vetsoapfan

Actually, yes it was. Bay City and Somerset were both said (on air) to be in Michigan. On a talk show years later, when she had found success on primetime TV, Audra Lindley also referred to Bay City as being set in Michigan. This is why I was so annoyed when AW suddenly started to refer to the town as being in Illinois. TPTB not doing their homework (or making arbitrary changes for no fathomable reason) is egregious to me. Throughout the decades, I have found historical inaccuracies posted and printed everywhere. It's frustrating, of course, but trying to combat the problem is like trying to prevent the tide from rolling into the shore...with a spoon, LOL. What did MdL say about Ryan's Hope that was wrong? (I did not see her piece about that show.)

No, Steve did not appear at Morgan's wedding to Kelly. The actor/character had drifted into oblivion before the wedding took place.

My interest in most soaps dried up with the sci-fi and camp period of the 1980s (I prefer naturalistic soaps with multi-dimensional characters and plausible storylines), but I am always happy to chat about vintage soaps from decades past. I've always maintained that the 1960s and (particularly) the 1970s were the golden years of daytime drama. If by some miracle I stumble across the AH/PP Daytimer articles, I will notify you ASAP.

There was a monthly columnist in Rona Barrett's Daytimers for a time, named David Johnson, and I know AH was interviewed/quoted in at least one of Johnson's pieces. I remember this specifically because Johnson made the erroneous claim that Pam Peters had been completely absent from the episodes surrounding Jennifer Brooks' final days. Not true. Peggy was in an episode when Stuart and Jennifer celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary, and then in another one when the Brooks girls were gathered in their parents' living room talking about Jen's death. At the conclusion of that ep, we saw Peggy running out of the room in tears. When the action picked up on the next episode, Lorie announced that Peggy couldn't take what was happening and had fled. David Johnson criticized the show for supposedly not including Peggy in any of this story, but Johnson was the one in the wrong. He obviously had failed to see the few times Peggy had appeared, and then lambasted the show for her "absence." I do remember this and AH's comments about PP walking off the set, which lead to the termination of the Jack/Peggy storyline. I just don't recall if the various tidbits came from one issue of Daytimers or two. Unfortunately, this was 4.5 decades ago, and while my memory of my favorite soaps is generally good, I cannot say for certainty what quotes appeared in what specific issue(s) of the magazine.

I don't recall AH specifically mentioning Pam Peters' spotty appearances during the rape trial; that was my own remembrance from watching the show daily at the time. I found it so weird. AH did acknowledge the incident of PP just walking off the set one day, and then later being told by Bill Bell that he was ending AH's story and run on the show.

Granny Matthews was written out with the on-screen explanation that she went to be with her niece, who was going to have her first baby.

Yes, that's a main reason why I ever considered getting an all-region player: because there have been some shows and films I wanted which were only available in other countries.

I will NEVER abandon physical media. Films and TV series are wont to disappear from streaming sites for a variety of reasons, but when you have your own, physical copies of your favorites, you can cherish them forever. Plus, all the special features and commentary soundtracks can be a blast! I've been thinking of buying an all-region player, and you're giving me more incentive to take the plunge and do it! I've never seen Hunter, but I do remember hearing about it when it was being produced. Certain pearl-clutching conservative types wanted it taken off the air because the actor's pants were supposedly too revealing.🙄 God, YES! A French-Canadian company (Imavision, I believe) originally had the rights to release Little House on the Prairie, and their DVDs' quality was atrocious. First of all, they cut out the opening and closing credits of the episodes (WHY???), sped up the film (WHY???), and then on top of it all, offered butchered, syndicated cuts of many, if not most, of the shows. Each one should have had a running time of about 46-47 minutes, but huge chunks of some eps were missing, leaving their running times at 37 minutes. Imavision had a disclaimer on the INSIDE of the packaging, claiming that "every effort has made to include all existing scenes." So you had to buy and open the DVD sets before finding out the eps had been butchered. Of course, years later, Lion's Gate re-released the entire series and had the full-length episodes intact and remastered, so Imavision's spin about complete eps being hard to find was bullsh*t, borne out of laziness, cheapness, and/or dishonesty. The first season of Rhoda had primarily syndicated versions as well, cutting out a lot of the funniest material.

Nowadays, before I buy anything on DVD, I always investigate the release's music rights, and see if they have been secured for the DVDs. I've been burned in the past, and left AGHAST at the atrocious butchering of some shows, whose music has been hacked out of the episodes. Beverly Hill 90210, Tour of Duty, WKRP in Cincinnati, St Elsewhere and the first version of Roswell are the worst offenders I know of. (WKRP, after having its music deleted and replaced on its first/cheap release, was later re-released by another company--Shout Factory--with most of the music restored, but cases like this are rare.) Because I had China Beach on both VHS and Beta tapes (two separate, complete runs of this fine show), I was okay with series not being released on DVD because of all the copyrighted music involved. The soundtrack was ESSENTIAL to the quality, tone, and effect of the drama. After YEARS of not being available, Time-Life somehow pulled off the impossible feat of releasing the show on DVD and Blu-ray, with an astonishing amount of the precious music intact. The (few) substitutions the manufacturers had to make to the soundtrack were perfectly chosen and did not diminish the quality of the show at all. I was thrilled. It's depressing that all the music-based problems are affecting streaming rights too.

Yes, the actress in the video you retained in this thread is definitely Sally Stark. I never questioned that fact. The other clip, the one you removed, did not feature the LoL actress, however. (IMHO, of course.) And thank you so much for the tag to this crisp LoL episode. What good quality! I was not old enough to be following the show at that time, so watching this broadcast will be fun!

Vlada Gelman, who is the credited author of the poll/article is too young to have seen AW during the 1960s and 1970s. Even Michael Ausiello, TVLine's founder and editorial director, was born in 1972, so he's too young to know about AW's heyday either. He has written enthusiastically about Santa Barbara over the years, which he could have watched when he was a kid, but never about AW. I think you are right: Gelman probably just googled "popular TV triangles" and culled candidates from wiki articles. Or she had read about certain characters from history books. I appreciate the effort to include a selection of vintage choices, but I seriously doubt the majority of TVLine's staff or even readers know who George Reinholt and Jacqueline Courtney were.

As fun as it was to find a 50-year-old soap triangle like this among the mix, it was still quite surprising. I wonder how many people who responded to this poll were on the younger side, and voted in favor of a character who remained on the show until the very end, and whom the modern audience remembered better. Anyway, the poll brought back a lot of memories.😁

The entertainment website TVLine just uploaded a new poll asking readers to vote for their favorite couples among divisive TV triangles. To my surprise, there was an Another World connection. https://tvline.com/lists/tv-love-triangles/

True, with all the misinformation and myths floating around, it's important to be careful about accepting just anything, from any source, reported about soap opera history. From what I've seen, however, the vast majority of misinformation comes from people who never saw the soaps broadcast on screen for themselves, either because they did not chose to watch specific series at the time, or because they were simply too young (perhaps not even born yet) to do so. Sites like Soap Central seem to fill in the blanks about stories and characters they know nothing about with a LOT of "creative fiction" from unknowledgeable contributors' vivid imagination. The writers of the Soap & Serials novelizations also got many details wrong, despite allegedly using original TV scripts upon which to base their books. Of course, some people trying to offer historical data in good faith may simply misremember details, thereby still getting the data wrong by accident. I would say that the cases of "facts" coming from non-viewers who choose the fill-in-the-blanks-with supposition method are not comparable to the commentary of first-hand viewers who actually did watch the material, who recorded the material, who read multiple articles about the material, and who remember the material in minute detail. But ultimately, people will believe what they believe, so continued attempts to convince them otherwise will be unsuccessful and therefore pointless. (I never did convince one internet poster that Eric Braedon began on Y&R in 1980, because that poster insisted Braedon was an original cast member from 1973. I offered evidence to the contrary, which was rebuffed, so I moved on. I like my drama and strife on television, not on the internet, LOL!)

I give up, LOL.🙄 All I can do is report the facts about an episode which I watched for myself first-hand, which I recorded on audiotape and listened to again later, and which was discussed at length in the soap press of the time (with quotes from Courtney and Rauch). If people who never even watched the show in 1973, and who--for whatever reason--cannot fathom the possibility that original scripts can be altered or revised before taping, there's little I can do to convince them.🤷‍♂️ I'll save myself the energy and stop reiterating the truth as I know it.😝

Over the years, I've always found the list of Daytime Emmy nominees (and even some of the winners) to be quite...dubious, but in a fair world, Nixon's AW would have been drowning in statues!

Right, with a new network and canvas, it was not surprising that Irna created a new family upon which to build the show in the late 1940s. Families being at the heart of her dramas was a staple for her.

Sam Groom was so handsome, so noble and so appealing as Russ. The actor somehow made the character an ultra-good guy without Russ being boring, trite or a cliche. Hw was excellent. Neither of his replacements ever did the character justice, IMHO. With Groom, Strasser, Courtney and Reinholt on board, the show was golden. Even in published history books, there is a lot of information about the soaps which is inaccurate. It's long been reported that Pat Matthews killed her first boyfriend, Tom Baxter, by stabbing him to death. This drove me crazy whenever I read it anywhere, because Pat shot him; she did not stab him. I saw the original episodes. Years later, when Pat killed Greg Bernard, Harding Lemay's script reiterated the false myth that she had stabbed Tom with "a letter opener or something." Argh. I am 100% sure of the fact that although the original script had other characters set to appear that day, Paul Rauch made the decision after the script had already been written to cut out the other actors from the episode, lengthen the Steve-Alice scenes, and only have Reinholt and Courtney appear on screen. I watched it live at the time and remember it very well. Plus, it was talked about and lauded in the soap press at the time, and Courtney did an interview about it. Even Paul Rauch put his two cents' worth in. The existing scenes with Pat, Dennis and Louise took place on the same "Bay City day" as the two-hander episode, but were broadcast in the NEXT DAY's television broadcast. The material available on youtube has a lot of clips lumped together in one upload; that does not mean that all the scenes came from a single day's NBC broadcast. Plus, the two-hander Steve-and-Alice episode was confirmed in the article from Daily TV Serials posted a few pages ago in this thread.

In no way were the Gregorys a core family. They were simply an unmemorable blip on the radar. It's like making a claim that the Rosales clan was a core family on Y&R. Um...no. AW continued to ride the wave of immense popularity that it had enjoyed for years under the Nixon/early Lemay years, but as the writing deteriorated in the mid-late 1970s, and as the competing soaps steadily climbed in the ratings, AW began to suffer noticeably. As someone recent said (was it Neil Johnson?), viewers will stick around through weak writing out of loyalty to beloved characters, but with bad writing AND the elimination of so many important, cherished characters, there wasn't a lot of incentive to stick around Bay City anymore. The 90-minute format might have just been another nail in the coffin. And...NOBODY has ever understood why and how TPTB bungled Jacquie Courtney's return in 1984 so badly. The incompetence of underusing and misusing her (and giving her the worst haircut known to man) is unfathomable. All we do know is that writer Gary Tomlin later admitted in a interview that he did know the character's history very well and did not know how to use her well.

After TGL lost several of its original, key players in the 1940s, there were several characters isolated in their own individualized storylines. There wasn't as much of a "homey" feeling as with the Ruthledges and Kranskys at center stage. I believe Irna Phillips, understanding soaps and the audience so well, knew that having a central family at the core was important, hence the introduction of the Bauers. It ended up being a savvy move, since the show enjoyed huge success for decades afterwards, with the Bauers at its core. The audience once again had a central family to call their own. Yes, Irna Phillips was the one to weave the Bauers into TGL, starting in 1948. She knew her own show and what it needed, which is why her choices were beneficial to the series. And you are right: Agnes Nixon did not make sweeping or damaging changes when she took over AW. She simply corrected the ship's course by writing out a few of James Lipton's tepid characters and introducing some inspired new ones of her own and attaching them to the show's core Matthews family. She got back to basics, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Again, perfectly said. I truly believe that beloved characters are the glue which binds the audience to the soaps. Once they are gratuitously eliminated from any show (particularly in large numbers over short periods of time), the audience reacts quite negatively.

Reinventing the (very successful) wheel generally does not work with soaps. Bill Bell was able to do it with Y&R in 1984, but most writers and producers who toss out everything that had been there before they arrive end up crippling the show. I believe it was Virginia Dwyer who vexed Lemay by leaving script pages around the set. He said Courtney annoyed him by reading her lines off the cuffs of her nurse's uniform. Neither of these supposed "crimes" were ever noticeable on-screen. To be fair, Margie Impert was woefully miscast and a pretty weak Rachel. Her being replaced was for the best, IMHO. They really did underestimate her drawing power. Jacquie was a huge star; extremely popular with the audience. None of the actresses chosen to replace her (admittedly, some were better--or "less bad"--than others) had the star appeal she exuded as Alice. Lemay even admitted that JC's presence might very well have contributed to OLTL's steady rise in the ratings once she began appearing on it. Bravo, @Neil Johnson! You put that perfectly. Lemay's petulance and ego got in the way of his talent and what was important for the show, and AW sank because it it. Bravo to you too, @DRW50! The contention that Harney was a "much better actress" than Courtney is absurd. SH's scenes after John Randolph died were just embarrassing.

When Lemay began at AW in 1971, he focused on the show's core, legacy characters and everything in Bay City flourished. The material he gave Courtney and Reinholt was wonderful for the first three years. I wonder if he eventually became emboldened by his own success, and wanted to flex his muscles and revise the show into something more to his liking. It eventually crippled the show, like Pam Long's and Gail Kobe's inexplicable gutting of The Guiding Light destroyed that series.

That's why I have to begrudgingly give kudos to Paul Rauch, who made fairly last-minute changes to the concept of this episode, based on his (astute) belief that the Steve-Alice reconciliation would be historic, and deserved special treatment. It was reported at the time that Rauch worked with the director to add depth and nuance to the Steve and Alice scenes, in order to "milk" the characters' long-awaited reconciliation and gratify the audience who had been vehemently calling for the pair to reunite. Aside from Reinholt, whose backstage issues/behavior on both AW and OLTL have been well-documented, I just don't believe firing Courtney and Dwyer was "for cause." Lemay simply had an irrational hatred for both women. The justifications he used in his book to fight for their dismissal were blatantly ridiculous and hypocritical. Considering that Courtney consistently ranked at the top of audience popularity polls and was awarded for her acting multiple times (in Daytime TV, Daily TV Serials, Afternoon TV magazines, etc.), it wasn't her acting that needed to be changed to placate a petulant writer; Lemay needed to get over himself and accept that it's destructive to fire hugely popular leads from any series based on personal ire. Someone who is less-than credible has been "going on and on" about the Mike and Nancy episode from TEON, or the Steve and Alice one from AW? I cannot and do not remember every single thing about soaps gone by (alas!), but the Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle is/was my all-time favorite soap opera saga, and I do remember it (including specific scenes and dialogue) quite well. The ONLY good thing about my being older than Methusela is that I was "there" to witness, first-hand, the halcyon days of daytime TV.

I wrote the lines of text which you reposted in your last message. I just lifted a quote from Jacquie Courtney (about filming the dress rehearsal of the two-person ep) from memory of a vintage soap magazine article. Back in the day, I literally bought and read all of the publications, so I can't specify which one.