vetsoapfan

William J. Bell and Agnes Nixon (to name just two writers) knew how to weave socially-relevant material into naturalistic dialogue. Anne Howard Bailey did not. She was later given the headwriting duties of a primetime soap opera on CBS, called Beacon Hill, fashioned after Upstairs, Downstairs. The ratings for the premiere were stellar, but AHB's script was painfully bad and trite, and the ratings immediately plummeted. She was quickly replaced, and the new scribes were excellent, but...like with HTSAM, it was too late. Once burned, twice shy, as they say.

I crowed with joy during the scene of Russ Matthews (played by Sam Groom at that point), taking the malicious Rachel (Robin Strasser) over his knee and spanking her, during their short-lived marriage. By that point, I had wanted for someone, anyone, to smack her for a long time.

The 90-minute debut episode of HTSAM is rumored to exist among private collectors, who will not share it. I had the final episode on tape for decades, but it had deteriorated to dust before I figured out how to transfer it to disc. (Fortunately, the vast majority of my vintage treasures managed to get saved and transferred. They have all shown up on the internet at one time or another.) It's true that during its first few months, the show was quite preachy, with some unlikeable male characters being pigs and women pontificating about equality, liberation, etc. (I agreed with the message about empowerment for women, but the lectures were so shrill, I had a feeling folks in the audience would be alienated.)

The author obviously did not know much of anything about the show, or soaps in general. He snidely remarked about how surprising it was that an episode of a half-hour soap would take an entire day to produce...yet 30-minute primetime series took (and take) an entire week. Back then, even at 30 minutes per episode, soaps produced the equivalent of an entire movie in ONE week. A theatrical film would require months to accomplish what AW did in five days. The author was a condescending and obtuse snob.

Some writers just "get" certain shows better than others. Harding Lemay's work on Strange Paradise really sucked, yet he soared at Another World. Douglas Marland's The Doctors and Loving were tepid at best, yet his General Hospital was miraculous. Claire Labine was excellent on Where the Heart Is and Love of Life, but her stint at The Guiding Light was painful. Rick Edelstein was (IMHO) okay at The Doctors (in comparison to many other writers who worked on that series), but his HTSAM was wonderful. He was the one in charge during the memorable storyline about David Bachman's death.

Constance Ford would have opened him up a fresh can of whup-ass, LOL!

Yes: smug, self-important nobodies who denigrated others to make themselves feel superior.

No, even with the expansion of other soaps, there still would have been room on the schedule for HTSAM. Lin Bolin and NBC clearly had high hopes for the show. Bolin boasted about how she had spent a fortune just on scenery for the show. They gave it a 90-minute premiere and lured daytime legend Rosemary Prinz to the show at a high salary, and then promoted the heck out of it with reams of publicity. The problem was...everyone involved forgot about CHARACTERS and STORIES that the audience could become invested in. Anne Howard Bailey relied heavily on didactic, preachy speeches about women's lib and the need for independence. Characters were not much more than caricatures with little depth or nuance. Originally, the show was both abrasive and BORING. It must have been humiliating for Lin Bolin, who championed HTSAM as her pet project. I have many vintage articles about this show, since I adored its fine "middle period," when Rick Edelstein was writing it. When the series initially failed to attract an audience (I knew it wouldn't, considering the dreck Anne Howard Bailey was putting out), certain actors commented that Lin Bolin just stopped coming around and turned her back on the production. I do think that the decision to move HTSAM against ATWT was NBC's way of acknowledging that they had given up on the show and were feeding it to the wolves. Under Rick Edelstein's sensitive writing, the show might have succeeded, given time to rebound and sandwiched between Days and Another World, but in the mid-1970s, no fledging show (particularly one which had initially turned off potential viewers) was going to survive against ATWT.

The author of that article is incredibly ignorant and condescending.

After being plagued by terrible writing and casting chaos upon its debut, it looked like RTPP was doomed. Miraculously, however, in its later run, the show stabilized and the writing improved dramatically. It actually took a huge leap in the ratings in the months before its cancellation, but by then NBC was dedicated to HTSAM, and cancelled RTPP anyway. Like RTPP upon its debut, HTSAM was dreadfully written and went through some casting problems. This show stabilized as well, and the writing reigns switched from the atrocious Anne Howard Bailey to the excellent Rick Edelstein. It was thrilling to see the surge in quality, but the impatient (and incompetent, IMHO) PTB at NBC struck again. Instead of learning from their mistakes with RTPP, they moved the fledging-but-blossoming HTSAM into direct competition with the powerhouse ATWT, and then cancelled it altogether when the ratings (predictably) did not impress them. Viewers ended up losing two soaps which had become very watchable and viable. It was a frustrating waste

Ahhh, thanks.

I still do not remember her at all. She must have played a minor, relatively unimportant character.

The only one I can think of that was successful: Jacqueline Courtney and George Reinholt, hugely popular on Another World, who also worked well together when they moved over to OLTL (although GR did not last very long there, and JC had zero chemistry with any of his mediocre replacements).

LOL, no need to apologize. While I do believe that firing Courtney, Reinholt and Dwyer in 1975 was a huge mistake (akin to axing the Bauers on TGL in the early 1980s), and that trying to replace Courtney was a losing proposition from the get-go (none of the replacements could hold a candle to her), there are other stars that should not have been replaced either. Some actors are simply too iconic and identified with their roles for recasting to be feasible.

I have the feeling that the author only knew of Mac and Rachel because they continued to be focal points of the show well into the 1980s.

"...below is a list of the seven best couples that came out of Another World." I always have to roll my eyes at lists like this, which purport to announce "the best" of any TV series, when the authors are clearly not old enough to have witnessed or been able to assess the majority of the show's run. It would be better to write, "Here are the seven couples whom I personally liked best on AW from the time that I watched it." A definitive list of Best Couples which omits Alice Matthews and Steven Frame, among others, is hard to take seriously. That would be like listing the best couples of GH and choosing Sonny and Carly to make the cut, but ignoring Luke and Laura, LOL. (Not that I could ever stand Luke, but there's no denying the impact L&L had on that soap.) https://www.fame10.com/entertainment/another-worlds-7-best-couples/?fbclid=IwAR2AKHKBWFj19eA-PZ9DPzYZzPgkUX4oA13j04zMXYPQvOffx-eDKrhkOsA

During The Cosby Show's original run on NBC, Rashad appeared as a guest on (IIRC) Phil Donahue's talk show. A member in the audience made the comment that, while it was fine to see people of color portraying well-off and affluent characters on television, it was also important to reflect the reality of all the black people whose lives are mired in economic and social struggle; whose lives are not ideal. Boy, did Rashad get angry. She sideswiped his point by saying that wealthy black folks did exist in the USA (true, of course, but that was not the crux of his statement), then demanded that he sit down and made no further comment. She was so gratuitously rude over an innocent remark that actually had merit. I never cared for her after that.

Wait, what? I know that Sheffer severely diminished the vets' presence on the canvas and basically treated them like irrelevant under-fivers, but I had never heard about him being despicable enough to tell a beloved vet to "know your place." What happened there? As for fans being vile enough to call for her punishment...UGH. Younger viewers, no doubt, who did not care about the vets or the show's legacy.

I've heard this contention many times throughout the decades as well: that Kobe wanted to recreate Texas on TGL when she assumed the reigns there. The story goes that she loved Texas and was furious about losing it, and had no feelings about or loyalty to The Guiding Light, so she had no qualms about trashing TGL. This could explain why she so easily hacked away at the core of TGL and brought in people whom she had known from Texas. After all this time, and with no first-hand witnesses around to substantiate the allegation, however, we will probably never know for sure. Peeved fans may have perceived this to be true and started discussing it, so what was originally a rumor become more accepted as fact. Personally, I would say that at least, Kobe must have enjoyed working with various members of the Texas team, as evidenced by them ending up on TGL. And based on what we witnessed on-screen, it was clear (IMHO) that Kobe did not care about TGL or its history at all. Does this mean she wanted to recreate the failed NBC soap and graft it onto TGL? Maybe, but I am just as tempted to conclude that she was just not a competent producer; a bad match for TGL simply because she did not understand it or care about preserving its legacy and integrity.

All three of the actors on that SOD cover were hot as hades. Woof!

I will readily admit that Michael Gregory did not photograph well. Still images of him are usually not terribly flattering. But boy, he was striking and charismatic, and sexy as hell, "in motion." I always found Chris Robinson to be bland, stiff and boring by comparison. He was no match for Gregory! I would have dragged Michael Gregory behind the barn in a heartbeat!

Yep.😑

It was cringe-worthy. I am 100% confident that most knowledgeable fans of TGL from this very forum could out-perform Alan in these interviews.

LOL!

I'd love to ask Alan Locher, "So, who was this 'priest,' named 'Father Ruthledge' who supposedly existed in TGL's early days?🤔🙄 Also, if I had been in the interview with KV and CAC, I would have been baffled too when Alan asked, "Did you ever work with Violet?" Um..WTF was Violet? Alan first stumbled around that name (it turned out he was referring to the character of Mrs. Violet Renfield, whom nobody actually referred to as Violet) and then admitted he wasn't sure of the actress' real name or how to pronounce it. UGH! If he chooses to ask a question about a past character/cast member, shouldn't he have some, any, idea of what he's trying to talk about? Alan claims to have been a longtime fan and publicist for P&G, and yet he so often proves that he has little knowledge of major facts.