vetsoapfan

Well, Rachel was on the show from 1967-1999, a total of 32 years. Aunt Liz appeared 1964-71, 1974-1986, late 1987-1993, and then for a few months in 1994. If you add up the years in which she appeared, it would be 26. Ada, was on the canvas from 1967 to 1992, or 25 years. Those are AW's three longest running characters, and Rachel has Liz and Ada beat.🙂

I have no idea. I have blocked him out of my mind for years, LOL. His acting, writing and interviewing have all turned me off so much that I ignore everything related to him.

To me, the whole look-alike Julie/Jenny story was just hackneyed and unbelievable. The show's final writer was James Lipton, whose named I dreaded seeing in the credits of any show. He was awful. Jenny was just too cardboard a character for me to be interested in.

It was Hutchinson's smarminess and weirdness in the role that turned me off completely. Roger's son should at least have had nuanced layers to him, which made the audience feel he was a viable character worth investing in. Right. There were so many pointless, boring characters floating around...fire ten of them and bring back a major character or two whom the audience wants to see!

@slick jones Thanks for the tag. Regarding Mike Horton: A donation of sperm does not a true parent make. Bill may have been the bio father, but by raising and loving him from birth into adulthood, Mickey was Mike's DAD. I will die on this hill, LOL!

Oh, okay. I was just curious. Thank you. If I were held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I'd keep Tom Pelphrey on the show over Doug Hutchinson. Or Bradley Cole, LOL. 🤭

While I readily admit to being a die-hard crusty curmudgeon, I am being honest and straightforward when I say that I never heard anyone praise Hutchinson for his work on TGL, let alone highly. Was it in a soap magazine? On the internet? Soaps should have been cut back to 30 minutes each a looooooong time ago. Cutting the casts down to 18 or so players would free up some money to pay writers who can actually write.

Oh, of course; no question. It was just fantasy casting on my part. I am wont to dream in Technicolor. The endless poor management decisions at P&G are legendary at this point. I must say, that with all the talk about budget problems, a huge chunk of the cast of characters could have been pruned away quite easily. TGL had so many extraneous and tedious actors and characters in its final years.

Although look how stupidly they squandered...JOAN COLLINS, and we ended up Marj Dusay again. Personally, I found MJ breathy, campy and lacking in depth.

YES! With a drastic overhaul of the writing for the character, James Marsters would have been amazing as Sebastian. Instead, the character became an awkward failure who disappeared, never to be thought about again.

No one--least of all me--will deny Laurence Olivier's and William Wyler's obvious talents--but that version of WH was just so stiff and mannered. The whole point of WH is that Heathcliff has the barely-contained sprit of an untamed beast, and neither he nor Catherine is meant to be aloof, reserved and able to control emotions.

I think TBTB are more concerned with potential profitability over any artistic concerns. If if comes down to casting shiny bright lights of the day, or attempting to stay true to the source material, the source material is often tossed aside. Really, the casting for the new Wuthering Heights boggles my mind. The insta-child not only watered down Roger and one of the principle motivations for his behavior, but Hart himself never really jelled. Did the writers even have a concrete definition of what type of person he was supposed to be, and what they intended to do with him? It seemed Hart changed direction with every new actor hired No, it ended up not mattering much at all, which was a failure on the writers' part. If they just had to introduce Hart through wonky revisionist history, the character should have had a serious, dramatic impact on established Sprinfieldians like Roger and Blake. It was all such a waste. NOW, an even worse blunder on the part of the show (producers, casting directors, writers) was introducing Doug Hutchinson as Sebastian Hulce, Roger's other son. What a disaster. The actor was woefully miscast; he came across as creepy and smarmy, and NOT in a good way. Hutchinson may have been perfectly fine in other roles (I don't know, I've never seen him in anything else), but his "je ne sais quoi" on TGL was such a major repellant. I wanted him gone immediately. I prayed every day he would be replaced by James Marsters, lol. I knew Sebastian was not going to be long for this world.

Sadly, the last time I checked, many of the episode were on YT, but not all. And a lot of the ones there were of poor quality and badly cut up. I'm going to check again now, to see if any better copies have been uploaded. GOOD NEWS: A kind soul has, indeed, been uploading this show, and in good, uncut quality too. Here's a playlist list for seasons 1 and 2:

To me, the writers did not really develop the role of Julie very deeply, particularly at the beginning. She was put in the confining mold The Good Blonde Girl, and did not seem to have many layers or depth.

Yep, details matter except to a lot of TIIC who produce the material. Do we really need ANOTHER version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights? Really? To me, the Colin Firth version of P&P is definitive, and no one is ever going to top it. I have never seen a version of WH which I was satisfied with; even the 1939 version with Laurence Olivier was truncated and stiff. The casting for this new version is egregious. The actors chosen may be great for many roles, but not Catherine and Heathcliff. Ugh.

What made it even worse, and showed how lazy the writers were, Josh remarked to the alleged Ruthledge descendant, "Your grandfather was a legend in this town." Um, no. Not only was it improbable/impossible for the original John Ruthledge to have had a grandson with his family name, but RJR did not even live in Springfield to begin with. If writers are going to give a nod to the past, at least they should make a nominal effort to research it.

It was short-sighted of CBS to axe Executive Suite so quickly. Most soaps take a while to "build" and really take off. Dallas and Dynasty both had tepid ratings in their first seasons. I think ES might have made it if given more time for viewers to find it, although IMHO, either W.E.B. nor Beacon Hill stood much of a chance after their weak writing became apparent.

In my heart, I would like to believe that the dearth of character-driven series like Family on TV today was what ignited the emotional response to Heated Rivalry. Fans of intimate, nuanced character dramas are not necessarily satisfied with a steady diet of generic action/adventure/sci-fi/supernatural/comic-book material. I crave to see literate, mature series more often .

I hope the official DVD releases of PP will eventually continue. As far as I can tell, they have been discontinued, which almost always means they are dead in the water, but occasionally axed TV-series releases do get picked up by another company. Fingers crossed.

I watched both Executive Suite and W.E.B. Of the three shows being discussed (BH, ES and W.E.B.), I thought Executive Suite was the best. Henry Slesar, Rita Lakin and Rick Edelstein (soap writers whose work I've always appreciated) offered up some fine scripts, and the cast was solid. W.E.B., to me, was "meh." Not great, not atrocious, but just rather bland and lethargic. The acting was fine, but none of the characters ever clicked for me, and I just never became invested in the drama. As previously noted, Beacon Hill had great potential, but did not live up to anything great when it actually aired.

Gordon Russell and Sam Hall.

Yep, Kim was deaf, and the best remedy to dealing with conflicting reports is to watch the show and find out, first-hand. PP is available in its entirety (for free) on Youtube.

Thanks, @DRW50 . Yes, I have seen the great, informative post by @dc11786 . I appreciate what he brings to the board.🙂

You asked me this same question. Why do you doubt the character was deaf? She was, according to the broadcast episodes of Peyton Place. They're available to watch on Youtube if you'd like to verify. As an added bonus, the eps are fun to watch anyway.🙂

I had such high expectations for Beacon Hill, and hoped it would be a classy, American version of Upstairs, Downstairs, which I enjoyed. The first episode was atrociously written, and TBTB seemed to be treating the series as low-brow camp. I expected Jerry Lewis to pop up as The Nutty Professor at any moment, LOL. When I saw that the writer was Anne Howard Bailey, whose abysmal writing had tanked How to Survive a Marriage and doomed that daytime soap to failure, I was crestfallen. With hackneyed caricatures and shallow scripts at BH's core, I quickly predicted it would be a bomb. Most frustratingly, weeks into its run, the writing suddenly took an upwards swing. HTSAM had had the thing happen: after AHB was replaced by the great Rick Edelstein, the quality of the writing surged. Alas, neither the viewers of HTSAM nor BH gave those dramas a second chance; once burned, twice shy, I suppose. I stuck with Beacon Hill out of morbid curiosity, wondering if the network and/or show runners would do anything to turn the series around. I had watched the debuts of several soaps (HTSAM, Bright Promise, Return to Peyton Place, Where the Heart Is, among others) whose early days were stained by poor writing...but suddenly rebounded when new scribes were brought in. Unfortunately, none of those soaps were able to recover from their disastrous beginnings.