vetsoapfan

I am grateful for that, but reeeeeeally frustrated too. I know how excellent soap operas can be, based on my own first-hand viewing experience, but most of the evidence is gone. Okay, DAYS, Y&R, B&B, RH, TD and a few other soaps have their libraries intact, but unless they are all released to the public, we'll never get to see them again, either. Nothing being produced today illustrates the potential quality of the genre. 😪 All of them. No kidding. I was a soap opera fanatic in the 1970s. I either watched the shows "live," or I taped them to enjoy later. I had TWO recorders set up in my house; one in my bedroom and one in the basement family room. I used those recorders to tape some shows while I sat and watched the others.

Hopefully, but there are some soaps and details which I remember better than others. If a show was good at a particular time, I tend to remember it well. If it bored me (for example, if the writing was bad), I wouldn't always pay close attention, so my memory is hazier.

Marla Adams is always excellent. She was perfect for her role on TSS.

The ONLY thing about me being so old is that I was able to see and enjoy the soaps during their glory years!🤣

The previous actresses who had played Vanessa were good, too, so Peters' being able to win the audience over so completely really was a major accomplishment.

1975 was a stellar year for many soaps. Thank you so much for posting these synopses. They bring back a lot of great memories. I could talk about old soaps all day long!

Ooooh, I had never seen this episode before. What a treat! Thanks for posting.

It's always nice to see vintage episodes from the show's golden years being posted. During quarantine, it's so comforting and fun to revisit old friends!

It was the last time that TGL was at its peak, quality-wise (although Taggart managed to produce some good material as well, and helped make the show feel right again). Am I the only one who imagines how *I*, personally, would have restructured and repaired the show during its decimated final years, in hopes of returning The Light to its former glory? Sigh. I miss Springfield. And Oakdale. And Bay City. And Monticello. Blessed are the generous souls who upload episodes to youtube.

As the years (decades!!!) go by, I look back with even more respect for Slesar's work than I had ever had before. I think I took his quality writing for granted and did not appreciate it as much as I should have at the time. There were still many great scribes penning the soaps in the 1970s, and I assumed we would always have good writers on board. Little did I know how far the genre would fall. 😑 Henry Slesar could do it all: weave long-running and intricate storylines that involved most of the cast, create heartfelt romantic drama and family strife, and provide us with rich, colorful characters to root for. How I miss soaps' halcyon years.

I agree with this analysis. Alice was never depicted as weak until Harding Lemay became headwriter, but she was a good, innocent person. She had not experienced many harsh realities of life until Rachel came along and blew apart the Matthews family. Alice did not know how to fight such a relentlessly manipulative, cruel and selfish woman because people like Rachel were so outside Alice's realm of experience. Literally YEARS of misery would wear anyone down, and Alice's increasing fragility under Rachel's endless assaults made perfect psychological sense. I never saw Alice "slut-shame" Rachel, but she (like everyone else in Bay City) did acknowledge Rachel's total lack of morality in cheating on her sweet husband Russ and going after a "taken" man like Steve. Alice never tried to stop Steve from keeping and enriching his relationship with Jamie; she just did not want her husband spending time ALONE with the boy and Rachel. Alice knew that Rachel could tap very easily into Steve's own darker side, and that was very threatening. Considering all the heartache that had been unleashed before thanks to the Steve/Rachel dynamic, was it "selfish" of Alice to ask for limits on her husband's interaction with Rachel? Not in my book. It was totally understandable and made sense to me. I personally would have just killed Rachel...but that's just me. Honestly, as a viewer who had watched the show religiously for 11 years before Harney came aboard, I'll admit that my principle objection to her was that she was NOT Jacqueline Courtney. It's true. Harney was an okay-to-good actress, but she just was not the "real" Alice. We had literally watched Courtney from when she was a teenager, and suddenly seeing her replaced was jarring. Plus, she was the only remaining original cast member, and the show needed her as an anchor. Courtney projected a warmth and sweetness on-screen; a certain charisma that went beyond just technical acting talent and which cannot be manufactured. Susan Harney lacked that "je ne sais quoi" which had made Alice so beloved. (Again, I was shocked when even the caustic and condescending Harding Lemay acknowledge this. He credited Alice's dwindling popularity in the later 1970s to the change in actresses, and wondered if the surge in OLTL's ratings could be partially attributed to Courtney's joining that cast.) THIS. Harney was very...lacking in those scenes. Her wailing and hysterics just did not ring true at all. Courtney may have had her critics, but that girl could cry believably and make you feel her pain, the way Judith Light, Denise Alexander and Genie Francis could. A few different critics in the 1970s' daytime press labelled Courtney as the genre's "very best crier." I agreed! Harney probably was the best-accepted "replacement" Alice. Pfenning was stiff and Borgenson was painfully bland and colorless.

George Reinholt was immensely popular, one of the top daytime leading men for years. In general, he was a very good actor...until he wasn't, LOL. When challenged by intelligent material, he could present intriguing and nuanced performances and be quite commanding on screen. (To my shock, even Harding Lemay acknowledged this.) Towards the end of his run on both AW and OLTL, however, he looked bored and his performances suffered for it. As for his hair, I always thought it was fine. His later 'do suited him better than the cut he started out with. And looking back at the 1970s and '80s, bad hair was rampant on soaps. Talent was my own first concern.

Ahh, the Meta White murder trial is the earliest story I know from TGL. It was engrossing. Even though I was pretty certain she would eventually be found innocent, my stomach was in knots throughout the entire trial.

Nigel Reed (the final and by far the weakest TJ) aired into 1982, but I think he was gone by the end of the year. ITA. The show was totally hacked to pieces by incompetent and clueless PTB, and after 1984 did not even feel like TGL anymore. It was devastating to see the destruction, because for decades it had been a very consistent and consistently well-done soap. Suddenly we had irrelevant and often annoying newbies hogging all the airtime while our favorites were gone. And the painfully-stupid,low-brow camp storylines made it even worse. I loved JvD and Ross, and was glad he did the tribute from the available cast members, but it should have been done by Don Stewart. Mike should have appeared on screen for the funeral service. What a slap in the face it was to Charita Bauer, Bert Bauer, and longtime fans that the show threw together such a pathetic funeral for the character. No Mike. No Hope. No Meta. No Steve Jackson. No Peggy Scott. No Sara. But Warren Andrews, whom Bert LOATHED, was there mourning for her in the Bauer living room, looking grief-stricken? WTF? Hell NO! It was a mess. Yes, they were still on the show in 1982, but most would leave either in 1983 or 84. Many actors were dropped before the credits finally changed. Sara announced that she was going out of town to attend an extended medical conference/study and would be gone for three months. She never returned and was never mentioned again as far as I know. Gail Kobe acknowledged that writing out the Bauers had been so widely unpopular that viewers should expect to see Mike and Hope back on the show, but Kobe was replaced and the Bauers never came back.

Sara remained on the show through Pat Falken Smith's excellent-but-brief tenure as head writer in 1982, and was written out by subsequent scribes during the cast massacre of the early 1980s. Most of the vets were fired and did not leave voluntarily. Peter Simon (Ed) recalled that on his final day of taping, Tom O'Rourke (Justin) ranted and raved his entire way out of the building.

JE acknowledged the "exposure" incident was true in a long-ago SOD interview.

Yes, Jameson Parker, who played Granger's son Brad.

No, I was referring to when he was signed for his long-term contract on OLTL in the mid-1970s. He did not appear to be well-suited to the genre at all. That's why I was so surprised when he moved over to ATWT and did not exhibit the same flubbing of dialogue and reading from the teleprompter.

Granger "went back after his previous stint"...? As far as I know, he was only on OLTL for one run. Strangely, he did not seem to stumble over his lines and read from the teleprompter on ATWT.

It was a very minor guest role, and frankly, she was dreadful. She just did not seem comfortable on-screen at all, and kept getting stuck on her lines and (very obviously) reading the teleprompter. Farley Granger had done this too, so I was shocked and aghast when both Hagen and Granger ended up with Emmy nominations. It was clearly based on name recognition. Thank heavens neither of them ended up winning. What a slap in the face that would have been to all the wonderful performers who never even got nominated in the first place.

I do not remember reading anything specific in the daytime press at the time about why she left. Personally, I would have kept her around and tried to use her; same with Holly. At least in that era we did get several new, interesting and viable characters to watch. So often on soaps, when veteran characters are axed, they are replaced by pointless and irrelevant non-entities who, themselves don't last very long before being shown the door. Exhibit A: Nina Laemmle's tenure on DAYS.

Perhaps TPTB had had plans for her which just did not seem to jell. It's like bringing Jacqueline Courtney back to Another World in 1984 to so much fanfare...and then barely using her and dropping her from contract a year later. Anyway, as you say, from Myers' POV, a check was a check!

Peggy had had a long history with the show, and was tied to the Bauers and the Thorpes. While she may not have had a lot of story purpose in the late 1970s, that was not always the case. I personally adored her and was sorry to see her go.

Maureen Garrett did not appear on the final episode. There were a lot of basically useless, irrelevant characters (IMHO) taking up precious air time, but NO Holly and NO Ed Bauer, the two longest-running characters on the canvas. It irked me to no end. Ed and Holly should have been part of the very last act of the show. I begrudging accept that TPTB closed out TGL with Josh and Reva, but considering the historical and emotional significance of the Bauer family, Ed and Holly should have been featured as well. Peter Simon and Maureen Garrett did appear in the second-to-last episode, however.

Rauch did not become executive producer of OLTL until a while after Courtney was dropped, but I have always wondered if ABC planning on hiring him at the time, so they decided to axe Courtney while paving the way for his arrival. Yes, that was my suspicion too: ABC fired JC for Rauch. Vomit. And the brawl between Dorian and Karen took place in Larry's office, where Karen found Dorian changing the locks of Larry's door, in preparation to kick him out of the hospital. Karen whupped her ass, LOL.