Khan

Even Susan Sullivan or (God help us) Joan Van Ark might have made sense than Loni, lol. Don't get me wrong, I love Loni and her refusal to play Jennifer Marlowe as just another "office bimbo," but her inclusion kinda, sorta blows the whole concept behind the casting of this particular movie. *shrug* Meanwhile, I'm wishing they had had opportunities to include cameos from other soap divas - Dame Joan, Linda Evans, Susan Lucci, Michele Lee, Ana-Alicia, Dee Hall, you name it - but they probably didn't.

For sure, AW never should have expanded to ninety minutes daily. Even if a daily, 90-minute soap were feasible, AW was the wrong soap to do it. AW's audience was eroding, and Harding Lemay was displaying signs of creative exhaustion, too. All the expansion to 90 minutes did was seal AW's fate as the "dead soap walking" for the next two decades. Similarly, TEXAS and SaBa never should have premiered at sixty minutes each. (Same goes for SuBe and PASSIONS). I can't think of any soap that premiered at 60 minutes daily and then went onto have a long and successful run. In all four cases, you had new shows with a lot of airtime to fill, but not a lot of great characters and storylines to fill it with. If PASSIONS, SaBa, SuBe and TEXAS had been allowed to premiere at 30 minutes each instead, the respective PTB at each show might have been better able to zero in on what was working and jettison what wasn't. Conversely, I suspect that if THE DOCTORS had expanded to sixty minutes daily, it might have been able to survive past 1982. Provided, of course, they had the right HW and EP in place. And while I think GENERATIONS was just the type of groundbreaking soap that daytime needed in the late '80's, I also think they chose the wrong person to steer it.

I would, too. Like @Soaplovers said, the key to good camp is to play it straight (no pun intended).

"Fasten your face-lifts, ladies, it's gonna be a bumpy weekend!" Uh, speaking of face-lifts, Morgan? I still think Loni's a replacement for another (blonde) soap diva who turned down the role.

IIRC, the plot - and that's what it was, too, a plot, one that was in no way driven by character, lol - occurred during the '81 WGA strike. Edward was some obsessed fan of Nikki's who, at one point, kidnapped her and brought her home to meet his "mother." As soon as the strike was over, though, and the writers returned to work, the whole story was wrapped up and then forgotten.

Say what you will about Kelsey Grammer, but I've always appreciated how he champions for "Girlfriends."

I wonder if that could be attributed at least in part to TPTB's decision to streamline the cast, eliminating actors such as Peter Bergman (Cliff), Debbi Morgan (Angie), Robert Gentry (Ross), etc. I could be conflating all the actor exits - I know that Kathleen Noone (Ellen) and Mark LaMura (Mark) left prior; Maurice Benard (Nico), Rosa Nevin (Cecily) and Lauren Holly (Julie) left around the same time as others; and Candace Earley (Donna), Richard Van Vleet (Chuck), Vasili Bogazianos (Benny) and Matthew Cowles (Billy Clyde) maybe left later (followed by Michael E. Knight (Tad))? - but it seems like every ten years or so, AMC would experience some sort of cast purge/"reset"; and this one in particular might have been hard for some fans to take. God bless S. Michael Schnessel, because I truly believe he was a wonderful writer for OLTL, but by 1990, I think the man was burning out as the show's HW. No doubt, Paul Rauch kept pressuring him to come up with ever bigger ideas, but the bigger the ideas became, the more they started to weigh down the show. Andrea Evans' departure really showed the network just how much the show was suffering creatively. Chances were, if you weren't a LOVING fan by 1990, you weren't ever going to be one; and if you were, then you were in it for the long haul. Ergo, it's those diehard fans who would stick with the show until the bitter end that probably explains why their loss in 1990 was minimal. It ended for two reasons: 1) fans had become hip to DAYS' game, so that when you, as the viewer, saw two characters in a scene together for the first time, you knew what was coming; and 2) Al Rabin and his team appeared to have lost their "touch" in knowing which characters to pair together. The "misses" were starting to outnumber the "hits." (Shane/Kayla, anyone?). Jack/Jennifer and Roman/Isabella were the biggest successes from that period, of course. Justin/Adrienne were successful, too, although I think many saw how limited THEY were. Bo/Carly might have been bigger, had they not come at a point when the entire formula was getting tired and needed to be phased out. Aside from those pairings, however, and maybe Frankie/Eve, I'm hard pressed to name any couples from that pre-Reilly period that had even a little bit of staying power. Plus, it cannot be overstated how much Leah Laiman's exit as HW hurt the show. I know she has her detractors - and I'm not putting her in the same category as Bill Bell, or even Pat Falken Smith - but she knew DAYS. She knew what worked on that show, and what didn't; and even after TPTB canned her successor, Anne Howard Bailey, and promoted Richard J. Allen and Anne Schoettle, two writers who'd worked under Laiman, the show still wasn't what it'd been with her in that seat.

If even Hall and Oates can't make it in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours....! https://variety.com/2023/music/news/hall-and-oates-lawsuit-restraining-order-1235805425/

You've seen Hunt Block essay one role, you've seen him essay them all.

It sounds to me like JG wanted to salvage J.T., even though Thad Luckinbill was not back permanently.

Did GENERATIONS ever break 3.0? Again, it just seems like that show never stood a chance.

I agree, lol. I have my favorite actors just like we all do, but I don't think I would want any of them paired up with anyone, regardless of chemistry (or lack thereof), just because that might guarantee more screen time for them.

I guess Pamela K. Long was smart to leave GL when she did, because if she hadn't, I suspect P&G would've replaced her.

Didn't AMC's Edmund and Tad dress in drag once?

Which would be fine, I guess, if Thad Luckinbill still were on the show. Maybe he's planning to make a surprise cameo?

And I think that (the audience support) was due more to nostalgia than actual chemistry. I could be wrong, and I probably AM wrong, but I think the audience just liked to pretend it was still Andy Kavovit and Melanie Smith playing Paul and Emily. I don't blame her. It's as if Frank and/or Ron took a giant dump on Marty's legacy. The only thing worse would have been if she had raped John, or if she had faked another assault in order to steal him away from Natalie.

For sure, I don't believe Ben would've been killed off. I think Rauch, James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten had it in mind to make Ben, as Ross' long-lost half-brother, a permanent fixture in Springfield, but that would've required an actor who could be empathetic, if not likeable, two things Hunt Block (God bless him) just can't play.

"Fresno" might have been more successful if it had been a comic miniseries about the behind-the-scenes doings of a hit primetime soap, rather than a parody of one.

Once Abby had achieved her goals, there was nowhere else to go with her, short of her losing it all and having to start all over again.

I'd love to know more about that story's origins, not only because of how it impacted DAYS, which had been flailing for the past 3-4 years, but also because that story, along w/ Luke & Laura, helped set the tone for the genre in the '80's: less introspective, psychological drama; more thrills, more chills, more jaw-dropping twists and turns. According to an old SOD article, I think, Gary Tomlin and Michelle Poteet Lisanti initiated it, but when PFS returned, she expanded upon it. I wonder if Tomlin/Lisanti just had Marlena's talk-radio show, with the mysterious caller who was threatening her, but PFS decided expanding it into a serial killer tale be a good way to trim the cast and bring some excitement back to the show. Of course, the problem I have with serial killer stories on daytime - aside from their extremely gruesome and exploitative natures - is that most clearly begin with no idea who the culprit will be; and that when TPTB do decide upon a culprit - which is usually at the halfway point, if not later - the writers tie themselves into knots trying to explain/justify how and why that character would kill so many others, to the point of making it all so darn convoluted, and leaving more questions for the viewers than answers. Moreover, rarely do these kind of stories employ actual pathology. IRL, serial killers have a certain type of individual that they target. It might be that they prefer to kill members of one gender or another; or they may prefer a certain body type; or hair or eye color; or even members of a certain profession (like how Jack the Ripper supposedly targeted prostitutes) or of a certain neighborhood or socioeconomic class. On daytime, however, serial killer victims tend to look arbitrary, with no connections that you can spot right away; and if there is a connection, it's a flimsy and preposterous one. ("She killed everyone in Corinth because they all were in so much pain." Yeah, as if the Zodiac killer worried over their victims' emotional issues, lol.) Years ago, when the citizens of AMC's Pine Valley were still in the grips of the Satin Slayer, I think, Amanda Dillon and another character (blanking on who atm) visited her mother, Janet "From Another Planet" Green, at the sanitarium where she had been confined to (after nearly wiping out half the town with a gas valve explosion at the Mardi Gras ball) in order to get some ideas on who the SS might be. "First of all," I said, as I watched those scenes, "neither one of you is a trained psychologist or criminologist, so it's ridiculous how you're attempting to get this information. Second, a person who kills someone with a crowbar (Janet, ICYMI, off Will Cortlandt years before) and rigs an explosion that kills another is not a serial killer. The pathologies are entirely different."

It's Victor's long-lost sister, Nicole. No relation to Nikki, or Nick, or the designer of cheap quality goods that you can purchase at JCPenney.

I agree. And I don't think it's that people are knowingly choosing fascism either. It's just that the world is changing too fast for many people and this is their response.

I don't understand his reluctance either. It wasn't as if we wouldn't care about Victor if he were German.

Seeing Sophia in drag reminds me of someone, but who? Oh, yeah:

After that spoiler, she better be Eve Howard or some other past character whom we know about or remember, or this story's gonna be so damn insulting.