Khan

Frank and Ron really blew it when they pitched to JS their stupid idea for how to bring back Blackie for the anniversary.

I agree.

Will do, lol!

Personally, I thought Bill and Lee Phillip Bell set B&B in the wrong city. If you want to do a show that is set within the fashion industry, you set it in the home of "Fashion Week" and the annual Met gala, which is NYC. To me, L.A. is more about the entertainment industry than anything else. The earliest that I remember watching a soap with my mom was watching Greg and Jenny on AMC. My mom, however, watched a lot of shows: AMC, LOVING, RH, CAPITOL, ATWT, OLTL, GL, later Y&R. For some reason, though, she never got into any NBC shows, whereas I loved to rush home from school everyday and catch the second half of DAYS.

LOL!! Before there was Todd and Blair, there was Brad and Jenny.

JL was wonderful and a much-needed addition to AMC at a time when (let's face it) the show was faltering. But she was not Liza Colby.

Whenever I think of Bridget Dobson, the words "mad genius" spring to mind. Even as a junior high school student, learning about the ins and outs of this crazy industry through reading issues of SOD and SOW every week, I thought BD was screwy af, but also fascinating and, of course, brilliant. I think she (and her husband) understood better than any other scribes in daytime that human beings aren't entirely heroic; that we are, in fact, deeply, deeply flawed; and that it is in our flaws where we find comedy and tragedy existing side by side, nuzzling each other's necks like a pair of illicit lovers in the midst of a stolen afternoon. And, my God, how Bridget & Jerry loved to pen the most macabre and irreverent ideas! I mean, what other head-writing team, past or present, would even dare have SaBa's Augusta Lockridge serve up her daughter's deceased pigeon to the rest of the family as an hors d'oeuvre!? Even JER's mind wasn't so twisted - and that man, ICYMI, wrote a storyline where a character's penis was severed in a fit of anger, then reattached upside down! When I was in the sixth grade, I chose to write a research paper (the first one I ever wrote) on the life and work of Irna Phillips. To this day, I don't know why I chose her as my subject, except that I loved watching my mother's soaps and maybe I wanted to learn more about them. Like I said, I don't know why I wrote my paper on Irna, but I'm glad I did write about her, for two reasons: one, the more I learned about the history of this genre and of the people who left their marks upon it - not just Irna, but others, like Agnes Nixon, and Bill Bell, and Douglas Marland, and Bridget and Jerome Dobson, and so on and so on - the more I fell in love with the industry and wished to be a part of it one day; and two, I'm grateful for whatever good sense that led me to write about Ms. Phillips, because it was BD, in particular, who gave me that little piece of cockeyed wisdom that has never steered me wrong in life from the moment I first came across it. As BD told Christopher Schemering in his book commemorating GL's 50th TV anniversary: "We aim for purity...and we always miss." She, of course, was talking in general about her and her husband's approach to soap writing - and if I don't have that quote letter-perfect, please forgive - but from the very first time I read her words, I thought they could apply not just to writing or to writing for the soaps, but also to how we go about this so-called "business of living." In life, we do aim always to do what's perfect and pure - and most of the time, we [!@#$%^&*] up royally. (God knows you all have been witness to many times when I have!) But even on those rare occasions when we don't eff up, we never get it exactly the way we pictured it either. No matter how many times we promise ourselves that this time - this time - we'll get it right, like Bridget says, we always miss. I thank Bridget and Jerome Dobson for the many hours of entertainment they gave us on GH, GL, ATWT and SaBa, but more than that, I thank Bridget Dobson for giving me my life's basic philosophy. Like I said, Bridge, you were one looney chick, but damn if you weren't right.

Even when Bill Bell still was head writer, B&B was a show I never could tolerate for more than a couple of months at a time. I loved watching Susan Flannery, of course, and Darlene Conley always was a hoot, lol. But the rest of that cast, I could take-or-leave.

I chalk that up to the same forces that undermined most GL actors' performances in the show's last 5-10 years: poor writing, minimal direction and absolutely zero rehearsal time.

Good God, lol! Uh...thanks...I guess...?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: JER hated writing for DAYS, and it showed. IMO... AMC: 1992. ATWT: 1993. CAPITOL: 1986. DAYS: 1989. THE DOCTORS: whenever Rita Lakin and Rick Edelstein stopped writing for the show. EON: 1983. GH: 1996. GL: 1994. LOVING: 1985 (and even that's being generous). OLTL: 1990. RH: had some rough years, but ended in '89 on a good note. SaBa: 1987. Y&R: 2004.

I agree. Thank you for reminding me about the Emmons Carlson case and its' aftermath, @dc11786. I tend to think the court ruled in favor of Carlson on account of his gender.

How about "all of the above," lol? The ones you've posted/talked about, the ones like the one @Vee posted, too. (I just thought the entire campaign was too poseur-ish, too "try hard," know what I'm saying?) I especially hate those like the one you posted, @carolineg, featuring JY's Lucky as "rebel," or whatever. They all attempted to make the characters on ABC soaps appear to be so cool and relatable. But, if you ask me, ABCD's characters had become so maladjusted across the board that, IMO, they were the literal opposite of cool and relatable. If I had done that campaign, I would've been a lot more straightforward. For example: a picture of whoever was playing OLTL's Todd at that time, with the word "rapist" underneath. GH's Sonny? "sociopath." Carly? "gun moll." And why, for [!@#$%^&*]'s sake, is it in the same color scheme as a [!@#$%^&*] taxi cab? Were they paying homage to the old sitcom "Taxi" or something? It's stupid! Oh. My. God.

What was happening on OLTL the week of 11/21-11/25/77 for them to jump to #3? Was it a heavy Karen week?

Wait, when did he write that, lol?

Of course, I'm extremely biased, because Justin Deas is my third all-time favorite soap actor (after Larry Bryggman and Michael Zaslow), but I'd say it's a toss-up between his work w/ Margaret Colin on ATWT and his later work w/ Robin Mattson (ex-Gina) on SaBa. In both cases, Deas was paired with an actress who was brilliant and witty and not at all conventional. IMO, that is the kind of actress who can bring out the best in Deas, who is himself unconventional in terms of the choices that he makes in his acting. (It's why I will campaign for him to join GH as Jane Elliot's (Tracy) love interest until GH is cancelled or I am banned from SON, whichever comes first, lol). I realize Deas isn't everyone's cup of tea (hi, @Mitch64, lol!), but I love that he refuses to "play it safe" in his work. I've always said I'll forgive a multitude of sins except the cardinal sin of boring me, and Deas rarely, if ever, bores me.

IKR, lol?

Yes! But, as I've said before, nothing else for them makes any sense.

Wait, you've never heard about his star-making role in the movie "Disorderlies"?

I can't even figure out how that teaser tied in with the premise for GH. Like, instead of a bunch of random doors that looked like they were borrowed from a community theater, why not have him enter through the ER doors instead? Don't worry. Now that Drew is as much as gone.

I agree. But I think that one SOW article we read re: "Manhattan Lives" was correct: NBC's affiliates had lost whatever faith or patience they had in the show and gave up on it. Did they give up on it too soon? Maybe. But I don't think there was anything the network could have done to convince them otherwise. Poor AW. That show tried and tried and tried to move the needle again, but it was like no one apart from their most diehard fans even cared anymore. I want to die for him and for everyone else who was forced to participate, lol. Even those yellow-and-black promos that ABCD actors had to do after Disney had purchased the network weren't as embarrassing. If NBCD had been smart, or smarter, they could have figured out how to steal "Clarence" away from CBSD. Just imagine him promoting DAYS ("Don't blink, Marlena, and don't look away!," lol.)

So many childhood memories dwell within this photo. It's funny, though, how Frank Valentini's GH currently employs about six times that many actors.

You're correct on all counts, @beebs. Especially about NBCD's slate of game shows holding up the rest of the lineup until they inevitably faded. Imagine for a moment, though, if NBC, and not CBS, had brokered the deal that brought Y&R to their lineup in '72/'73. Would NBCD's fortunes have been different? Lin Bolen, as well, had a chance to counter ABCD with HTSAM, but from what I understand, the show was DOA, thanks to bad writing. Oh, totally, lol! NBCD's marketing always has been such an embarrassment. We laugh and roll our eyes at DAYS' current promos today, but were campaigns like "It Will Excite You!" or "I used to be hot [!@#$%^&*] on that ABC soap, but now I'm at DAYS and I'm loving the difference (until ABC offers me more money and better storylines)!" any better, lol? Even their "Love in the Afternoon" campaign, which happened years before ABCD's, was so low-rent and low-energy, it was more like "Snooze in the Afternoon." And OMG, when Pat Falken Smith and her team returned to DAYS after working on GH! That was an excellent opportunity to put together a brief montage of some of PFS' past work on DAYS with the v.o. saying, "The writers who wrote all that great stuff you loved on that other show? Well, they've come back home - to DAYS! And you're gonna REALLY love what they do next!" So what does NBCD's marketing department do instead? After inadvertently giving GH more advertising by mentioning their name, they gather some of DAYS' older stars together (and NOT the younger ones, who might have appealed more to ABC viewers) and have them stand on risers and smile for the camera like a damn high school show choir! Anyways.... You might get away with suggesting DAYS and SaBa were tonally similar, but AW, too? Girl, no, lol! To me, AW always was like ATWT and GL's cousin who shopped at TJMaxx instead of Bloomingdale's or Macy's. It might have tried to be hip like the other soaps on NBCD, but it never could stop being just another, meat-and-potatoes P&G soap in its' heart. As for whether SaBa also was "too niche" for the mainstream audience, I would say SaBa was "too niche" in tone, if not in content. IMO, SaBa always was more irreverent and tongue-in-cheek than even the ABCD soaps. And I think it's quite telling that, after trying for most of its' run to siphon viewers away from GH, SaBa (and the Dobsons) gave up toward the end and tried to steal away GL's audience instead, hiring both Pam Long and Kim Zimmer, phasing out many of the Capwells and Lockridges and rebuilding the show around the blue-collar Walker clan. IOW, after trying to be the anti-dote to the P&G shows, SaBa decided to be like the P&G shows instead. I agree. There never was any tonal threads that could connect AW, DAYS and the other shows on NBCD's lineup meaningfully. In fact, if you were a typical NBCD viewer, it probably was quite jarring to go from a show like AW, which was so traditional and down-to-earth that it could be almost journeyman-like; to DAYS, where couples were jetting off to exotic locales in search of prisms and [!@#$%^&*] (to say nothing of the madness that went down in the '90's, lol). I mean, how do you build an ad campaign around that and everything else on the lineup? "NBC Daytime: We're Random as [!@#$%^&*] And We Guess We're Okay With That?" JER and PASSIONS are what happens when you, as a network, give creative autonomy to a reclusive individual with deep-seated psychological issues, who then creates a show that is so god-awful and that will never appeal to anyone older than the age of 12. At the very least, you are dooming your entire lineup to the kind of existence that NBC's daypart has to this day. ICAM, @carolineg. You know NBCD was making a mistake in trying to align AW more with DAYS when even JFP was like, "Nah," lol.

Especially when everyone has acknowledged, once and for all, that Luke raped Laura. Who wants to remind everyone else or be reminded that Daytime's Greatest Romance began with a sexual assault on the floor of a sleazy disco?

I think that one big problem for NBCD was that it never had a core demographic. CBSD always had the older, conservative viewers, while ABCD, after struggling initially, made inroads with younger and more urban ones. Where did that leave NBCD? I know the network attempted in the '80's and '90's to be the alternative to the other two with SaBa, GEN, SuBe and PAS, but I think those shows were "too niche" to be sustainable in the long run. Another problem for NBCD was that the network itself never was independent the way CBS and ABC had been in years past. Instead, NBC always has been a property of one conglomerate or another; and because of that, it's always had to brook more corporate interference in their day-to-day operations than the other networks have had to. Finally, it's always been my impression that NBCD has long had a more contentious relationship with their affiliates than CBSD and ABCD have had. They have literally no control over when or how each affiliate schedules their shows in ways that benefits NBCD the most; and the affiliates flat-out don't like much of what the network offers them to run, or trusts them. I know soaps once were so profitable that they helped keep the networks afloat in other places, but if you told me that wasn't exactly the case for NBCD - that, in fact, NBC's primetime, news and even children's programming divisions always have been bigger moneymakers for them than their soaps - I wouldn't be a bit surprised, lol. Ironically, @beebs, there was talk in the '70's of spinning off Doug and Julie - but into a new soap, not a sitcom. Like I said, DAYS and NBCD always has been spinoff-crazy, lol.