naturally), Little Women (the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn), and several others. It was wonderful.

Well, when it comes right down to it, no two critics ever agree on everything, and maybe there were some viewers/critics who appreciated Grover's work. As for the Brez's material, I think it was universally reviled. An anti-smoking storyline (if not too sanctimonious and preachy, which would only alienate smokers in the audience) is an appropriate plot for a soap called The Doctors. The anti-aging saga and similar crapola were simply stupid, and don't belong on any show. Maybe I will pick up a book or two of hers at the library, and see what and how she can write on her own, without network interference.

Buzz and Hope? BUZZ and Hope? Oh dear God in heaven, please no. The Bauers have suffered enough!

In the early years, I found Lillian to be too passive, too demure; a bit of a dishrag. I did not want Mike to be paired with such a dull (IMO) character. I wanted him to romance someone strong, charming, witty, with a mind of her own, who could keep up with him and even challenge him if need be. I would have loved a Nick and Nora Charles-type romance for our dashing Mr. Bauer. (Of course, being as ancient as I am, probably no one else at SON has even HEARD of Nick and Nora, LOL!)

The writing during this show's final months was atrocious. I'm not surprised NBC stuck its inept fingers into everything, but I wonder what Morgenroth's work would have been like if she had been left alone to write what she wanted. What made it to our TV screens was unwatchable.

Speaking as a rabid fan, a Mike/Alex/Roger triangle would have sent me into NIRVANA. Imagine those three stars working together, and the fireworks it would have engendered? WOW. Lillian was best suited, I thought, for LT Larry Wyatt, whom she dated briefly in the early 1980s; another affable supporting player. At that time, GH was being written by the dreadful Ann Howard Bailey, and the weak material on that series could have benefited its competition.

Personally, I would say Alexandra. She was a leading lady and BM was a STAR, more befitting of Mike Bauer's/Don Stewart's leading man status. To me, Lillian was best suited as a supporting character. Besides with all the past tension between the Spaulding and Bauer families, a Mike/Alex pairing would have provided a lot of storyline fodder for years to come.

While his material at THE DOCTORS was not his best writing, as one critic put it so aptly, "Marland worked wonders with the garbage he inherited." What came before and after him was abysmal. I think his GH soared to the top of the ratings for various reasons. His writing there was excellent, for one thing. GH also had a charismatic, attractive cast who were able to strut their stuff and shine once they were given good scripts. And the production values on GH at the time improved dramatically. With fine writing, appealing actors and a gorgeous-looking show, GH was primed for success. The Doctors, by comparison, when both Marland and Lemay wrote, it LOOKED drab and tired. It's a shame, because if a strong, talented producer been there during Marland's and/or Lemay's reigns, perhaps TD could have turned itself around.

I had to cut short my previous post because real life got in the way (and I HATE when that happens, LOL). Just now, when I returned to follow up my comments about the Horton brothers with my personal take on the Bauers, I see that zanereed has already written an eloquent post which more or less sums up my own thoughts. During her brief tenure as TGL's head writer, Pat Falken Smith wrote a great scene between Mike and Sarah, in which the characters acknowledged their longstanding friendship and how valuable it was. Although I had also flirted with the idea that a Mike/Sarah romance might be nice, I accepted the fact that some folks just have better chemistry and more durability as platonic friends. Oh, how I wish Pat Falken Smith had remained with the show throughout the 1980s! We would have gotten wonderful character moments, sophisticated romance, adult themes...and avoided The Dreaming Death, ghosts, and the like.

Both Douglas Marland and Harding Lemay had stints on this series, but neither writer really did his best work on The Doctors. But for me, the principle problem was that by the time Marland and Lemay actually started repairing the extensive damage done by other hack writers (who worked on the show before and after them), both men left TD, so their presence had little lasting effect. The deteriorating production values after Joe Stuart left in 1975 (I think) did not help either. And thank you for the kind words! ((Blush, blush))

Once the Pollacks' reign on The Doctors is over, the show plunges into serious decline, writing-wise. We go from the likes of Rita Lakin, Rick Edelstein, Richard Avery and the Pollacks, to Robert Cenedella (who was "ehhh," but not the worst), Margaret DePriest (UGH!), and Linda Grover (who just might have been the worst). The best years of this once-fine show are behind it, I'm afraid.

I would respectfully disagree about the Mickey and Bill Horton situation. Mickey was the older brother, and regarded as a good person throughout Days of Our Lives' early years, whereas Bill had a much more troubled life and caused his family and friends a great deal of grief. It was Bill who broke the hearts of women like Susan Martin and Laura Spencer. It was Bill who ended up in prison for the death of his sister-in-law Kitty Horton. It was Bill who raped Laura, his other sister-in-law, and fathered her child Mike, which would tear the family apart when the truth came out. Yes, Mickey did have an affair with his secretary Linda Patterson in 1970, but that was after years of enduring Laura's distance and the emotional limitations in their marriage. (Laura was in love with Bill and never able to completely commit to Mickey, which naturally hurt him. It was his feelings of rejection that led him to Linda's bed.) Although he was wrong to cheat, Mickey was a decent older brother until he finally found out that Laura and Bill were having an affair and that Mike was Bill's biological son. That's when Mickey had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill Bill. I didn't see Mickey as a negative character for any of this. Bill had been the one to precipitate all the heartache and drama in the first place, by raping Laura many years before. I would describe Bill Horton as the troubled, "bad-boy" younger brother who caused his good-guy older brother Mickey a lot of trouble. (Actually, all this was great, absorbing drama, because although Bill was in the wrong in so many ways, neither he nor Mickey were painted in simplistic black-and-white strokes; they were both multi-dimensional characters with understandable motivations. Even though Bill's behavior was wrong, we could feel his pain too, and this is what makes drama captivating.)

Well, anyone who has ever even taken a glance at the show's history would know that it began as a story about Rev. Ruthledge and his flock, but aside from that fact, I doubt that the writers knew much about the character and his family background. Or perhaps they just figured that no one in the present-day audience would know, or care, about history from the 1930s and '40s. I do appreciate when soaps take a nod to the past, but as a purist, it bothers me when they don't take the time and trouble to get it right. Many years ago, there was a Gold-Key comic-book version of the soap Dark Shadows, in which the character of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard referred to her brother Roger Collins as her husband. HELLO? Her husband? The lazy, clueless writers nominally attempted to use important characters from the TV series in their comics, but did not do any research on them. If nothing else, since Elizabeth's name was "Collins Stoddard," the writers should have figured out that anyone with the name Collins would not be her husband; her spouse's name would need to be Stoddard. Many years later, the former editors of the comics said that they had wanted to give the writers "creative freedom" to do as they wished, but this does not mean the scribes had the right to trash or ignore canon history and facts. Imagine if new writers on Grey's Anatomy had Meredith Grey being accused of racism by a disgruntled patient, and Meredith replied that she certainly was not racist; her best friend Cristina Yang was African-American. The audience would have a fit, and bombard the studio with angry letters, reminding TPTB that Cristina Yang is of Korean descent. She's not black. If new writers do not know the history of a series, they should not carelessly dip into it.

In its final years, the show did bring in a day-player named "Rev. Ruthledge," to whom Josh Lewis remarked, "Your grandfather was a legend around here." Supposedly it was a nod to the past. However, there were continuity errors the writers ignored. Rev. Ruthledge had only had one daughter, so once she married Ned Holden, her children would not have carried on the Ruthledge family name. As well, Dr. Ruthledge never lived in Springfield. He lived in Five Points.

Phillip's line to Mike would have better if he had said in a wry tone, "Mike Bauer, it's Phillip Spaulding...I'm sure you remember ME." My first, cynical thought was that the writers had not studied the show's history, and had no real knowledge of the characters' past interactions, but who knows? Pamela Long had mentioned at one point that she wanted Meta to return because, "She had so much happen to her." That made me believe that Long, like Douglas Marland, Claire Labine, Pat Falken Smith and a few others, had finally been professional enough to brush up on the show's rich past. She certainly knew little about Springfield when she wrote the dreadful Girl in the Lake and Brandon Spaulding is Alive crapola...but maybe the weird dialogue just came from a careless scriptwriter. Anyway, I am tired of shows not being able to fix major mistakes before they air. All shows should have a continuity person.

Right. He was on Where the Heart is, The Secret Storm and the Edge of Night, along with RH. He was also in the film Serpico.

The show was so down-to-earth, naturalistic and character driven during its first decade, it was hard to see how trite and ridiculous it had become with storylines like Eterna. Comparing the story of Carla passing for white to Viki going to secret underground cities or to heaven on a spaceship...UGH. What a disgrace.