vetsoapfan

No, I have not really watched BTG except for the first episode. By saying that it "brought a lot of that back," do you mean it offers over-the-hill camp like the 1980s+ soaps gave us, or the more naturalistic, down-to-earth style of daytime drama from earlier decades?

Even though Twin Peaks did have its missteps along the way, its first season was excellent, and the bits we saw of BOB were truly terrifying (particularly when he quietly entered Donna's house and crawled over the living room couch to get to Maddie. EEEEEEK!) The episode that featured the big reveal about Leland was one of the most intense and horrifyingly violent episodes of television I have ever seen. Right in the middle of it, my telephone rang and I almost hit the roof. When I answered, my friend didn't even say hello. He immediately hissed, "I am losing it! I can't watch this alone!" We never actually saw Dorian kill Victor Lord; when the character died, it was off-screen. We did know, however, that she was doing a lot of manipulating back-stage, and trying to isolate him from everyone. She was up to no good, and it certainly looked like she had taken his life. That implication was woven into the show's canon for years until later PTB chose to do some revisionist retconning. I know about the recast (I watched her), and fully acknowledge that the actress was decent. I just don't know how well she was accepted by the overall audience. I mainly heard comments along the lines of, "She's a lovely young woman, but she just isn't Bianca." To each his own. LOL! When I was in prep school, I had a film course in which the teacher screened the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn't as explicitly gory as I had been told (still disturbing enough, thank you), but UGH. It had a certain...quality that really creeped me out. When I returned home, my father was in the yard trimming the hedge with a chainsaw. I took my dog, went to my bedroom, and stayed holed up in there until I KNEW it was safe to come out.😬 It really was a dumb move for the show to make. They should not have killed off such an integral character in the first place. That shower scene and the explanation that followed ("It was a dream!") were pretty embarrassing, IMHO. I never would have killed Bobby off, but after the character was confirmed dead, I would have kept him that way. I get the sentiment. The moment I saw that AW had recast Alice Frame in 1975 (and dropped Jacquie Courtney), I stopped being a daily viewer of that soap. And after the last of the Brooks family members left Y&R, I bowed out of that show too.

I had never heard that tea. I'd have remembered it, considering how much I loathed Chuck Pratt.🤢 Actually, Lind really did do a good enough job, but she just wasn't Bianca. After Kate Mulgrew left Ryan's Hope, the show recast her role with Mary Carney. Carney was a fine actress, but no one else but Mulgrew would ever be Mary Ryan. (The less said about Kathleen Tolan the better.) Whom did that old rascal NOT sleep with, LOL? It was really well served by that great cast. Discarding attempts at social relevance and current events hurt the soaps a lot. They used to deal with mature, adult subjects significantly better than primetime TV. Nowadays, they don't seem to make a point about anything.

I think that's an experience many soap fans have in common: there are certain scenes which become imbedded in our memories, and which we never forget. Do you remember who the head writer at OLTL was at that point? Was it Michael Malone? Harding Lemay failed at getting permission to have the offspring of a core family be gay on AW. He probably would have done a fine job with it, but AMC's handling of this similar story was quite the success. I never understood why they later tried replacing Bianca.🙄 After the character's involvement in such a groundbreaking story, I highly doubted the audience would embrace a replacement.

ITA. While I believe the show ran out of steam towards the end, and tried too hard to offer more and more outlandish material at the expense of character development and exploring all the quieter moments of their stories (which had made the first few years so mesmerizing, IMO), DS worked wonders with the restraints it was under. There's a reason it became such a fiercely-beloved cult classic, warts and all.👏 The fact that this show and most of the run of The Doctors (including its best years) survived is a blessing and a miracle!

The Wendy Riche/Claire Labine era of GH was the last time any soap truly attained the level of greatness, IMHO. BJ's heart saga and Stone's battle with AIDS are exactly what I think of when I think of soap masterpieces. So many moments still resonant to this day. I'll never forget Felicia finding out what was happening, runni ng upstairs to find Bobbie, and then sinking to the floor shrieking/crying, "Not Barbara Jean! Not Barbara Jean's heart!" Mac hugging Stone made me love him dearly. OLTL really milked the Victor Lord business and Viki's alters way too many times, and it all ultimately became absurd. (Victor supposedly being alive...UGH! That was one of the show's worst and most egregious stories ever.) But the period you mentioned was well done, with a lot of good acting. It's true that the Victor Lord we longtime viewers knew from 1968 to 1975 bore no resemblance at all to the monster he was later said to be, and that irritated me, but some writers handled the revisionist history better than others. I just wish TPTB had left well enough alone, and allowed VL and Viki's alters to remain in the past after they had already been milked bone-dry. The Victor-is-Alive dreck was just embarrassing. (I appreciated hearing, much later on, Dorian remarking, "If that really was him," in reference to the suddenly-reanimated "Victor Lord". There was no way to fix the plot at that point, but at least the show was giving us a throw-away line offering hope that all that garbage wasn't even real. Complex villains, whose motivations we can at least somewhat understand, are always the most captivating. To me, Rachel Davis, Roger Thorpe, Iris Carrington, Erica Kane, Barnabas Collins, etc., captured the audience's imagination because no matter how badly they behaved, we could see their soft underbellies and understand their pain. "Suffering antagonists" are more magnetic than one-dimensional, cardboard caricatures, which many soap villains tend to be.

Yes. At the time, I started to have a glimmer of hope that the light was finally going to return to its former radiance and shine brightly for a long time to come. The return to glory did not last long, alas, but we were lucky to have gotten that brief renaissance.

I agree. While plots themselves can be riveting, we will care about all the twists and turns of the stories so much more because of our emotional involvement with the characters. The great writer Henry Slesar of The Edge of Night acknowledged this in an interview once. He opined that no matter how well he crafted his stories, they only worked effectively because the viewers cared for the people involved. He said that without our attachment to the likes of Mike and Nancy Karr, the audience would end up no more moved by the stories on soaps than by the articles we read in the morning newspapers. The plots, themselves, would not have the same deep impact. Your analysis of Dark Shadows was on the mark. The show surged in popularity upon the introduction of Barnabas Collins primarily because he was such a complex, tortured, fascinating character to watch. Despite his obvious trouble in memorizing the mountains of dialogue he was given day after day, month after month, Jonathan Frid played the character beautifully. But once characterization was sidelined/shortchanged and more and more time was spent on flashy gimmicks and shocks (the show had been more subtle in the original vampire story), DS burned itself out. TPTB who decided that offering gimmicky plot devices over layered, complex characterizations was the way to success understood neither the soap genre nor its audience.

And for many years, the successful soaps existed in a "reality bubble," staying more or less within the bounds of events that could take place in the real world. We had ordinary people next door to watch on-screen, and we never knew from day to day what would happen to them. It was easy to get immersed in the stories and identify with the characters' problems. There were no clones, extra-terrestrials, time travelers, devil possessions, mad scientists freezing the world, towns filled exclusively with the uber-rich, etc., all of which broke the magical reality bubble of the genre, and reinforced the idea that everything we were now watching had turned to cartoonish farce. To me, the advent of over-the-top camp alienated a lot of the die-hard soap fans who had loved the shows for their lost, immersive and HUMAN qualities. But for decades, we had experienced something magical!

My memory is good about stuff that captivated and interested me, no matter how long ago it was. Ask me about some of the tedious subjects I studied in high school...forget it. All that data is gone with the wind.😁 (To be honest, I'm glad that I retained more soap trivia in my head than facts about trigonometry or chemistry or any of the stuff we were force-fed in Moral & Religious Instruction 🙄). Soaps turned out to be much more relevant to my life! One teacher of religion argued with me about my answer to, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Paul Simon hit the nail on the head when he sang about all the crap we learned in high school. A friend remarked to me the other day that his young niece is watching DVDs of Little House on the Prairie which she got for Christmas. He said he was aghast to realize how sick and vicious some of the stories on the show really were. It's true, but soaps were second-to-none when it came to inducing trauma in viewers! OMG, too funny; funny because it was so appropriate. Bagpipes have long been used to commemorate funerals and other somber occasions, and heaven knows, TGL was being slaughtered at the time. Good for O'Roarke. (Writing out Justin was an bad move in the first place, but bringing him back later with a recast actor only reinforced the error.)

I always made sure to audiotape or videotape my favorite shows at home, because there was too much competition for control of the television sets at school. It's always so disarming when actors interact with young actors, and their innate affection for kids shines through. When Jacquie Courtney returned to AW in 1984, the show did almost nothing of interest with the character (a shockingly stupid blunder on TPTB's part), but she had some scenes with the adorable child who played Alice's grandson Kevin, and she really sparkled in those scenes. She had also shone a decade before when acting with young Cathy Greene, who played Sally as a little girl. JC clearly enjoyed interacting with children. When did you get your first VCR, so you could videotape the soaps at home? I used audiotape recorders before the advent of Betamax and VHS, set up with timers in different rooms at home, so I could at least listen to the dialogue of my shows at night. It was like listening to radio plays and was quite satisfying, but as soon as Betamax appeared on the market, I bought one...even though it cost a fortune. Ron Becker had intended to rape Chris, but found Peggy in the Fosters' apartment instead. When Chris returned home, Peggy was huddled on the floor, shaking and in a state of shock. Chris quickly figured out what had happened. The show's use of flashbacks to Chris' own assault and obsessive showering was very effective. Bill Bell later made the comment that you don't duplicate a prior story unless you're doing it on purpose for impact. This defintely had the intended impact. Lisa Brown was indeed a unique talent, and Nola was her better role. This was the responsibility of producer Gail Kobe ("Story on soaps is more important than the characters!") and newbie writer Pamela Long ("My first mission was to get rid of all the dead wood in the cast."), and IMHO they crippled the show. Peter Simon said that Tom O'Rourke was the last of the "old guard" whom Kobe and Long fired, and when he left the building on his last day, he went ranting and raving down the hall. Like with Stefano DiMera on DAYS, ATWT went back to the well too many times with James Stenbeck and it ultimately ruined the character. The world before spoilers was a boon to the soaps; being taken by surprise was a highlight of viewing. When Mary Matthews died suddenly on AW in 1975, we had no advance warning, and were not used to seeing matriarchs of core families being killed off. The abject shock of the event elevated the impact to the nth degree. The same was true on Little House on the Prairie, when Mary Ingalls' baby died in a fire at the school for the blind. We had no notice, the plot was sick and grisly, and left a mark (I'm sure) on all the people who endured it.

Vintage soaps that took their time and played all the emotional beats of their stories always ended up being more emotionally gratifying than the modern ones. Today's shows are more apt to rush through everything at lightning speed, based on the idea that modern audiences have the attention spans of gnats. That's hilarious, and it's so true how invested viewers were in "their stories" back then. The likes of Rachel Davis, Dorian Lord and Lorie Brooks made me scream at my TV. Nothing on soaps has engendered a strong reaction from me since BJ's heart transplant on GH in 1994. Genuinely nice guys always have a certain edge.

I naively took for granted that soaps could and would always be this good, because I had only witnessed them offering high quality since I first started tuning in. Little did I know how suddenly and how far they would later fall. My sentiment, exactly. Yes, I was saddened to see AW spinning out of control and down the drain after 1975. My anger was particularly pointed, because I knew it had been gratuitously decimated, and it didn't need to be. Chris was raped in 1973 by George Curtis, who was played by Tony Geary. Peggy was the one raped by Ron Becker, on June 16, 1976. Upon finding her baby sister had also been assaulted, Chris had memory flashbacks of compulsively showering after her own assault, to wash the stain off. It was heartbreaking. That was the first time I ever heard the word "bitch" uttered on a soap. As the scene faded to black, a split second before dissolving into the commercial, Leslie screamed, "BITCH!" at Lorie. I always wondered if placing the curse word at the last possible moment was a safeguard the show made in case they had to cut it out before broadcast.

That entire scene stayed burned in my memory for decades. I was thrilled when it was discovered to exist, and started making its rounds through the internet. When it was first broadcast, I was cheering for Alice as she chased Rachel down the stairs and throwing copper pots at her. Go Alice!!! They had electric chemistry in their scenes together, like Jacquie Courtney and George Reinholt exhibited.

To me, Ronn Moss always came across as quite wooden. Drake Hogestyn may not have been the single greatest actor of all time, but he was warm and personable, and had charisma to carry him through. There are some performers who just have a certain "je ne sais quoi," which endears them to the audience regardless of their actual acting talents. RM came across as an empty shell (IMHO), whereas DH had a likeable guy-next-door charm.

I probably saw more of the soaps than I did of real life, I'm embarrassed to admit, LOL. I was very shy as a child, and found great fascination and comfort in books, vintage movies, music and soaps. I'd include the 1970s in the golden era of soaps. I think that's when they really blossomed into topical, complex adult drama. Personally, I'd include Henry Slesar's The Edge of Night and Harding Lemay's Another World (among others) as the best-written serials of the decade. Looking back on it, viewers were truly spoiled in those years. The majority of soaps were very well written most of the time. (And when the quality did dip in the 1970s, changes were made very quickly.) A moment that shaped the course of the show for years to come. Did you see the first sexual assault story on Y&R, centered on Chris Brooks? I found that even more harrowing than Peggy's experience. Trish Stewart's performances blew me away. There were so many astonishing moments in that storyline. Another one of my favorites is when Leslie finally figured out the depths of her sister's twisted manipulation and betrayal. She confronted Lorie in the mental hospital and they really had it out. Knowing the jig was up, Lorie just dug the knife in a little deeper by saying, "No one is ever going to believe you about this, Les. They all know...you are SICK!" The scar seemed to move around a bit from time to time, LOL, but the scenes of the fire were terrifying. It was sheer melodrama, but Pat Falken Smith's writing and Patty Weaver's performance made this storyline must-see TV. I tell you, 1976 was my favorite year of DAYS. Wesley Eure's clingy, almost translucent and form-fitting pajama bottoms left so little to the imagination.🫣 As I got older, I started to appreciate the smaller, sweet moments between characters, but when I was a kid, the "actiony" stuff stood out for me more, too. I think that's normal.👍

That era of TGL was golden. And the actors played that memorable episode to the hit. There were so many beats left to play in that story; so many emotional chords left to hit. Discarding Justin Marler so quickly was a terribly bad decision. The audience still resents losing Ellen Parker's beloved Maureen. If the rumor is true, that we lost her to make room in the budget to pay for Justin Deas, it's all the more egregious. We finally had a warm and sympathetic character to replace Bert as the Bauer matriarch, and instead we got a hammy and loud-mouthed buzzard inflicted upon us. No, thank you. JWS reaffirmed that he was more than just a pretty face in that storyline, and the "Helloooooo, Barbara!" moment became iconic. In its heyday, ATWT gave us some great stuff!

The all-too-brief Calhoun/Nancy Curlee tenure proved conclusively that TGL could be repaired with the right people in charge. Sadly, the show had been so badly butchered for so long, I think former fans had just become too burned out and were hesitant to give it yet another chance. There comes a point when viewers finally give up, and their emotional attachment to a series evaporates. A less-than-skilled actor always ends up looking even worse when the material he's asked to play is weak. I know we are stuck with Bradley Bell, all things considered, but he should have been replaced decades ago. IMHO, B&B did not showcase Bill Bell's best work, either, but Bradley's writing is subpar.

The Billy Douglas/AIDS quilt saga was beautifully done. It will forever boggle my mind how Michael Malone produced some fine material during his first tenure on the show (after a rocky start), but bombed so badly during his second stint. TGL gutted such a huge number of its core cast members in 1983 and 1984, it just did not feel like "my show" anymore. The return of Maureen Garrett and Michael Zaslow was a much-needed relief and shot in the arm. Familiar characters with a history in Springfield, played by wonderful actors, were so welcome. If only TPTB could have gotten Mart Hulswit back as Ed Bauer. Ronn Moss showing acting skill was a miracle in itself, LOL!

I know. It's so frustrating when you are totally invested in watching vintage soap storylines, and then the videos just dry up and stop before the stories reach the conclusion. ARGH!

God yes. ITA 100%. That hug just popped into my head since you mentioned the Bob/Susan affair. After bitter animosity between Susan and Kim for decades (over both Dan Stewart and Bob), why the hell would Kim hug her? Even Ellen Stewart held a grudge against Susan and snarked at Susan until leaving Oakdale. Part of the reason the greats were so...great!

Doug Marland was one of those rare writers who studied the past of his shows extensively, and wove it into present-day stories to strengthen the impact. Pat Falken Smith, Claire Labine and Agnes Nixon were also great at this when they took over the writing reigns of soaps, whereas the likes of Hogan Sheffer and Pam Long failed big time.) It was so effective. I get the sense that many writers just don't bother to delve into their shows' deep histories at all, which leads to glaring continuity, characterization and plot blunders. The two stories you mentioned were excellent. (But how stupid was it of ATWT to have Kim hugging Susan, of all people, in the soap's final episode? Susan? REALLY?)

Ahh, yet another gem by the legendary Henry Slesar, who thrilled viewers of TEON for many years with a succession of masterful stories. The dumbest move TPTB ever made was firing Slesar in 1983 and replacing him with the mediocre Lee Sheldon. The plummeting quality of the writing was instantaneous. The list of gems HS gave us on TEON, however, was impressive.

I haven't had access to Emmerdale since about 2011, but I did enjoy the series way back when, with the Sugden family having a presence in the village. I was happy to have seen Annie Sugden's final appearance on the show in 2009, when the last of her three children passed away. I preferred the quieter, character-based slice-of-life quality of the early years over the melodrama which seemed to take over later on. I can't believe they kept killing off (or otherwise discarding) so many Sugdens. I know I'd have trouble watching the show nowadays, since I have always loathed the Dingles. I'm now curious to know how many of "my characters," the ones whom I liked when I watched the show, are still around. I'll have to check it out. I think the last storyline I got to see was Jackson Walsh's death.

That was one of my incentives for creating this thread. Since so many of my favorite storylines were broadcast long before episodes started being preserved, I was wondering if there were any "more recent" stories from the last 40 years or so, which would be more likely to survive and be worth taking a look at now (according to other fans). I still semi-keep up with today's soaps, but haven't watched any of them daily for a few decades. I figured my fellow SONers might surprise me.🙃 Yes, the scenes between Jill and Katherine after Phillip's death were quite memorable. That conflict was so well set up, it helped carry the show for YEARS to come. Kudos to Bill Bell for understanding that absorbing, long-arc storylines keep viewers glued to the edge of their seats year after year. Pat Falken Smith's return to DAYS could have jump-started a return to the halcyon period of yore in Salem. During her brief comeback, she implemented savvy storyline and character decisions which noticeably perked up the dreary show. It's a shame that she was axed so quickly, after only six months. DAYS has not had a truly great head writer in 44 years. (Yes, some have been slightly better than others, but many/most have been atrocious.) I've always maintained that 1976, when PFS was the head writer and Bill Bell was the story consultant, was the show's best-written year.