vetsoapfan

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.

Upton was also horrible, and another writer who was shipped from soap to soap. Today, fans complain about hacks like Josh Griffin, Ron Carlivati, Charles Pratt, Jean Passanante, etc., stinking up one show after another, but the practice of recycling hack scribes has always been a problem on daytime TV.

Probably the Best Show vote for Days was residual appreciation of the soap under Pat Falken Smith, who wrote into 1977 before Marcus took over. To be fair to Ann Marcus, while I thought her Days was a disaster, she performed very well on Mary Hartman and Search for Tomorrow. Even her Love of Live was an improvement over some of the boring writers who had preceded her. Her Knots Landing was not the worst, either. But...UGH, her Days was atrocious. I wrote an angry letter to TPTB in 1977, condemning how she had slaughtered a once-great show.

Their work on both shows was outstanding. I firmly believe that if they had been with WTHI from the start, the show would have been a success. Unfortunately, the show was launched by the dread Margaret DePriest, one of those daytime scribes who kept getting recycled from soap to soap, no matter how tepid her material was. I firmly believe her initial writing was what doomed WTHI to failure. DePriest also followed the excellent Pat Falken Smith on Days, the wonderful Rick Edelstein on How to Survive a Marriage, and even Labine and Mayer on Love of live, all to negative results. But when she was not involved, all those soaps were mesmerizing.

Um...Ann Marcus certainly did not "whip Days of our Lives" into a "top-rated show it now is." It instantly and noticeably collapsed under her tenure. Speaking of soaps turning around quickly, I must say that when Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer assumed the reigns of Love of Life, the show almost instantly started to soar. Its total rebirth (from a drab and turgid, lethargic oldtimer to a fresh, entertaining and more modern drama) was astonishing. Everyone always praises Douglas Marland for saving a dying General Hospital in the late 1970s, but to me, Labine and Mayer worked similar miracles with Love of Life.

I no longer have access to episodes of Emmerdale, alas, so I have not been able to watch it in years, but even way back then, the overexposure of the vile Dingle-berries turned me off, big time. TPTB killed off and otherwise eliminated a huge number of the core Sugden family, and THIS was their idea of a new principle clan? More like an infection. Yuck.

I think both those stories worked well, but for very specific reasons. Primarily, the writing was exquisitely beautiful and heavily predicated on character development and relationships. Few, if any writers available to daytime TV today would be able to pull sagas like that off. Plus, both stories mixed hope and heroism in with the tragedy. BJ died but her death resulted in saving her cousin's life. Stone also passed away, but he regained his sight at the last moment and was able to see Robin one last time; Robin, who was also HIV positive but who survived, and who then championed the fight for HIV causes. Along with the pain, there was a ray of light. In the short term, yes, but then the hopelessly grim plot would be over, and the show would be left without the only decades-long matriarch left on its canvas; a character who had been a hub of the wheel since almost the beginning. The show could never, ever replace a character like that. I've always felt that cutting off the vets is like hacking away at a plant: if a soap tears out the last remaining roots, the entire plant will suffer for it. Right. At least nowadays, the prognosis for HIV+ patients is more optimistic. When TPTB don't even understand the degeneracy of what they are presenting, you know soaps have taken quite a tumble.

Real-life illnesses can work on soaps if they are maladies from which folks can possibly recover. The the audience can have hope, and there's some "suspense" as to whether or not the afflicted characters will pull through. Devastating illnesses that cause unending agony and still lead to certain death? That's not my idea of entertainment. I don't want to see explicit, cruel violence or pain directed at children, animals or the elderly. I realize that strong drama can be gripping in many cases, but there's a limit. There's a difference between strong, mature drama and gratuitous ugliness for its own sake. I find GH's glorification of violent, criminal degenerates and murderers to be morally repugnant. Talk about elements I do NOT want to see on soaps. Hold back my hair, I'm going to hurl.🤮

I know, it was a shameful and idiotic move on DAYS' part. (But, then again, that show has been in the toilet since 1983, LOL!)

For many years, soaps had the habit of transforming characters pretty quickly from romantic leads to supporting parental units, aging them rapidly. Think of poor Ellen Stewart (ATWT), Doug and Julie (DAYS), etc., along with Audrey Hardy. Nowadays, some performers are kept in the romantic-lead category loooooong after they should have graduated from that position. Casting really does influence character interaction and story decisions. I did not want to see the Mac-dementia story on ATWT at all, but as you say: at least he was not a long-time favorite character and essential to the show. If they had given Nancy, Bob, Kim, Lisa or Ellen dementia, I would have gone nuclear. Fans would have revolted en masse, I'm sure. I agree that ending the plot quickly was the right decision.