vetsoapfan

I could have written this entire post, line by line, myself. You have encapsulated my thoughts perfectly. Bravo. I agree the last year DAYS was written well was 1982 under Pat Falken Smith. Did you ever read the interview with Joseph Mascolo, who bluntly said, "When Pat Falken Smith left the show, she took the quality of the writing with her"...? Subsequent writers really turned Mascolo's character into a cartoon villain, an unrealistic buffoon. Others can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Julie Williams is the only legacy character who has never been presumed dead.

Even a nominal perusal of the history of our culture confirms the popularity of "junk" entertainment. Masterpieces like St. Elsewhere and The Wire languished in ratings hell while The Kardashians and The Jerry Springer Show drew massive audiences. I'm convinced that a huge segment of the public just doesn't like to think; they don't want to be intellectually challenged. They gravitate towards popcorn entertainment that allows them to turn off their brains and "veg out" in front of the TV. Starting way back in the era of radio soaps, critics went out of their way to denigrate the soaps and demean the (mainly female) audience. One critic wrote that the soaps were written for "slack-jawed housewives who can't be bothered to change out of their bathrobes, get off their sofas, or put down the chocolate bon-bons." It was clear that such critics were trying to elevate themselves ("Look how intellectually superior we are!") by vilifying others who "dared" to appreciate an art form the critics neither watched nor understood. I am sure the intense hatred for the soaps and their audience was rooted in misogyny. I have experienced this phenomenon as well: people who mocked daytime TV for being boring, poorly done, and devoid of substance. It was an opinion based on second-hand condemnation of the soaps by other folks who didn't have any knowledge of the genre, either. One of my friends had a long-term medical issue at one point, and was relegated to staying on the couch or in his bed for a few months. Then he started watching General Hospital with his girlfriend. She had not been involved with that show as long as I had, so pretty soon he was calling me and asking all sorts of history questions and for my opinions on current plots. He was AGHAST when BJ died and her heart went to Maxie. He said watching Lucy, Felicia, Bobbie and especially Tony break down just stunned him. ("Have soaps ever been this powerful before?" YEEEEES!) Prejudice of daytime TV is borne from sheer ignorance, like any other form of bigotry. Right, but the challenge is in getting new viewers to give soaps a fair try. People who think the WWE is the greatest thing since sliced bread are not always open to sampling The Young and the Restless, LOL. I agree. That formula has decimated the genre, and it's long past time to discard it.

To me, Love of Life disintegrated pretty quickly after Claire Labine left, but I must say that the scenes with Lynn and the baby were very effective. Primarily because the young actress playing Lynn was good, but also because that baby screamed and cried and screamed and cried FOREVER. It wasn't faked or staged, either. The poor kid was going mental on camera, and it wouldn't stop. My sister asked more than once, "How on earth did they make that child scream like that?" I was actually concerned for the kid.

Years later, I stumbled across a documentary on PBS (I think), with a television analyst discussing trends on TV throughout the years. She said that the audience attracted to the camp craze on soaps was not made up of tried-and-true soap loyalists, but just temporary viewers who were looking for a quick fix of silly madness to enjoy. They ultimately were not prepared to spend five hours a day, forever, to watch soaps, however, so they abandoned the genre and went on to find other forms of entertainment to satiate their interests. The problem then was that the soaps had alienated regular daytime drama fans who couldn't stand watching the drivel of the past few years. They, too, had moved on to other viewing choices. It was a lose-lose situation for daytime TV.

YES!!! 👏👍👏👍👏 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I have staunchly made these exact same points for over 40 years, ever since the idiotic Ice Princess/The Cassadines Freeze the World crap on GH opened the floodgates to the low-brow, cartoonish camp stories which ended up permeating daytime TV. I knew that insane clown plots would garner temporary interest from outsiders, the media and kids, but not the dedicated, already-loyal and emotionally-invested viewers who had loved and stuck with soaps throughout their lives. They watched for vastly different reasons; not to laugh at the latest, outrageous stunts. It took a while (TPTB are nothing if not dogged in their determination to beat dead horses into the ground), but the cringeworthy camp phase did end up making a huge swath of the audience drift away from soaps, and the ratings plummeted. The damage is still being felt to this day, but at least sci-fi/supernatural plots are not at the forefront of the shows anymore. With Ron Carlivati gone, hopefully even DAYS won't be resorting to another devil possession.

I turned away from DAYS the moment I saw Marlena levitating above her bed. I just couldn't stand it. The DAYS I loved had been adult, subtle, layered and grounded in reality. The show I knew and the character of Marlena, were destroyed for me that day. And I must say, watching Marlena "murder" beloved characters (especially Alice Horton) was so morally repulsive, it made me sick. I have no problem with shows telling campy, absurd, supernatural based stories if they were conceived and introduced to do so. But, IMHO, inflicting this onto once-erudite and serious soaps destroys their DNA in a way from which they never recover. I do not want to see the Great Gazoo floating around Maggie Smith's head on Downton Abbey and taking her on trips to visit Dr. Who, LOL.

The problem is now widespread. With spoilers so prevalent in the media, whatever you want to watch (soaps, primetime TV, movies) is bound to be spoiled anywhere/everywhere, often immediately upon its release and before many people even get a chance to see it. If you dare turn on the TV or radio, and if you dare surf the internet, you will be hit by spoilers even if you actively strive to avoid them. Many folks spread spoilers on purpose, for fun, which is so annoying. Unfortunately for me, I only forget all the painfully bad, unforgettable moments...which I would never want to watch again, anyway. Great material, worth rewatching, would hold no surprises for me.

I thought about giving BTG a try when it was first announced, but I guess a combination of being really busy and having been burned out by decades of bitter disappointment in modern soap opera style, kept me from delving into the show. I'm glad you are enjoying it, though. I really do want the soap format to survive and thrive, and hopefully make a strong comeback. Laura was a pain in the butt when she was a teenager. She was arbitrary, touchy, headstrong and refused to deal with conflict like an adult, even though she demanded to be treated like one. That being said, the character was a very recognizable and realistic teenager like we have all encountered and known in our lives. Bobbie truly felt that she was better for Scotty than Laura was, and she wasn't totally wrong for believing this, considering how Laura ended up betraying her true-blue young husband and running off with a hoodlum rapist. The fact that characters were drawn in shades of gray, and made you root for them as well as want to smack some sense into them at other times, made the soaps much more compelling and believable. Neither woman was totally innocent/blameless in any of this, and we could understand the motivations driving them both, so our loyalties and opinions could shift from time to time, which kept us on our toes and the show engrossing. The fact that Jill and Katherine ended up hating AND loving each other lead to an endlessly fascinating roundelay of emotions for the audience to enjoy. Having Phillip later turn up alive, and having hidden himself for years to cover his sexual orientation, was a cheap and tacky (i.e. ridiculous) choice, but it could never erase the years of fine drama that had preceded it. James Reilly just left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I loathed basically everything he did on the soaps, but I recognize he had his admirers. I've just never been able to tolerate unbelievable camp and fantasy on soaps, which destroy the "reality bubble." The soaps in the 1970s were surprisingly frank in their depiction of mature, adult storylines and sexuality. It's so weird that they became much more conservative and restricted in later years.

No, I have not really watched BTG except for the first episode. By saying that it "brought a lot of that back," do you mean it offers over-the-hill camp like the 1980s+ soaps gave us, or the more naturalistic, down-to-earth style of daytime drama from earlier decades?

Even though Twin Peaks did have its missteps along the way, its first season was excellent, and the bits we saw of BOB were truly terrifying (particularly when he quietly entered Donna's house and crawled over the living room couch to get to Maddie. EEEEEEK!) The episode that featured the big reveal about Leland was one of the most intense and horrifyingly violent episodes of television I have ever seen. Right in the middle of it, my telephone rang and I almost hit the roof. When I answered, my friend didn't even say hello. He immediately hissed, "I am losing it! I can't watch this alone!" We never actually saw Dorian kill Victor Lord; when the character died, it was off-screen. We did know, however, that she was doing a lot of manipulating back-stage, and trying to isolate him from everyone. She was up to no good, and it certainly looked like she had taken his life. That implication was woven into the show's canon for years until later PTB chose to do some revisionist retconning. I know about the recast (I watched her), and fully acknowledge that the actress was decent. I just don't know how well she was accepted by the overall audience. I mainly heard comments along the lines of, "She's a lovely young woman, but she just isn't Bianca." To each his own. LOL! When I was in prep school, I had a film course in which the teacher screened the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn't as explicitly gory as I had been told (still disturbing enough, thank you), but UGH. It had a certain...quality that really creeped me out. When I returned home, my father was in the yard trimming the hedge with a chainsaw. I took my dog, went to my bedroom, and stayed holed up in there until I KNEW it was safe to come out.😬 It really was a dumb move for the show to make. They should not have killed off such an integral character in the first place. That shower scene and the explanation that followed ("It was a dream!") were pretty embarrassing, IMHO. I never would have killed Bobby off, but after the character was confirmed dead, I would have kept him that way. I get the sentiment. The moment I saw that AW had recast Alice Frame in 1975 (and dropped Jacquie Courtney), I stopped being a daily viewer of that soap. And after the last of the Brooks family members left Y&R, I bowed out of that show too.

I had never heard that tea. I'd have remembered it, considering how much I loathed Chuck Pratt.🤢 Actually, Lind really did do a good enough job, but she just wasn't Bianca. After Kate Mulgrew left Ryan's Hope, the show recast her role with Mary Carney. Carney was a fine actress, but no one else but Mulgrew would ever be Mary Ryan. (The less said about Kathleen Tolan the better.) Whom did that old rascal NOT sleep with, LOL? It was really well served by that great cast. Discarding attempts at social relevance and current events hurt the soaps a lot. They used to deal with mature, adult subjects significantly better than primetime TV. Nowadays, they don't seem to make a point about anything.

I think that's an experience many soap fans have in common: there are certain scenes which become imbedded in our memories, and which we never forget. Do you remember who the head writer at OLTL was at that point? Was it Michael Malone? Harding Lemay failed at getting permission to have the offspring of a core family be gay on AW. He probably would have done a fine job with it, but AMC's handling of this similar story was quite the success. I never understood why they later tried replacing Bianca.🙄 After the character's involvement in such a groundbreaking story, I highly doubted the audience would embrace a replacement.

ITA. While I believe the show ran out of steam towards the end, and tried too hard to offer more and more outlandish material at the expense of character development and exploring all the quieter moments of their stories (which had made the first few years so mesmerizing, IMO), DS worked wonders with the restraints it was under. There's a reason it became such a fiercely-beloved cult classic, warts and all.👏 The fact that this show and most of the run of The Doctors (including its best years) survived is a blessing and a miracle!

The Wendy Riche/Claire Labine era of GH was the last time any soap truly attained the level of greatness, IMHO. BJ's heart saga and Stone's battle with AIDS are exactly what I think of when I think of soap masterpieces. So many moments still resonant to this day. I'll never forget Felicia finding out what was happening, runni ng upstairs to find Bobbie, and then sinking to the floor shrieking/crying, "Not Barbara Jean! Not Barbara Jean's heart!" Mac hugging Stone made me love him dearly. OLTL really milked the Victor Lord business and Viki's alters way too many times, and it all ultimately became absurd. (Victor supposedly being alive...UGH! That was one of the show's worst and most egregious stories ever.) But the period you mentioned was well done, with a lot of good acting. It's true that the Victor Lord we longtime viewers knew from 1968 to 1975 bore no resemblance at all to the monster he was later said to be, and that irritated me, but some writers handled the revisionist history better than others. I just wish TPTB had left well enough alone, and allowed VL and Viki's alters to remain in the past after they had already been milked bone-dry. The Victor-is-Alive dreck was just embarrassing. (I appreciated hearing, much later on, Dorian remarking, "If that really was him," in reference to the suddenly-reanimated "Victor Lord". There was no way to fix the plot at that point, but at least the show was giving us a throw-away line offering hope that all that garbage wasn't even real. Complex villains, whose motivations we can at least somewhat understand, are always the most captivating. To me, Rachel Davis, Roger Thorpe, Iris Carrington, Erica Kane, Barnabas Collins, etc., captured the audience's imagination because no matter how badly they behaved, we could see their soft underbellies and understand their pain. "Suffering antagonists" are more magnetic than one-dimensional, cardboard caricatures, which many soap villains tend to be.

Yes. At the time, I started to have a glimmer of hope that the light was finally going to return to its former radiance and shine brightly for a long time to come. The return to glory did not last long, alas, but we were lucky to have gotten that brief renaissance.

I agree. While plots themselves can be riveting, we will care about all the twists and turns of the stories so much more because of our emotional involvement with the characters. The great writer Henry Slesar of The Edge of Night acknowledged this in an interview once. He opined that no matter how well he crafted his stories, they only worked effectively because the viewers cared for the people involved. He said that without our attachment to the likes of Mike and Nancy Karr, the audience would end up no more moved by the stories on soaps than by the articles we read in the morning newspapers. The plots, themselves, would not have the same deep impact. Your analysis of Dark Shadows was on the mark. The show surged in popularity upon the introduction of Barnabas Collins primarily because he was such a complex, tortured, fascinating character to watch. Despite his obvious trouble in memorizing the mountains of dialogue he was given day after day, month after month, Jonathan Frid played the character beautifully. But once characterization was sidelined/shortchanged and more and more time was spent on flashy gimmicks and shocks (the show had been more subtle in the original vampire story), DS burned itself out. TPTB who decided that offering gimmicky plot devices over layered, complex characterizations was the way to success understood neither the soap genre nor its audience.

And for many years, the successful soaps existed in a "reality bubble," staying more or less within the bounds of events that could take place in the real world. We had ordinary people next door to watch on-screen, and we never knew from day to day what would happen to them. It was easy to get immersed in the stories and identify with the characters' problems. There were no clones, extra-terrestrials, time travelers, devil possessions, mad scientists freezing the world, towns filled exclusively with the uber-rich, etc., all of which broke the magical reality bubble of the genre, and reinforced the idea that everything we were now watching had turned to cartoonish farce. To me, the advent of over-the-top camp alienated a lot of the die-hard soap fans who had loved the shows for their lost, immersive and HUMAN qualities. But for decades, we had experienced something magical!

My memory is good about stuff that captivated and interested me, no matter how long ago it was. Ask me about some of the tedious subjects I studied in high school...forget it. All that data is gone with the wind.😁 (To be honest, I'm glad that I retained more soap trivia in my head than facts about trigonometry or chemistry or any of the stuff we were force-fed in Moral & Religious Instruction 🙄). Soaps turned out to be much more relevant to my life! One teacher of religion argued with me about my answer to, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Paul Simon hit the nail on the head when he sang about all the crap we learned in high school. A friend remarked to me the other day that his young niece is watching DVDs of Little House on the Prairie which she got for Christmas. He said he was aghast to realize how sick and vicious some of the stories on the show really were. It's true, but soaps were second-to-none when it came to inducing trauma in viewers! OMG, too funny; funny because it was so appropriate. Bagpipes have long been used to commemorate funerals and other somber occasions, and heaven knows, TGL was being slaughtered at the time. Good for O'Roarke. (Writing out Justin was an bad move in the first place, but bringing him back later with a recast actor only reinforced the error.)

I always made sure to audiotape or videotape my favorite shows at home, because there was too much competition for control of the television sets at school. It's always so disarming when actors interact with young actors, and their innate affection for kids shines through. When Jacquie Courtney returned to AW in 1984, the show did almost nothing of interest with the character (a shockingly stupid blunder on TPTB's part), but she had some scenes with the adorable child who played Alice's grandson Kevin, and she really sparkled in those scenes. She had also shone a decade before when acting with young Cathy Greene, who played Sally as a little girl. JC clearly enjoyed interacting with children. When did you get your first VCR, so you could videotape the soaps at home? I used audiotape recorders before the advent of Betamax and VHS, set up with timers in different rooms at home, so I could at least listen to the dialogue of my shows at night. It was like listening to radio plays and was quite satisfying, but as soon as Betamax appeared on the market, I bought one...even though it cost a fortune. Ron Becker had intended to rape Chris, but found Peggy in the Fosters' apartment instead. When Chris returned home, Peggy was huddled on the floor, shaking and in a state of shock. Chris quickly figured out what had happened. The show's use of flashbacks to Chris' own assault and obsessive showering was very effective. Bill Bell later made the comment that you don't duplicate a prior story unless you're doing it on purpose for impact. This defintely had the intended impact. Lisa Brown was indeed a unique talent, and Nola was her better role. This was the responsibility of producer Gail Kobe ("Story on soaps is more important than the characters!") and newbie writer Pamela Long ("My first mission was to get rid of all the dead wood in the cast."), and IMHO they crippled the show. Peter Simon said that Tom O'Rourke was the last of the "old guard" whom Kobe and Long fired, and when he left the building on his last day, he went ranting and raving down the hall. Like with Stefano DiMera on DAYS, ATWT went back to the well too many times with James Stenbeck and it ultimately ruined the character. The world before spoilers was a boon to the soaps; being taken by surprise was a highlight of viewing. When Mary Matthews died suddenly on AW in 1975, we had no advance warning, and were not used to seeing matriarchs of core families being killed off. The abject shock of the event elevated the impact to the nth degree. The same was true on Little House on the Prairie, when Mary Ingalls' baby died in a fire at the school for the blind. We had no notice, the plot was sick and grisly, and left a mark (I'm sure) on all the people who endured it.

Vintage soaps that took their time and played all the emotional beats of their stories always ended up being more emotionally gratifying than the modern ones. Today's shows are more apt to rush through everything at lightning speed, based on the idea that modern audiences have the attention spans of gnats. That's hilarious, and it's so true how invested viewers were in "their stories" back then. The likes of Rachel Davis, Dorian Lord and Lorie Brooks made me scream at my TV. Nothing on soaps has engendered a strong reaction from me since BJ's heart transplant on GH in 1994. Genuinely nice guys always have a certain edge.

I naively took for granted that soaps could and would always be this good, because I had only witnessed them offering high quality since I first started tuning in. Little did I know how suddenly and how far they would later fall. My sentiment, exactly. Yes, I was saddened to see AW spinning out of control and down the drain after 1975. My anger was particularly pointed, because I knew it had been gratuitously decimated, and it didn't need to be. Chris was raped in 1973 by George Curtis, who was played by Tony Geary. Peggy was the one raped by Ron Becker, on June 16, 1976. Upon finding her baby sister had also been assaulted, Chris had memory flashbacks of compulsively showering after her own assault, to wash the stain off. It was heartbreaking. That was the first time I ever heard the word "bitch" uttered on a soap. As the scene faded to black, a split second before dissolving into the commercial, Leslie screamed, "BITCH!" at Lorie. I always wondered if placing the curse word at the last possible moment was a safeguard the show made in case they had to cut it out before broadcast.

That entire scene stayed burned in my memory for decades. I was thrilled when it was discovered to exist, and started making its rounds through the internet. When it was first broadcast, I was cheering for Alice as she chased Rachel down the stairs and throwing copper pots at her. Go Alice!!! They had electric chemistry in their scenes together, like Jacquie Courtney and George Reinholt exhibited.

To me, Ronn Moss always came across as quite wooden. Drake Hogestyn may not have been the single greatest actor of all time, but he was warm and personable, and had charisma to carry him through. There are some performers who just have a certain "je ne sais quoi," which endears them to the audience regardless of their actual acting talents. RM came across as an empty shell (IMHO), whereas DH had a likeable guy-next-door charm.

I probably saw more of the soaps than I did of real life, I'm embarrassed to admit, LOL. I was very shy as a child, and found great fascination and comfort in books, vintage movies, music and soaps. I'd include the 1970s in the golden era of soaps. I think that's when they really blossomed into topical, complex adult drama. Personally, I'd include Henry Slesar's The Edge of Night and Harding Lemay's Another World (among others) as the best-written serials of the decade. Looking back on it, viewers were truly spoiled in those years. The majority of soaps were very well written most of the time. (And when the quality did dip in the 1970s, changes were made very quickly.) A moment that shaped the course of the show for years to come. Did you see the first sexual assault story on Y&R, centered on Chris Brooks? I found that even more harrowing than Peggy's experience. Trish Stewart's performances blew me away. There were so many astonishing moments in that storyline. Another one of my favorites is when Leslie finally figured out the depths of her sister's twisted manipulation and betrayal. She confronted Lorie in the mental hospital and they really had it out. Knowing the jig was up, Lorie just dug the knife in a little deeper by saying, "No one is ever going to believe you about this, Les. They all know...you are SICK!" The scar seemed to move around a bit from time to time, LOL, but the scenes of the fire were terrifying. It was sheer melodrama, but Pat Falken Smith's writing and Patty Weaver's performance made this storyline must-see TV. I tell you, 1976 was my favorite year of DAYS. Wesley Eure's clingy, almost translucent and form-fitting pajama bottoms left so little to the imagination.🫣 As I got older, I started to appreciate the smaller, sweet moments between characters, but when I was a kid, the "actiony" stuff stood out for me more, too. I think that's normal.👍

That era of TGL was golden. And the actors played that memorable episode to the hit. There were so many beats left to play in that story; so many emotional chords left to hit. Discarding Justin Marler so quickly was a terribly bad decision. The audience still resents losing Ellen Parker's beloved Maureen. If the rumor is true, that we lost her to make room in the budget to pay for Justin Deas, it's all the more egregious. We finally had a warm and sympathetic character to replace Bert as the Bauer matriarch, and instead we got a hammy and loud-mouthed buzzard inflicted upon us. No, thank you. JWS reaffirmed that he was more than just a pretty face in that storyline, and the "Helloooooo, Barbara!" moment became iconic. In its heyday, ATWT gave us some great stuff!