vetsoapfan

Oh dear God in heaven...noooooooooooooooo!🤮 We need an attractive, charismatic and likeable actor in such an important role (important in the sense that it would open the door for the Brooks family's renewed presence in Genoa City). After the painful debacle of Howarth as Paul Ryan on ATWT (Scott Holroyd had been perfect in the role), the thought of RH representing the Brooks family makes me nauseous. JMHO.

Gloria Monty and Paul Rauch! When paired with writers who understood soaps and the audience (like Douglas Marland and Pat Falken Smith) Gloria could be a fine producer. The technical aspects of her GH were good. But in less-competent writing hands, Monty proved that she just did not "get" the heart and soul of soaps, and ended up reaping great damage onto the medium. He was a destructive force as well.

Exactly. Gloria Monty and the crap she foisted onto daytime (romanticized rapists, serial-killing heartthrobs, science fiction idiocy) precipitated the destruction of the soap genre. Alas, most of the eps from the 1960s and 1970s are lost forever, but at least we do have some surviving gems on video and audio. Beggars can't be choosers. I'm so glad I kept the 10th anniversary of AW and eventually sent it to Eddie Drueding of the AW Home Page. Since he uploaded it there, it's been available to everyone and safe from tape deterioration! Hear, hear! The stuff Monty introduced to GH in the early 1980s temporarily ignited a flurry of attention among young viewers, but their interest didn't prove to be long-lasting, and the gimmicks like freezing the world, extra terrestrials, etc., turned off dedicated and life-long members of the audience.

Oh yes, the 15-minute episodes of TGL and SFT that we are fortunate to have access to were wonderful examples of soap opera storytelling! My only "beef" about the short format was that 15 minutes seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, leaving me wanting more. Nowadays, I realize that wanting to see more is infinitely better than becoming impatient with extraneous scenes, filler dialogue, and uninteresting newbies, and hoping for the episodes to hurry up and end already. A few writers like Douglas Marland, Pat Falken Smith, William J. Bell (after a rough start when Y&R transitioned to an hour), Claire Labine (at GH), Nancy Curlee (at TGL), etc., rose to the challenge of keeping their 60-minute shows successful, but who knows if the quality would have lasted long-term? More writers of the hour-long soap format haven't been up to the task (IMHO) than those who have succeeded. Burn-out happens to even the best of scribes. I'll generally stick with a favorite show, at least for a while, through weaker periods, but only if the core characters whom I care about remain front and center. If the writing deteriorates AND much of the core cast is gutted (AW in 1975, TGL in 1983/84, Y&R when it went to an hour, etc.), my loyalty and interest dissipate. I remember one excruciating scene on the expanded AW in which characters were discussing ordering chairs or something for a warehouse. It felt like it went on forever. UGH. No, thank you. I'd rather watch paint dry.

@chrisml, that was really interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Yes, in retrospect, expanding soaps to an hour a day was a destructive idea. It's a grinding, exhausting schedule that works against TPTB putting out the best-possible product on a long-term basis. There are only so many work hours in a day; only so much you can wring out of a cast and crew. To be fair, many soaps managed to succeed beautifully in the 60-minute format for a while, but it never seemed to endure. I do think the 15-minute ones extending to 30 minutes a day ended up working well. To me, this was the ideal length. (And, of course, 90 minutes per day of AW was a foolish idea from the get-go.) As much as critics have are quick to deride the daytime soaps, I've always found them superior to the primetime ones. AW did give Susan Sullivan better scripts to work with than Falcon Crest! And Lenore Delany didn't die a horrific, fan-alienating death , the way Maggie Gioberti did. What sick, tone-deaf PTB thought that was a good idea to do to the audience?

I watched the show (or audio-taped episodes of it when I couldn't be home) up until 1975. I thought the first few years were uneven, but then AW really took off in late 1965 when Agnes Nixon came aboard as headwriter. After she left at the end of 1968 or early 1969, I felt her replacement Robert Cenedella's material (he wrote from 1969 to 1971) became a little too plot heavy and not character-driven enough for me, although it was still watchable. Then Harding Lemay took over in 1971 and his forte was character delineation and interpersonal relationships, so I enjoyed his initial work thoroughly. I believe Nixon and Lemay were the very best writers in AW's history. A lot has been said and written about the contentious backstage goings-on behind the scenes in the mid 1970s. After the show went to an hour in 1975, I personally felt there was too much repetitious dialogue and "filler material," and a noticeable lessening in quality, but I continued to tune in, figuring that TPTB were just working out the logistics of filming an hour-long episode five days a week. Then we lost four major stars before the end of the year, and the focus and the tone of the show shifted too much for my liking. I would happily join you for a marathon watch party of episodes from the debut to the end of 1975, however! (To be fair, while I was disappointed in what I considered a drop in AW's quality in 1975, I guarantee that the show was still miles better than anything soaps have to offer today!)

Actually, it's curious, but I have never heard fans reminisce about this particular scene either. I've also never heard anyone talk about the memorable scene in which Jim Matthews told Mary that Rachel's baby was Steve Frame's and not Russ'. The normally staid matriarch of the Matthews family went berserk and shrieked, "I hate her! I HATE HER!" It made my blood run cold. As you say, probably most fans are too young to have seen the golden moments of the 1960s and '70s play out. I may be wrong, but I don't believe scripts from that era are on-line.

You put that very well.

You are correct. Susan Sullivan was definitely playing Lenore by the time Walter Curtin died. The scene with Lenore being so traumatized by the whole Walter debacle that she went berserk and tore apart her living room was chilling!

That is an excellent point: some soaps in the 1990s still warranted patience and continued checking in. I think I finally gave up completely on the genre with the cancellations of TGL, ATWT, and AMC. I no longer had FOMO about the remaining shows. I was too burned out to care.

Actually, I too continue to watch certain primetime shows looooong after they have started to bore me, but not soaps anymore. I loathed the awful ninth season of Little House on the Prairie, but sensed the show was on its last legs and had a strange compulsion to stick with it until the bitter end. The tenth "season" (comprising of just three 2-hour movies) was weak as well, but I was glad that I saw the series finale because it ended up being semi-decent.

Since only the first two seasons were ever released on DVD, I never saw the last year. I was heartbroken, but eventually gave up waiting for the series to ever turn up streaming anywhere. Thank you for this news; I never would have known, otherwise!

Do you dislike missing an episode because you find the soaps so compelling, or just out of habit? This is actually a serious question (I'm not being snarky), because even back in the golden 1970s, if one particular show (i.e. Somerset, which had wild swings in quality from great to atrocious) was going through a dreary period, I still hated to miss episodes. I never knew when a positive change for the better would suddenly take place. Back then, weak stretches on soaps were quickly rectified. When writer Roy Winsor assumed the reigns of Somerset, Rick Edelstein came aboard How to Survive a Marriage, and Claire Labine took over Love of Life, the surge is quality was immediate and exhilarating. I was afraid of missing the turnarounds!

The 1970s gave us the halcyon years of most soaps, IMHO; so many of the shows were on fire and impossible to miss! I wonder how many fans feel as invested in daytime TV today, considering the genre's decimated state. Does anyone even care if they miss an episode these days?🤔

By the end of the 1970s, I had splurged on two VCRs, so between those and an audio-only tape recorder I had used before the advent of Beta and VHS, I could record everything I wanted at home, and did not need to listen to the CBC soap broadcasts on the radio anymore. But I really appreciated the ability to do so before I bought my VCRs. VCRs really made soap fans' dreams come true!

It was a travesty. It still makes me mad to think about. TPTB clearly had no respect for the character, the actress, the history of the show or the fans, to dish out those episodes. Epic failure.

With all the garbage TGL foisted on us in 1986, I will always contend that the most egregious was how the show handled the passing and service for the late Bert Bauer.

Yes, I remember watching TEON and AMC on the CBC. Luckily for soap fans, the audio of CBC television was available on radio (in the 1970s, anyway), and if we had to be out of the house, we could listen to those soaps while we were away. One poster on Facebook argues with people endlessly, when anyone writes that Y&R has preserved its archives. He says he worked as an extra or something on the show back in the day, and has inside confirmation that all the tapes from the beginning have been wiped. As for the tons of flashbacks that have been used over the decades, he claims those are just individual scenes which TPTB saved, because they knew they would need to re-air them them 10, 25, 50 years later. This makes no sense, but it's pointless to argue with someone who needs to be right to feel important. As for AMC, TEON, or any other soap, I guess we are never going to know for sure about what has survived, until we see it for ourselves (like in the surprising case of The Doctors).

It wouldn't shock me. "Lost" Dr. Who episodes turned up in a Nigerian TV station years ago. Who would have predicted that? I'm hoping, just not holding my breath

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall, listening in, when Lemay had his training period with Irna Phillips, LOL.

ABC archives starting from 1977 would be great. It's a safe bet that they kept material from at least 1979 onwards, anyway. The famous courtroom scenes from OLTL (Karen Wolek on the witness stand) exist. I remember an ABC researcher once, when talking about finding footage for a GH anniversary special, saying he really had to dig around to find the lovely scene of Laura and Scotty under the Christmas tree, which was probably 1977 or 1978 (I don't remember for sure). In the end, if Nixon said it was 1977, I'd believe that that is when the tapes started being saved. The Doctors should be added to your list too, fortunately. So with DAYS, Y&R, B&B, RsH, DS and TDrs, we are lucky to have almost-complete archives in existence of several soaps. And even with all the others, having tapes from the late 1970s is a treat, even though the genre would soon implode in the 1980s. When preparing to air Ryan's Hope on SoapNet, Claire Labine said they had missing episodes from their collection, and ended up getting copies from Ireland (where the show had also been broadcast). I wonder if any other countries kept archives of soaps they broadcast; archives that P&G in the USA wiped. AW was hugely popular in Canada. I guess we have to continue hoping that more stuff will be brought out by private collectors.

What the heck is this?🤔 https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/news/special-collections/the-edge-of-night%3A-a-drama-in-six-parts--how-cooperative-extension-service-booklets-connect-nc-state-a-soap-opera-and-dc-comics

Fingers crossed. Well, I don't want to give anything away (Bryce's journey is best told by himself), but...there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Anyone who has ever spent time on social media knows it's so true, LOL!