vetsoapfan

And he would have been such a vast improvement over many of the awful writers who controlled GH in the 1980s after Pat Falken Smith departed. Yes, that was the most tasteless, arrogant and putrid (LOL) moment for me.

The thought had never occured to me, but now that you have brought it up: the electric McKinsey and the charismatic Espy might have been quite an interesting pair. I agree that attempting to replace Reinholt was a major blunder, but AT LEAST David Canary was a good actor in his own right. How Linda Borgenson ever got an acting job is beyond me. You are right: those reveal scenes were horrendous.

I forget: did we ever find out if she was Bruce Sterling's biological daughter? I thought Mary Carny was attractive, a competent actress, and showed potential. Too bad TPTB axed her so quickly in favor of the painfully bad Kathleen Tolan. Speaking of Ryan's Hope, my unpopular opinion is that Johnny Ryan was a pompous, unlikeable and boorish windbag, and Maeve could be a cold fish.

There's no denying that David Canary was a powerful actor, but pairing him with Linda Borgenson was like pairing Laurence Olivier with a Swiffer Duster. That, combined with the atrocious writing and lack of attention to history, doomed the story to fail. With a gifted scribe who knew the characters' pasts, and performers like Jacqueline Courtney, Victoria Wyndham and Canary, the idea might have been feasible, but I guess we will never know. The show had been under 5.0 in the early 1980s, but rose to 5.1 in the mid-1980s. Santa Barbara and SFT's ratings were even worse, however, so that probably did help stave off cancellation for a bit. Yes, although the bulk of the audience was on team Mac (even if many viewers wanted to have sex with Mitch more, LOL!) They certainly had more appeal than Canary's Steve and pod-Alice!

Gordon Russell wrote the show into 1980, but left in the spring, as I recall. Sam Hall, who had been Russell's co-headwriter for a few years, took over the reigns with Peggy O'Shea. I preferred the Russell/Hall team, but O'Shea was fine too, and I was satisfied with the show under her and Hall combined. A few years later, when she wrote the show by herself, it was noticeably weaker (but Paul Rauch was producing then, so I was not surprised and did not totally blame O'Shea for OLTL's downwards spiral). (When O'Shea wrote for Search for Tomorrow, Mary Stuart said she was the best writer that the show had ever had.)

Nobody in charge understood the show or the audience or what viewers wanted to see (a problem rampant on daytime TV for decades now).

True, but Rauch made the ending even more putrid than it needed to be. The show was still on a high that year, although I'd say that 1979 was the zenith..

The ratings were anemic before the attempt to renew the Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle, and did not improve at all during its run. It was reported at the time that the idea was to rebuild Steve and Alice as a pair, but Linda Borgenson had no chemistry with anyone, and David Canary was a better actor with potential, so TPTB switched courses and veered Steve towards Rachel. That idea was a failure too, because "old-time" Steve and Alice fans did not buy it, and Rachel fans only wanted her with Mac, so the show finally cut its losses and killed Steve off yet again.

Rauch ultimately decimated (or further decimated) the once-great AW, OLTL and TGL, and his work on Texas, SB and Lovers & Friends was a failure as well. IMHO, he was a destructive producer who reputation was undeserved.

Be careful! I had never heard of that site until now, seeing you refer to it. I just tried to go to and open it, but my virus software blocked the site completely. And thank heavens, that remained its theme song in the DVD release! Ahh, Disney Plus, yet another service I do not have. (I don't subscruibe to cable.) Well, Singer did become a somewhat recognizable name thanks to The Beastmaster and V. He became very popular in MY house for looking so sexy in a loincloth and tight jeans, LOL!

You are being fair, because you are being truthful. The Chromakey was dreadful, and we were NOT interested in watching strangers playing once-beloved characters, particularly Linda Borgenson who was painfully bland and nondescript. Borgenson and Canary had no chemistry at all. There was no reason to care.

In Canada, neither Hulu nor Decades are available to us, unfortunately. I am a complete and abject failure at internet technology. I could not get this app to work for me when I desperately tried to install and use it months ago. I'll give it another shot. It couldn't hurt. Thanks for the reminder. If St. Elsewhere were also available in Canada on the CTV app, I would move heaven and earth to make it function for me. But...Family alone is enough incentive. I did not "get" the appeal, either, and I was still watching TGL "live" in those days. Then again, I never really wanted Reva on the show in the first place, considering how much airtime she hogged. Her histrionics just made me grimace. Actually, that's not a bad price for all the seasons combined. I'd pay that. And Jeff Kober, Dodger on CB, is now on GH, to add another soap connection.

I think by that time, Lemay was pretty much burned out. I found much of his work during his first three years on AW to be brilliant, even though I found fault with some of his choices, but even by 1975 there were issues with his writing. The problems continued to grow over the next few years. I agree. But I suspect they would complain about anything which they felt was too slow moving; not flashy enough. Tennessee Williams, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper Lee might have also incited their wrath. Many folks today (particularly some of the ones on Twitter, LOL) have the attention spans of gnats. She certainly was "down there," wasn't she? I wonder what would have become of the revisited Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle with a capable writer at the helm, and a return of Jacqueline Courtney and George Reinholt. What ended up on screen, under Jacker's pen, was a disaster. Sadly, a lot of tedious repetition was foisted on the audience then.

When characters like Scotty, Bobbie, Monical Mac, etc., are available to them, TPTB's insistence on focusing on Sonny, Jason, Carly, and Howarth's 800 characters boogles my mind. GH needs a total overhaul. I'd write out 2/3 of the current characters if I could. I think the China Beach DVDs are out of print and hard-to-find/very expensive now, but trying to hunt down an affordable set is well worth the effort. Dana Delaney cannot be praised enough for her work on this series.

Ahhh, yet another anonymous "soap writer" elaborating on past work that cannot be verified. 🙄 When you attempt to get specifics out of them, these alleged writers suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke. Color me sceptical, LOL.

The DVD boxset for China Beach was truly an astonishing accomplishment. To be fair, I've also seen "labor-of-love" DVD releases for film gems like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, but for beloved TV series that only attracted moderate popularity among the general audience, nothing beats China Beach. (The one-season release of St. Elsewhere was not even remastered, had grainy video quality, suffered poor music changes and was such a disappointment. Now, only a good set of St Elsewhere and seasons three, four and five of TV's Family--starring Sada Thompson--are on my dream DVD wish list. Well, along with collections of vintage soaps, of course.)

Was that the same insider who revealed that Phyllis Diller was Robin Strasser's and Susan Lucci's mom? 🤔🤣 The tidbits we find on the internet can often be just as entertaining as anything we see on TV!

Yep, and then a few years later, Paul Rauch (🤮) came aboard and decimated the cast. Who fires the likes of Ellen Holly, Lillian Hayman and Al Freakin' Freeman, Jr???

The show did start cutting back his lines. By 1979 or 1980, Marlowe would be included in scenes but have little dialogue to recite. An example of this is the episode (available on youtube) in which John Randolph dies. Jim Matthews is in scenes with Aunt Liz and Dan Shearer, but remains largely quiet while the other characters do the majority of the talking. He does get a few lines, but nothing close to the number of everyone else's. "Ouch" is right. Lemay had been introduced to work by people like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon and Henry Slesar, and in his opinion, they only knew what NOT to do? Pffft! Those legendary scribes ruled the roost!

Exactly. Lemay complained that Dwyer changed and edited her lines to better reflect the nature of her character, which allegedly threw Hugh Marlowe off. Ironically (or should I say, hypocritically?), while Lemay lambasted Dwyer for changing her dialogue, he reaped praise on his pets like Constance Ford and Victoria Wyndham for DOING THE EXACT SAME THING. And Hugh Marlowe was clearly having issues by then. He had begun to stumble over his lines no matter WHOM he had as a scene partner, and his flubs continues long after Dwyer left the series Oops, I did not see your well-written post before I made similar comments. Anyway, great minds think alike! To me, the defining moment of Lemay's ego came when an interviewer asked him what he had learned from legenday soap writers of the day. Lemay pompously sniffed, "Only what NOT to do!" That basically says it all. Marlowe was my second favorite actor in the role of Jim Matthews (after Shepperd Sttrudwick). I did warm up to HM, and appreciated his presence, but his inability to remember his lines was obvious his own, and not anyone else's fault. Lemay's just wanted to justify his firing of Dwyer by dragging her into the issue. No one else in scenes with her struggled like Marlowe did. And Marlowe DID have trouble with his lines while performing with other actors. I think HM "went up" more than Jonathan Frid on Dark Shadows, and poor Frid had 20x the dialogue to learn! (I'm not attacking HM, by the way. No one chooses to have memory problems.)

You said that perfectly. I agree with every word. Mary Matthews was created to be, and was, an important and strong matriarch from 1964 until 1971 when Lemay took over. He claimed that people like Mary didn't really exist, and tried to change her into a shrewish harpy. It didn't work, and Lemay became increasingly annoyed at Virginia Dwyer for trying to keep an honest and consistent through-line for her character. Killing off Mary was an egregious error that seriously damaged the show. How deciding to axe Dwyer, George Reinholt, and Jacqueline Courtney all within a few months of each other didn't make someone, anyone, at P&G and NBC stand up to Lemay and Rauch and bellow, "Hell to the NO!" is baffling. Susan Sullivan quit at the end of the same year, we lost Alice, Steve, Mary and Lenore in 1975. IMHO, AW never recovered after that.

I was truly shocked at how well Miami Vice was brought to DVD. Even though the studio could not get the rights to use all the original music, the changes were fine, and (thankfully), all the major, must-have material (like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight) remained. I must say, however, that the best, most gratifying and rewarding DVD release of a TV series which featured an enormous amount of popular music was China Beach. Time-Life took years, and obviously went through a ton of work, to get everything just right. Only 30 seconds of the original TV series had to be cut out, because a character quoted lyrics from a song that the producers could not obtain the rights to use. But no fan will complain after discovering that the complete collection on disc contains more than 300 (!!!) popular songs from the past. Soap fans who have never seen China Beach should definitely try to check it out. It's more riveting, emotional and addictive than anything on daytime TV right now. (Is that...an unpopular opinion?) https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/61151/china-beach-the-complete-series/ Here's an interesting article about the problems associated with obtaining music rights for DVD releases. https://www.vox.com/2014/11/3/7145231/shows-not-on-dvd-music-rights-wonder-years-wkrp

I had the same thought, originally, until I saw how ATROCIOUS, DESTROYED and UNWATCHABLE the episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 were in their dubbed-over version. Entire chucks of episodes were cut out. Characters sang along to music, supposedly playing live for them at the time, which had been dubbed over with generic musak. It was idiotic to watch the characters "sing along" to tunes that were no longer even there. I had had the first several seasons recorded on VHS (in good quality, too), and was furious that I had gotten rid of them before even realizing that the official DVD releases would be so heinous. I wish a company like Shout! Factory would do a reissue and restore the music, like they did with WKRP (as much as humanly possible; there were still some changes. The original DVD release of WKRP infuriated fans, but the re-release, with so much of the music restored by Shout!, made most people quite happy.

Not that longtime viewers of the REAL General Hospital would know, alas, considering how unrecognizable the new, pod version of GH is from its roots. Sigh.

La Courtney really does look stunning there. Viewers were so lucky back then to have so many stellar actresses in the cast (Slezak, Courtney, Holly, Light, etc.), as well as excellent actors like Gerald Anthony. I'll never get tired watching vintage classics like this.