vetsoapfan

I've always felt that soap fans love a good cry, but there's a difference between crying over a doomed romance, for example (which you know in your heart will work out in the end) and the torture of a beloved character that will surely lead to an agonizing finale. If a story is brilliantly written and acted (like BJ's death and Stone's death), viewers will get caught up in it and stay for the ride, but there are certain plots that the audience just does not want to see, particularly after enduring other heavy tragedies on the show. The painful, inescapable decline of a vet headed towards death is a turn off. If anything, viewers are protective of the vets and do not them written out at all unless there is no alternative (i.e. if the actor passes away). Save the vets, save the soaps!!!

There were DEFINITELY a few (and only a few, thank goodness) on-air scenes of Audrey being confused and disoriented. I remember them vividly because I was horrified. It was clear that the show was starting to foreshadow a grim dementia story for her. Then the unsettling scenes just stopped and Audrey's potential issues were never witnessed or mentioned again. I was so relieved. With Jessie Brewer gone, Audrey had become the show's matriarch, and destroying her with such a depressing storyline would have been unspeakably cruel. And unwatchable. I would have dropped the show over it.

He has recently joined a vintage soap opera board on Facebook. Now that he is a member, I wonder if folks there will refrain from giving their honest opinions of his "interviewing" style, just out of courtesy. I don't want his feelings slaughtered, of course, but it will be unfortunate if other members can no longer say what they truly think, and must stifle themselves.

The published reference books I have say 1960, but heaven knows, even history books can be laden with errors. Right.

On the other hand, Patti mentions a new physician, Dr. Walton, to Ted, and that character is listed as debuting in 1960. Tracking down exact dates for vintage soaps can be challenging, but I am so glad to see a "new" episode like this pop up, even if its timeframe is murky. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

To be fair to historians, the few years before Marland and Monty came aboard GH were...ahem...not worth much attention. The show was a mess in the mid 1970s.

Spot on!

Genie Francis left, Pat Falken Smith was replaced by dreadful hack writers, and science fiction garbage was the name of the game. The show was cringeworthy. IMHO. GH was lucky that AW was too weak at the time to offer solid competition and steal viewers away, but TGL was great!

It was amazing how quickly ATWT plummeted into the toilet with the combination of Sheffer and Passanante. The old gal never recovered, alas.

TPTB don't need my suggestions to make horrid and baffling decisions, unfortunately.😉 Going back decades: General Hospital, Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night, The Doctors, Dark Shadows, Another World, Love of Life, All My Children and The Young and the Restless. Those are the ones I can think of off-hand, from the top of my head. There were also those awful Soaps & Serials novelizations of many other soaps. I've read many of them, and the Kate Lowe Kerrigan Another World books were the most satisfying to me as someone who had watched the TV versions of the shows. The S&S books were poorly researched and often inaccurate and hard to tolerate, IMHO.

Emily McLaughlin's daughter, Mary Ann Cooper, wrote a book about her mother once. It was a soft-cover trade paperback called Portrait of a Soap Star. It only remained in print a short while. When I ordered it, the book was about $15.00. A few years later, I saw it on sale on the internet for over $700.00. Surreal! Most people seem to agree. The choice to cast Borgenson in the role is as baffling as the decision to cast Susan Batten as Connor Walsh on ATWT, Charity Rahmer as Belle Black on DAYS, Jayne Bentzen as Nicole Drake on TEON and Jason Kinkaid as Tom Hughes on ATWT. It's like someone deciding that Danny DeVito would be a good choice to take over the role of Rhett Butler in a remake or sequel to Gone With the Wind. Egads!!!

When the Whitney family was first introduced to TEON, Colin was the first member of the clan we saw. He was in a television studio preparing for a broadcast, with his pushy wife Tiffany giving orders. As we got to know the other members of the Whitney family, the skeleton in their closet was that Colin's murderous brother Keith was hiding out in the disguise of a a hippy type named Jonah Lockwood. The sociopathic Jonah Lockwood terrorized Monticello for many months but eventually fell to his death while he was trying to murder Laurie Ann Karr in a deserted area out in the country. The Whitney left town to escape the bad memories, but matriarch Geraldine Whitney and Colin's wife Tiffany later returned after both their husbands died tragically. To me, the Jonah Lockwood/Whitney family saga was a masterpiece; the most suspenseful and terrifying story ever told on daytime TV. Kudos to writer Henry Slesar for weaving a long, deliciously complex and mesmerizing tale.

If any advertisement about the books falsely claimed that Kerrigan was "the author of the serial," that would have been egregious and Lemay's ire would have been totally understandable. She did not write for the TV serial. BUT! The ads I have seen made it very clear that the party was to launch the Ballantine books. They referred to Kerrigan as the "author of AW I and II." Those were obviously the novels, not the broadcast program itself. Besides clearly stating that KLK was the author of Another World I and II, the Ballantine novelizations, what else could P&G, Ballantine, or the creators of the advertisements do? Perhaps add a note that the books were based on the TV serial which was written by Agnes Nixon, Robert Cenedella and Harding Lemay. But even without that, I don't believe most reasonable people would jump to the conclusion that KLK had been the headwriter for the show. That had not been claimed anywhere. I think the prickly and easily-vexed Lemay jumped to annoyance for little cause. That is a great find; thank you. I have seen a couple of advertisements about the novelizations, and this is one of them. There is no doubt that they are talking about two books and their author, not the material as seen on TV broadcasts.

Actually, I do remember Dan flirting with Ruby. I just wish that viewers had actually SEEN Jessie and Dan drifting apart, as opposed to only hearing about it after the fact. Just like, if Dan and Ruby eventually became exclusive and Jessie accepted it, I'd want to see that unfold as well, and not have to put the pieces together in my own mind to explain the relationships. But GH didn't invest much time or interest in the "old people" by then.

I believe you are correct on all counts. To be fair to the show, if the audience was not warming up to Vana Tribbey, and TPTB wanted a major story to play out with Rachel, Mac and Alice, it kind of makes sense that the producers would try out another actress and keep their fingers crossed that viewers would accept her. How they bungled the casting process and hired such an awful performer remains the principle mystery here.

Yes, there was a party scheduled for launch of the novels, and Kate Lowe Kerrigan was being credited as the author of the adaptations. Lemay became vexed because he had been the headwriter of the actual show for years by then, and had created the story and situations dealt with in Kerrigan's novels (well, particularly Book Two, since a lot of what took place in her Book One had been based on the work of Agnes Nixon). I never heard about Agnes Nixon getting vexed about any of this. (Just sayin'.😉) Isn't it common practice for the novelizations/adaptations of TV series and movies to be penned by different people other than those who wrote the original TV and film scripts? It happens...all the time. The copyright owners can do whatever they please, and hire anyone they want, to write the novelizations based on their property. That being said, it would have been courteous and diplomatic for P&G to have a notice printed on the copyright pages of Kerrigan's books (or perhaps on the back covers), along the lines of, "Based on television stories and scripts written by Agnes Nixon, Robert Cenedella and Harding Lemay." Then Lemay would only have had his third-place billing in the credits to grumble about. LOL! (I jest, I jest!)

I doubt these paperbacks are the sort of thing most libraries would carry (soap-based novels are too low-brow, LOL), but you may be able to find them on eBay or amazon. I've seen the books being sold on both those sites.

No, I would have been furious if P&G had allowed Lemay and Rauch to kill off Alice too, after killing both Steven Frame and Mary Matthews. My first choice would have been to write out the character completely. That way, after Lemay and Rauch departed the show, future writers and producers could have brought Alice/JC back, without permanent damage having been done to the character. I wonder if Lemay would have preferred killing off Alice. The character was basically ruined and/or useless after 1975 anyway.

Honestly, after watching her for the first 11 years of the show, I did not want to see any other performer cast in the role of Alice, other than Jacqueline Courtney. I think Tina Sloan could be a good actress, but she did not project the intense vulnerability and heightened emotionalism that JC had in spades. All that being said, I think Judith Light could have done it.

Thank you so much. Another way to experience this story is by tracking down and reading the Another World novelizations (there are two), written by Kate Lowe Kerrigan. While the Kerrigan books are not high art, they are miles above the dreadful AW books put out by the Soaps & Serials company years later. The S&S paperbacks go over the same basic storyline, but in much less detail, with noticeably weaker writing, and with lots of mistakes. If you read the Kerrigan books, and watch/listen to all the video/audio material which survives from the period, it's the closest you can get to experiencing this mesmerizing storyline "first-hand."

Yes, I've read that too.

If I were forced to choose one worst-Alice actress, it would probably be Borgenson. So bland, so lifeless, so lacking in emotion. She was a non-entity. I thought Tribbey was a better actress than Borgenson, but after watching Courtney for a decade, Tribbey's cooler, sarcastic Alice just did not feel right to me. I would have preferred her as another character. In any case, I'll bet that Borgenson would "win" the title of the worst Alice in a poll, LOL.

No. They went away together, and a bellman in a hotel gave Jessie a saucy wink to signify that he knew naughty plans were afoot, but Jessie and Dan never consummated their relationship as far as I know. After their mini vacation, I don't believe any focus was ever given again to their relationship. Jessie and Dan just went back to chatting occasionally at the nurses' station.

Jessie's final story was her romance with Dan Rooney, culminating with them going away together and discussing sexual intimacy. Jessie confessed it had been many years since she had been with a man; the last time had been with her husband. This was 1980, I believe. I thought Jessie and Dan were sweet together, but the relationship simply petered out without any fanfare. And yes, McLaughlin's health issues had begun in earnest in the mid-1970s. I remember when GH had to emergency recast her with actress Aneta Corseault in 1977. Later, the show created a minor character named Nurse Georgia Price, played by Lisa Figus, who would step in and say Jessie's lines when McLaughlin was unable to work. Figus' Georgia substituted for Jessie for many years, probably 1981 to 1988.

Now I am curious: if you have seen most or all of the Alices on youtube, whom did you think was worse than Pfenning? I thought all of the recasts were wrong for the role, for different reasons. I don't think Harney had chemistry with anyone at all, to be honest.