vetsoapfan

I think many dedicated soap fans daydream about how they could salvage and rejuvenate once-stellar, now decimated, shows. And I'll bet many of those fans could do a better job than the often-incompetent PTB who actually get hired to ruin...er RUN...daytime dramas. Daydreaming keeps us all from going insane over the horrendous state of our cherished soaps.

I was so disappointed in how the soaps were being decimated in the 1980s (asinine sci-fi/fantasy garbage, discarding of vets, an emphasis on gimmicks and gloss over humanity and identifiable human drama), that I wanted to go back to cornerstone basics of the genre. I've actually created a few soaps in my lifetime. The first was during my early high school years; a mystery saga along the lines of The Edge of Night. It didn't really click well, for whatever reason (I was no Henry Slesar), but I figured I'd get better at writing with practice. The second one was at the end of my high school experience. The writing came much easier for me by then, and the words just flowed from my hands as if the stories were writing themselves. I ended up producing 306 episodes of that serial, until real life (school, work, family responsibilities) pulled me away from it. I brought that "world" to a conclusion with a wedding of two principle characters and then said goodbye to it. Occasionally, I must admit, I still daydream about that community today.🙃 The soap I devised when I went back to university in the 1980s was based on people I knew and the issues they had had/were having in their lives. It was predicated on interpersonal relationships mainly. I included some characters who were aspiring to succeed in the entertainment industry. My professor wrote that I had imbued the show with a somewhat idealized depiction of the main family. He described it as being the type of family everybody wishes they had, but so few people ever get. He called it comforting wish fulfilment. That had been my goal! I wrote descriptions and histories of all the main characters, along with projected storylines for the first six months, and then the opening scripts. It took me ages to complete, but it was a joyous experience for me. It was like conceiving and birthing 20 children all at once, ROTF!🤣

Awesome Jocks.

If the MAGAts were easy prey enough to get manipulated into voting for the tangerine-tinted terror, they'll fall for anything.🥺

The cynical (i.e., the dominant) me has the very same thoughts.

I've seen so many posters over the years who are bright, creative, well-versed in soap history, and who care deeply about the integrity of the genre. I'd put the shows' chances in their hands a lot faster than I would allow any of the "usual suspects" to take control of the dramas they've already helped decimate. When I returned to university in the 1980s, I created a bible for a new soap and presented it in my screenwriting class. It was in reaction to how badly I saw the network shows being butchered at the time. The creative process was thrilling; a total joy, and I still smile when I remember the positive feedback I received from the professor and my fellow students. I was used to seeing written commentary from professors on my work. This one wrote me a long, complimentary note on the final page of the bible, but also graded it 97%, A+. I was beaming ear to ear for days!

Right. Literally for decades, soaps mesmerized their audiences with tales of romance, family conflict, class struggles, and recognizable interpersonal-relationship sagas. We didn't need relentless, heavy violence. We didn't need clones, mad scientists, extra-terrestrials and demon possessions. We didn't need gaggles of plastic himbos and bimbos pushing beloved vets off-screen. We only needed to see people whom we cared about, and the intelligent, moving progression of their lives. Flashy sets, gaudy gimmicks, and high-falutin' hairdos be damned. The characters and the words were important.

This is the perfect way to encapsulate the situation. So many morally-reprehensible stories were foisted on the show and its characters in ATWT's dwindling years. Rape should never be used as a cheap plot device or in a way that degrades the victim. Jack's sexual assault was another heinous example of how nasty the the show's tone had become. The fact that people like Hogan Sheffer, Ron Carlivati, Jean Passanante, Charles Pratt, Dena Higley, etc., somehow end up winning awards for their material, decimates the credibility and integrity of the awards, IMHO. Soaps used to have a solid moral core and did not originally wallow in the gutter, rolling around in filth and depravity just to be cool, hip, campy, or whatever else modern-day PTB aim for. Thank you. Cruelty, degradation and misogyny are not components which lend themselves to successful soaps, which have always been predicated on warmth, family bonds, and providing a comforting haven for their audience. The genre has been crippled because the cynical and ignorant executives in charge understand neither the shows nor what the audience wants to see.

Janice Lynde responded to the original Facebook post. Janice Lynde Top contributor My Little Sister, our PumpkinSo sad to hear this, Pam… May you soar with the Angels

I have a feeling that the backstage dramas of the soaps are a heck of a lot more enthralling than anything we see on screen.

I've seen writers producing poor scripts for primetime TV and movies before, but not to the same overwhelming degree as in daytime TV. They generally don't get hired by everyone else under the sun once their initial work bombs big-time. On soaps, even the worst of the worst stay in the same positions for YEARS.

What absolutely boggles my mind about daytime TV is that no matter how many times weak/incompetent producers and writers fail in the soap world, they keep getting hired by other serial to wreak the exact same type of damage. (Or worse.) It's freaking unreal.😡

That's a good point: if a show's state is not mentioned for many years, it's easier for the revolving door of never-ending newbies in charge to miss out on or get confused about previously-established facts.

I don't believe Lemay was the one who negated the fact that the show was originally set in Michigan. Aside from a few curious character mutations, he did seem to care about the past. I think AW switched the local to Illinois in the 1980s or later. I don't think TPTB always knew or remembered the past well enough to give new headwriters full accurate information, anyway. Lemay wrote a story about Pat Randolph killing a predator named Greg Bernard who was targeting her daughter. The writer referred to a teenaged Pat killing her boyfriend (Tom Baxter) by stabbing him, as she later killed Greg. But in reality, Pat had shot Tom with a gun, so TPTB were lax in knowing or correctly relating established facts to the current scribe. Is the specific murder weapon of a long-gone character a vital component 15 years after the fact? Probably not to most viewers, but for those who had been watching way back when, little mistakes like this can be grating. I'm not devastated that AW changed Bay City's home state along the way, but I see this as another grating point that a little research could have prevented. Soap viewers have loooooong memories, LOL!

To me, there were some weaker writers on ATWT in the 1980s pre-Marland, but starting in 2000, the advent of the show's associated with Hogan Sheffer and Jean Passanante, the quality plummeted and remained in the toilet for the show's remaining years. It's amazing that so many actors were still able to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I just don't think KMS was one of them.

What was most frustrating, is that RTPP was weakly written at the beginning and remained tedious for what seemed months on end. Then, in its last stretch, it suddenly perked right up and turned itself around significantly. Unfortunately, by that time NBC was fully committed to How to Survive a Marriage, and went ahead and cancelled the flourishing RTPP in favor of HTSAM. Ironically, history repeated itself. HTSAM was dreadfully written in its opening months. NBC fairly quickly gave up on it and changed its time slot to compete with the ratings powerhouse ATWT. Wouldn't you know it, NBC hired Rick Edelstein to take over the writing reigns and the quality soared. It turned into a rich, layered, deep psychological drama along the lines of Harding Lemay's Another World. Alas, NBC axed this newly-shining soap too.

I have a long-time friend with whom I used to watch soaps religiously when we were kids. When I told him about SON recently, I suggested that he jump into the forums so he could join the discussions about vintage daytime TV. He was incredulous that this TGL thread alone was up to a whopping 1183 pages. He asked, "How can anyone even talk about a long-cancelled soap that much?!?" Then I reminded him that he has brought up the topic of The Guiding Light EVERY SINGLE TIME he has phoned me in the last 50 years!🫢 So, he became sheepish and embarrassed, but relieved to know he's not alone in is undying love for his favorite show. TGL community rocks!

For novelizations that were promoted as being "based on the actual scripts," the Soaps & Serials books were weakly written, missing major details, and didn't really adhere to the source material. I bought them all when the company lunched, but was quickly disappointed by what I was reading. I wasn't surprised when S&S folded. I sold all my copies on eBay.

In the early years, both Bay City and Somerset were said to be located in Michigan, about an hour's drive from each other. In a long-ago news report about the backstage goings-on of the show, the host opened the segment by giving historical facts about AW, including Bay City, Michigan, as its locale. The clip is, or at least was at one point, available on Youtube. I watched it twice. Somerset, the spin-off sister soap, was also acknowledged to be in that same state. When Heather Lawrence was told by her mother, Eve, that they were moving there permanently, Heather complained about not wanting to go to that, "dreary little town in Michigan." On a talk show once (it might have been Merv Griffin; I forget), Audra Lindley spoke about her career pre-Three's Company. She said, "I was on a soap opera for years called Another World. It was set in Bay City, Michigan...." And then she elaborated on her antagonistic character of Liz Matthews. Finally, even Google has its say: "Yes, Somerset, a township in Huron County, Michigan, is relatively close to Bay City. It's located to the north-east of Bay City, and the drive is generally less than an hour. The two towns are linked by the Saginaw River and Lake Huron, according to a local information source." The two towns, whose names at least exist in real life, were always said on-air to be close to each other and separated by water. The opening logo of Somerset even had a visual depiction of this. Why TPTB at P&G later changed AW from Michigan to Illinois, who knows? Maybe they just made the arbitrary/pointless decision to set AW, TGL and ATWT in the same state. Maybe those in charge were just ignorant of the facts and didn't care about consistency and continuity. Remember this is a company which mandated dropping the article THE from The Guiding Light and The Edge of Night in order to "modernize" the shows and "attract a younger audience." (If anyone can explain the irrational logic of that loopy decision, let me know, LOL.) So, yes, Bay City was originally set in Michigan. There is a real Bay City in that state, just like there's a Genoa City, Wisconsin on Y&R and a real Genoa City in the real Wisconsin. Retcons and historical inaccuracies are not uncommon on soaps, alas. Out of curiosity, were you watching in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Michigan was mentioned, on-air, more than once back then. I kept extensive scrapbooks of all my favorite soaps at the time (yes, I had no life, LOL), and I made notes of trivia like this, characters' addresses and telephone numbers, birthdates of babies, etc.

Personally, I felt that the deletion of the original music from the girls' slumber party episode, and the axing of REM's Losing My Religion from the ep featuring Brenda and Dylan breaking up, were the most painful. The changes really damaged those episodes. I dropped the DVDs after season two, but I've been told by other viewers who kept going that tunes from all the seasons continued being replaced, and the situation only got worse as the DVD releases progressed. Yes, penny-pinching from those in charge was the principle issue, but I wonder how much better the DVDs would have sold if such poor choices had not been made in the name of cost cutting. On the other hand, when Time-Life put out the Vietnam-war era classic China Beach, they dug deep into their pockets and ended up clearing the rights to a whopping 268 (!!!) of the original tracks. This represented 96% of the total. TPTB said that when they were not given permission to use a few of the remaining pieces, they substituted different singers' versions of the exact same songs, in order to preserve the show's integrity as much as possible. The CB set was expensive as heck, to be sure, but to me it was worth it.

@DRW50, as always, the tag is much appreciated.👍

@Gatecrashers, No, that's not GA, although there is a resemblance...particularly with that hair.

That was interesting; thanks. Courtney looks tired and/or bored AF, LOL!

YES! While I objectively found the writing on RH (particularly during its first few years and then again in its final days) to be excellent, so many of the principle characters were unpleasant, and totally turned me off. I could never settle down and become emotionally involved with a group of people who grated on my nerves.

This is tragic news. Another one of our legendary icons, gone. I was just talking about her yesterday, with one of my friends, and remembering all the wonderful performances Denise Alexander gave us on DAYS and GH. Modern audiences will know her best as Lesley Webber on GH, of course, but she was a force to be reckoned with on DAYS and gifted us with years of mesmerizing work there. RIP.