vetsoapfan

Robert Cenedella replaced Lipton as head writer. He was better, but not by much.

Danson played Tom Conway on SOMERSET in 1975 and 76, replacing Michael Nouri in the role. He then went on to play Mitch Pierson on TD in 1977.

Yes, the show took a shot of the late Macdonald Carey and had the deceased Tom Horton's ghost chasing Marlena around the Horton living room. UGH. It might have been the worst, most tasteless moment in the show's history...until Marlena rammed doughnuts down Alice's throat. I'll take Lilith and the shrunken head over the garbage that we had had to endure on DAYS, any day!

If the show had given the audience a plausible, or at least POSSIBLE, reason for Marlena's demented behavior, perhaps. Was she being drugged with mind-altering chemicals? Did she have a brain tumor? Had she become schizophrenic? But as the story played out on-screen, it just became dumber and dumber (again, IMO) and impossible. I found the scenes of Tom Horton's head floating around to be offensive to boot. I've never been able to take Marlena seriously as a character again.

It takes careful writing to pull off stories that touch on supernatural themes. The writers have to reign events in so they do not get absurd. Most soaps have been unable to do this. Characters believing in the afterlife, or being convinced that they can feel the presence or spirit of a dead loved one, is fine. I daresay that happens to most of us one time or another. Characters like April Cavanaugh on TEON experiencing extrasensory flashes is still within the realm of reality, because even police departments have been known to use psychics. But the shows should not (IMHO) get into ludicrous material that simply do not happen: mad scientists freezing the world, heroines jumping into paintings and travelling through time, anyone flying to heaven on a space ship or discovering secret underground cities, people getting cloned, possessed by Satan and "murdering" (but not really) half the town, etc. To me, there's a big difference between a show presenting us with a character who believes in the supernatural, and the show PRESENTING THE SUPERNATURAL AS FACT that we are all supposed to accept.

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.)