vetsoapfan

Kay Alden, Lorraine Broderick, Nancy Curlee, Patrick Mulcahey doing scripts. There is talent still out there, but the current soaps overlook it and recycle the hacks like Carlivati and Griffin. It was the wrong choice to make SSM the lead headwriter on Y&R a while back, too. I'd rather see the soaps cancelled completely than have Jean Passanante hired anywhere on daytime TV again.

When actually given material to work with, Rachel Ames was an excellent actress.

Gail Baldwin brought up Lesley's other lost child in a conversation she and Lesley had when Pat Falken Smith was writing GH; circa 1980. After that, as far as I know, nothing. So...after 41 years of going unmentioned, Denise Alexander might be the only one left who remembers the child ever existed.

Sadly, I remember neither the name of Lesley's late child nor the family name associated with her first husband.

I have spoken to various fans who lament the omissions in most of the soap coffee-table books. I guess it's to be expected; with so much history to cover, no book can give complete and concise information on every bit of minutia. Right, but after those mentions in the character's early years on the show, the "other child" drifted into forgotten/ignored/unacknowledged history. One of the things I always loved and respected about Pat Falken Smith as a writer is that she knew her stuff, and studied what was under every leaf in the soap towns she wrote for. Douglas Marland and Claire Labine who another two who studied, used, and respected history. The more I think about it, the more I believe Lesley's first child had had diabetes, but succumbed to crib death. I suppose we will never know for sure, alas.

Lesley spoke about her past when she was first introduced to GH, but besides having had Laura, her pre-Port Charles existence was sort of looped off and not referred to. The last mention of her deceased, other child was in 1980 or so, when Lesley and Gail talked about it. I daresay the vast majority of viewers have/had no clue that Lesley had even had a previous child, since the fact hasn't been mentioned in over 40 years. There are a lot of omissions and inaccuracies on Soap Central, but to be fair, very few sources--if any-- sources acknowledge Lesley's other child. I doubt historians from books and magazines and internet sites even know he (I seem to recall the child was a boy) even existed.

I have (very vague) memories of him on the show, but don't remember specific details, and he's not in my 1970s' soap scrapbook archives, alas. Sorry to be so useless, LOL!

Thank you. As I say, I will take her word for it, based on her history of accuracy.

Is that the one written by Bryna Laub? She was always quite accurate, from what I've seen. I have a compilation book of her summaries around here...somewhere. If she is the one who wrote that Lesley's first child died of crib death, I'd accept that, but I swear on the soap gods that I remember Lesley saying the child had had leukemia. Now I wonder if the poor kid had been afflicted with that, but actually died of crib death.

Crib death? I was sure the child had had diabetes. Of course I could be wrong, memories fade after 50 years. Hmmm. Where did that summary come from originally, does anyone know?

Right. If the writing is weak and the storyline poorly thought out, even the most popular actors will not be able to negate that completely, especially when they come onto a new show and are no longer playing the role that made them stars to begin with.

Very few writers (particularly in recent decades) take the time to study their shows' and characters' pasts, so all sorts of important information gets dropped/lost forever. Fans remember, but TPTB don't even know, and don't seem to care that they don't know. More than ever, these days I appreciate and applaud the writers who DID thoroughly study the past when taking over a new show. Yes. He has been completely ignored by all TPTB of the show except the divine Pat Falken Smith, who wrote a scene between Lesley and Gail, explaining that Lesley's fierce overprotectiveness of Laura stemmed from the death of her son. TPTB also totally ignored (or, more likely, never knew in the first place) that Gail Adamson adopted Monica. And on Search for Tomorrow, Jo and Stu both had a widowed parent who married each other, making the longtime friends actual family members/step-siblings. All soaps should have historical consultants, whose job it is to keep track of important details.

Maybe, but honestly, I don't remember. I stopped watching TEON when the divine Henry Slesar was replaced by the dreadful Lee Sheldon. But if a late-morning time change for Edge had been given the green light, it would have killed the show anyway.

I thought Mark Dante was basically a retread of Nick Bellini, but just with a different name, LOL, and less of a temper. I'm sure GH hoped/expected that he would would bring the same kind of magic to Port Charles as he had to The Doctors, but the writing on GH was so bad at the time, the character was unfocused, and the soap didn't get the right romantic pairing down for Gerald Gordon. I felt Terri Webber and Mark Dante would have caught on, given time, but TPTB didn't give that union much of a chance, and the next try-out with Kathryn Corbin was a total dud. It reminded me of when GH "stole" Denise Alexander away from Days, to great fanfare and expected she would help the ratings soar because she was a soap superstar. There again, the writing was weak, the character was unfocused (she had had a son who died of diabetes whom no one except Pat Falken Smith ever remembered or talked about), and was not paired with a romantic lead successfully for years until Rick Webber came along. Neither Alexander nor Gordon helped the ratings rise. Only good writing and dynamic romantic pairings would later do that.

The promo for RTPP was inside a longer video with other material on it. A soap fan just stumbled across the RTPP clip by accident, as I recall. If anything survived from the show, it would make sense that the primetime special they did would be it. At least among private collectors, you hear about a few rare episodes of, say, Where the Heart Is, but even after 40+ years, nothing has ever turned up from RTPP. It's a pity. The show was weak at first, but by the end, it had improved dramatically (and the ratings were rising too), so seeing it get cancelled when it was on a roll was really frustrating.

Yes, episodes of A Flame in the Wind have been around and available for many years. Return to Peyton Place, not so much. Fans/collectors have hunted for RTPP for more than 40 years, to no avail so far. (A promo commercial for it was available on youtube a while ago, but I don't know if that is still uploaded. It was less than 30 seconds, anyway.) Unfortunately, the entire collections of many past, favorite soaps have never been preserved or made available to the public, and are lost to us forever. We are actually lucky to have access to so many miscellaneous episodes of various shows on the internet. Before the advent of the web, we had to collect Betamax or VHS copies of vintage soaps through the mail, by trading with other fans. That could be quite expensive and disappointing. Sharing stuff on-line is a godsend.

CBS and P&G should have both agreed to return TEON to a late afternoon timeslot, either 3:30 or 4:00, but once TPTB make a bad move, they tend not to undo it, sadly enough. And...I always enjoy the posts.

The show is not even circulating among private collectors, as far as I know (I started trading and collecting soap stuff in the late 1970s). If anyone, anywhere, has any videos of it, they are not sharing.

Yes, I remember the idiotic decision to change TEON's timeslot very well. Henry Slesar did an interview at the time, acknowledging that he was being mandated to write more family and romance stories to accommodate the potential loss of younger and male viewers, and to appeal more to women. I knew it would just end up alienating everyone, and it did. Slesar continued to produce stellar material, but soap watching is largely based on habit and familiarity, and tampering with that is always risky.

I believe so, yes. Kathryn reminds me a bit of the Adam Brewster character from OLTL, whom TPTB vainly tried to pair with Jacqueline Courtney's Pat Kendall: a boring, unlikeable actor played by an off-putting performer whom the audience did not accept. Throughout soaps' history, there have been countless characters who have been completely forgotten about and basically erased. I did not want Terri to be one of them, but I'd be thrilled if Sonny, Jason, Carly, Sam, Peter, and anyone ever played by Roger Howarth were to vanish forever, never to be seen or heard of again.

That was an excellent year for TEON, with the Whitney-family/Jonah Lockwood saga in full swing. A legendary story penned by a master writer. It was must-see TV.

Terri Webber was a warm, very likeable character, played by an attractive, talented and very likeable actress. GH really lucked out with all the actors in the original Webber-family group. IMHO, it was a major mistake axing Terri from the show. She was exactly the sort of heroine Port Charles needed. Unfortunately, after she was gone, TPTB tried to pair Mark Dante with a new character named Kathryn Corbin (actress Maggie Sullivan). Both the character and the actress came across as cold, not appealing at all. I always wanted Terri to return, but I don't think anyone on the show ever mentioned her again. There's a playlist titled General Hospital Full Episodes 1963-89 by a youtuber named VAwriter. I tried to link directly to the full playlist, but only the first episode (of 62) comes up. Check it out.

I wish he would take some time to practice honing his interviewing skills, instead of hosting pointless sessions like this one.

None of these actors had any actual, lasting significance to the show. What a waste.

I was still watching Days back then because of Pat Falken Smith's stellar work, and I was morbidly curious about how bad DePriest's follow-up would be. Not surprisingly, I found her material to be as awful as always. I agree: the bottom line on soaps is finding writers capable of churning out material day in and day out. Quality may have been preferred, decades ago, but that was an added bonus, not the number one priority. The most important criterion (back then and especially today): finding scribes who can fill up the pages quickly and consistently, regardless of the material's integrity and quality. We were just lucky in the 1950s-1980s that so many writers could do both: write quickly AND infuse the soaps with high-quality drama. I took for granted that soaps would always be principally guided by scribes like Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon, William J. Bell, Roy Winsor, Henry Slesar, Pat Falken Smith, Harding Lemay, Claire Labine, and their ilk. Little did I know that we would end up with painful-to-endure hacks like Charles Pratt, Thom Racina, Ron Calivarti, Megan McTavish, Jean Passanante, James Reilly, Josh Griffin, etc., running once-great soaps into the ground...endlessly.