Khan

Did Lisa Peluso leave LOVING while the murders were still happening, like when she left SFT, or did she stay all the way to the end?

Maybe Jack Wagner? From GH and SANTA BARBARA to MELROSE PLACE, then back to daytime with B&B.

I know I, for one, would not have wasted her in yet another retread of the Ridge/Brooke/Taylor triangle. That beast has been dead since the end of the George W. Bush administration.

I would've gone even further that week and had Jo on trial for murder! Of course, no one in their right mind would believe Jo to be capable of such an act, but just imagine how the audience might have responded had the big Friday cliffhanger had been the jury finding her guilty? You KNOW they're gonna tune in on Monday just to see whether Jo will be exonerated after all!

I actually laughed when I saw that both Showtime cable and Showtime streaming had been rebranded as "Paramount + with Showtime." What a cumbersome ass name, I thought, for an outlet that probably will have to rebrand itself again if/when Paramount + goes under. It wouldn't surprise me, if down the line, Paramount + and Showtime are subsumed into Pluto, lol. It's not a question of quality, though, as far as the Star Trek-related series go. What I am suggesting is that, sooner or later, there will come a point when people will have reached their saturation point with all the related franchises on streaming, regardless of individual quality. Same holds true for Marvel, for Star Wars, for Game of Thrones, for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, etc.

On the one hand, I appreciate Joanna Lee's attempt to steer SFT away from the kind of action/adventure-based stories that was occurring at the time on other soaps. Since SFT still was a half-hour show, with a budget that probably wasn't very huge in light of their ratings, they really didn't have the proper resources to tell those stories effectively. But, on the other hand, in addition to the usual network/sponsor interference and time slot/affiliate clearance issues, she didn't have that kind of "Wow!" storyline that could have infused new life and interest into the show, the way the David Hamilton storyline helped GH avoid cancellation back in '77. In order for her vision for the show to have succeeded, she and Gary Tomlin really needed a true potboiler storyline that could have had everyone talking.

It's been so long that, unfortunately, I can't recall the exact chain of events anymore, but was TC developed and announced and MF hired before LOVING actually went off the air? If so, then I think they had ample opportunities to have MF/Sydney appear on the former show. For example, they could have had pop in briefly as a former dalliance of Clay's from way back, who runs into him again while on business in Corinth and has another romp in the sheets with him before his untimely demise. Maybe Alex would have considered her a prime suspect until the next murder occurs, which lets Sydney off the hook, but establishes animosity between them. I mean, anything that could have made the audience sit up, take notice and say, "Hey, I gotta start watchin' the new show when this is over, just so I could see what else this chick might be up to!". I had thought of her, too, @Franko, lol. Farrah would have been a much more interesting choice. This is definitely where having a "name" actor among the cast members - perhaps, a name bigger than MF's - could have worked to their advantage, as more affiliates might have been willing to sign on if they had had someone big to help launch the show.

Personally, as far as streaming goes, I think FAST should have been the way to go all along. Yes, it was nice for streamers to offer ad-free content to subscribers at a premium, but it's as if that side of the entertainment industry had forgotten how shows on traditional networks had made their money so that they could afford to keep producing episodes. (Like I always say: television exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to do whatever they can to sell you refrigerators and toothpaste). Plus, the more the streamers increased the rates for those ad-free plans, the less inclined subscribers were to sign up for or renew their subscriptions to those plans. Add to that the sudden glut of streamers, with everybody and their uncle launching a streaming service, and all the complaints from subscribers ("[!@#$%^&*], it's like I'm paying for another cable bill!"), and now you understand a little more why the streaming industry has imploded. Remember: it wasn't that long ago when "binge-watching" was all the rage with subscribers, until the streamers realized there were major drawbacks to allowing subscribers to view entire series or seasons of series all at once, and they instead started encouraging the traditional way of watching a new show one episode per week. As former NBC and FOX scheduler Preston Beckman says, "Television always regresses to the mean." Anyways. You were saying, @Vee? I agree. Conversely, or similarly, I think those who write and produce many of the streaming shows are taking too much advantage of streaming, telling stories that drag and drag and dddddrrrrraaaaaggggg to the point where they're becoming ponderous and a chore to watch. I like character exploration and development as much as the next guy, but do I really six episodes of it before I get that first edge-of-my-seat moment? As popular as Marvel and Star Wars still are with the general audience, I think there comes a point when too much of that kind of content is too much and potentially could spoil the franchises as a whole. Same goes for Star Trek and all those related series. Networks and streamers really don't know when to say when. I agree. I'd love to see AMC and/or OLTL revived somewhere, but I'm willing to concede that that's likely gonna stay a pipe dream. I think it's easy to forget that it took early daytime TV a few tries and more than one brief, failed series before it landed its' first real hit with SFT. Who knows? The same trajectory could be happening now with soaps on streaming. I don't know whether the days of Erica Kane are past us, but I do know that whoever's in charge of any potential AMC reboot should recognize that it's 2023, and that Erica cannot keep acting as if she's still thirty-five years old. She still can be fabulous! Just let her be The World's Most Fabulous Great-Grandma!

Yep, we sure did, lol. Look, I realize that the era of supercouples jetting off to exotic locales in order to take down supervillains like Stefano DiMera was over and that DAYS needed to move in entirely new directions. And I realize, too, that had JER not gone big, then DAYS would have gone home, permanently. But I feel like DAYS (and other shows) should have taken lessons from Y&R, GH and even GL and turned inward, focusing back on the kinds of deep, psychologically complex stories that Bill Bell and Pat Falken Smith had told in the '70's. Maybe DAYS wouldn't have come within points of beating Y&R in the ratings, but then again, maybe it wouldn't have become the kind of silly, cartoonish mess that it still is today either.

ICAM, @chrisml. James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten should have introduced Sydney Chase on LOVING in preparation for the spinoff. Doing so might have helped give TC more of a "push" in terms of building suspense around her, and around the new show in general. I don't necessarily agree that the LOVING Murders needed to continue on TC, but I do think they needed to plant story seeds other than, "Hey, everyone, Corinth's been a real drag since Gwyneth Alden killed everybody, so let's all move to SoHo!". (In retrospect, maybe they would have been better off just moving some of those actors over to AMC or OLTL.) Furthermore, as I've said before, I think TC made a concerted effort in the beginning to steer away from telling the sort of big, melodramatic stories that we had become accustomed to seeing on soaps - to be "anti-story," in a sense. I think that makes a sense if you want your show to be seen as a cutting-edge soap for a new generation. But even if you don't want the kinds of stories that you could watch on your grandmother's old soap opera, you still need something that will keep people glued to their screens other than jaw-dropping sets and fantastic camera work and editing. You also need strong characters with strong relationships that, in turn, will generate strong stories. I also agree, @chrisml, that they might have miscalculated Morgan Fairchild's appeal in getting her to agree to star on TC. Obviously, if you lived through the '80's, or if you watched SFT BITD, or even if you saw her play Sandra Bernhard's lesbian lover on "Roseanne," then you know who she is. But I don't know whether that appeal carried over at all into the next decade. If TPTB wanted a "name" to headline TC's cast, then they either should have swung a bit higher - maybe gone for someone like Jaclyn Smith*? - or, as I suggested eons ago, they should have (done the unthinkable and) spun off Erica Kane/Susan Lucci (with the provision, of course, that she still could appear on AMC occasionally, and that she could return full-time to AMC should TC ever be cancelled...which it was). For some reason, @Vee, I was thinking 3:00 pm CST, rather than EST. Yeah, I can't see ABC bumping even a flailing GH up or down on the sked for a new soap that was rising from the ashes of a cancelled, low-rated one. They'd sooner put TC on after "Nightline." *It's just a suggestion, since I can't think of any "names" in the same age bracket as MF's that held any cache in the mid-to-late '90's. I ask you politely not to kill me.

And now look where he is: lucky to get a part in a movie on LMN.

I agree. I'd be okay with a return to the network OR with streaming, but I do think streaming would be the better of the two options. Granted, things are looking shaky at the moment in the streaming industry. In fact, the business itself appears to be contracting, as streamers are merging, dumping a lot of product that isn't retaining viewers and whatnot. If you ask me, though, I think these shifts will be good for streaming in the end. Yes, streamers ultimately will adopt a business model that will look an awful lot like cable TV, but I think doing so will create a need for profitable but more "traditional" kinds of programming...such as soaps.

And if you didn't watch LOVING, but you knew TC was spun off from it, you weren't going to tune into the new show, no matter what. IMO, the only things TC had going for it going in were Morgan Fairchild, Debbi Morgan and Darnell Williams. Otherwise, as amiable as the LOVING actors might have been on-screen, the start of TC was a big "So what?". Maybe. For one thing, TC could have pulled in younger viewers who didn't know the connection with LOVING and therefore could love or hate it on its' own terms. Again, though, you gotta have story and incredible characters to draw viewers of any age in, and I just don't think TC really had that (at least, not at the start).

I agree. I could be wrong, but I don't think Mark Hapka/Nathan was very popular, so the fact that Nathan hasn't been mentioned at all since he left Salem likely guarantees that we'll never see him or Melissa again.

Lordy, lol! But at least we know who Nick's parents were. I'm still trying to figure out who fathered Nathan, lol.

Even her battles with DID read as dull, and that's saying something, lol!

Make no mistake: DAYS was floundering. At best, Deidre Hall and Wayne Northrop's returns provided a sort of Band-Aid, but they alone could not salvage the rest of the show creatively. It NEEDED a new direction BADLY. I'm just not sure JER was the right person for that task (then, or now).

I wouldn't go that far, @Paul Raven, lol. I'm actually okay with rebooting/reviving AMC, but I think it needs to be done right, by people who "get" the show and its' overall message. Like @Errol said, it needs to be done either in daytime on a network or on streaming. Reviving it as a primetime series is not going to work.

That reminds me of what John Pleshette (ex-Richard Avery, KL) said about KNOTS and the difficulties of getting the show's original cast (four couples, all living together in the same cul-de-sac in Southern California) to interact. In real life, he said, neighbors don't become all that involved in each other's lives, so you end up contriving situations where they could be involved - like, for example, having Gary Ewing work for Sid Fairgate at Knots Landing Motors. That's why I tend to prefer soaps centered around families. Like you said, @te., family members might squabble with each other, but blood always will be thicker than water. Also, stories about families are something just about everyone can relate to. If you didn't come from a large or loving family, you can live vicariously through one on a soap. In the end, I wonder if it was worth spinning off LOVING into TC at all, just because LOVING always had been a low-rated show with not much of a following outside of its' core audience. Maybe Agnes Nixon, James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten would have been better off developing a brand-new soap that had no ties to LOVING whatsoever.

How could I forget the country Alice's? When Bonnie had the audacity to change the sign to one of a drawing of the late Alice Horton, wearing a Stetson hat and brandishing six-shooters, lol! You'll never convince me that JER loved writing for DAYS.

I think Douglas Marland would have used the flood as an opportunity to introduce a new family - most likely, a blue-collar family, who would have been particularly devastated by the flood - while keeping Jo, Stu, Patti, Liza, Sunny, etc. front-and-center. I know people think Marland couldn't write a half-hour soap, but I'd like to chalk up his stints on THE DOCTORS and LOVING to external forces, lol.

"Gold & Silver Circle Honor"? What is this? The Daytime Emmys, or the Kentucky Derby?

More than likely, Gary Tomlin wrote GH during the strike, Josh Griffith wrote Y&R (and directed it and acted out half the parts); Bradley Bell wrote B&B, and Anna Indiana wrote DAYS.

I wonder if TC took that approach deliberately in order to avoid looking like another hoary old soap opera and instead look hip and contemporary.

And the WGA is wrong for doing it.