Khan

That's a very good point, @Broderick; and one, I believe, David Jacobs himself recognized when he introduced Abby in the second season. I know Jacobs liked to say that Abby was in the works all along - just as he liked to tell people that he made Karen so aggressive in the pilot, because viewers would have been wondering who was going to be "the J.R." on the show - but I don't necessarily believe his claims, lol. I think he saw that the intended "'Scenes from a Marriage x 4'" concept wasn't working, especially when half the cast simply wasn't up to the challenge, so he decided to bring on a single person - and a recently divorced mother, at that - in order to create more variety in the storylines. I also think one major drawback in KL's initial premise and first season is that the four couples are more alike than they are not. Gary/Val and Kenny/Ginger were ostensibly younger than Sid/Karen and Richard/Laura, but Jacobs and his team didn't make a big deal about that. (For one thing, would the two younger, newly married couples feel all that comfortable hanging out all the time with the older ones?) Nor did they explore the inherent dramatic possibilities in what was probably an interfaith union between Jewish Richard and Irish Catholic/Protestant Laura. I realize that one could push boundaries only so far on network television in 1979, but why not have an interracial couple living in the cul-de-sac? Or (gulp) a same-sex couple? The more varied the couplings, I think, the more interesting they could have been to people watching.

IOW, Jordan feels guilty that she and Eve never had an opportunity to make amends, so she's taking her anger and frustration out on Victor. Again, though, why wait this long? Did she really need to steal Cole and Victoria's baby, raise it and train it to hate the Newmans in order to get her revenge? She had plenty of other chances to ruin the Newmans - hell, she could've been the one who sabotaged that plane that crashed with Nick on it during the MAB era!

Yes. At the outset, David Jacobs envisioned KL to be a sort of American version of Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." He also drew upon his own recent experience as story editor for "Family" - where, coincidentally, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz had also cut their teeth - in developing the show.

Let's just hope the '90's boy band cover band he's obviously joined works out.

Well, if they were estranged, why is Jordan so intent on avenging her sister's death? And why did she wait so long to set this plan into motion? So many questions.... You know, they could have hired Colleen Zenk to be a recast for Lindsay Wells. I'm just saying.

I would put even the Lechowicks' work on the show up there with "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere" and other dramas from the '80's that really challenged the audience's expectations of what one could do every week on television. Last time I saw Michelle Phillips online, she looked very frail. I don't know if she would have been up for appearing in this movie, or any movie, for that matter. It doesn't help that she's heavier these days, too. Her extra pounds make her face look heavier and puffier than it should.

I agree. A storyline has to be within the realm of possibilities for that show or else it doesn't work for me. Even a story like Janet/Natalie on AMC didn't work for me, because, one, they were not identical twins; and two, no amount of plastic surgery will ever help you look and talk exactly like somebody else. As Mama Khan once said, "The eyes always give you away." For me, Lumina was like the Princess Gina saga on DAYS. I followed along, not because I thought it was any good (although, I will admit, Lumina had its' moments), but because I wondered just how far the show could go with the bullshit before they were forced to throw in the towel, lol.

"thirtysomething" was what David Jacobs always wanted KL to be, but couldn't pull off. His writing wasn't that deep, and his cast wasn't that good.

To quote Sally Sussman from that article: “To be perfectly honest, as soon as the show went on the air, they were talking about canceling it.” (Brandon Tartikoff might have wanted another soap on NBC's lineup, but the affiliates sure didn't.)

Sadly, I think Mr. Winther was right. GENERATIONS was a show that needed to happen, but everything was working against it. It was placed in a terrible time slot, against a juggernaut like Y&R, on a network whose daytime lineup was itself struggling. Moreover, the theme song and opening titles were like something out of a coffee commercial ("Folgers brand coffee: three generations later, we're still the best part of waking up"), the sets, wardrobe and background music looked and sounded like they belonged on "Saved by the Bell"; the actors were mediocre, with only a handful of standouts among the cast; and although Sally Sussman had a great vision for her show, she was also 100-percent the wrong person to execute it.

Ironically, Lee Rich and Philip Capice got their starts working for Benton & Bowles, an advertising company that counted P&G among its' clients; and Michael Filerman got HIS start, I think, working in CBS Daytime. That probably explains why the Lorimar-produced soaps succeeded where others didn't, too. Ah, thanks, @kalbir.

Interesting point, @j swift. By the mid-'80's, NBC had garnered a new reputation as a home for "quality television," thanks to shows like "Hill Street Blues" and "Cheers." If there was going to be a successful primetime soap on NBC, therefore, it probably needed to do for the genre what HST did for cop shows, or "St. Elsewhere" did for medical ones. "Berrenger's," "Bare Essence," "Emerald Point N.A.S.," even "Flamingo Road" - all those, and others, simply felt like more of the same. In the latter part of the decade, however, ABC was also gaining a rep for doing quality shows that often redefined genres, like "The Wonder Years" and "Moonlighting." DYNASTY had a target on its' back already, thanks to Brandon Stoddard's well-known distaste for Aaron Spelling's shows. Ergo, if DYNASTY had any hopes of surviving into the '90's, it needed to evolve - not just better storytelling, with deeper characters, but also a whole new production aesthetic (less glam, more grit). However, between ABC's eagerness to rebrand itself, years of mismanagement on the part of its' producers and general viewer fatigue, it was doomed to die with the Reagan era.

Say what you will about Ellen Wheeler, but not every actor would agree to audition for their old job, especially if it's for a role or roles that they won an Emmy for! Another actor might have told the producers to [!@#$%^&*] off. IIRC, shortly after Leah Laiman joined the writing staff, one of the soap mags sat down with her for an interview and asked her about the Lumina story. They basically wanted to know what her agenda was, and Laiman responded, in effect, "I had no idea what it was about when I started it, and I'm still feeling my way through it." You know you're in treacherous waters when you're the HW and even you can't explain a storyline as weird and off-putting as Lumina.

I don't deny that, from the start, DYNASTY presented the Carringtons and their lifestyle as a sort of fantasy. After all, theirs was a world that was completely foreign to Krystle, who, as the premise-embodying protagonist, served as a surrogate for the audience. Therefore, it'd make sense for the Carringtons to be larger-than-life, if only to serve as a contrast to the Blaisdels, Walter Lankershim and the other, major characters. As I tried to say in the DYNASTY thread, however, producing a series that aims to give its' viewers fantasy doesn't mean you have to check reality at the proverbial door. You can create, develop, cast, produce and direct a series that provides style AND substance; and in its' first season, DYNASTY did that. In the first season, you had the Carringtons' life and all the trappings that came with it, but you also had the grittier and relatively more down-to-earth world that the Blaisdels belonged to and that Krystle was emerging from; as well as the more nuanced characterizations in both worlds that, frankly, presented a more honest picture of what it means to straddle the two yet never feeling entirely comfortable in either. As I've said several times recently while rewatching the show on PlutoTV, the first season of DYNASTY had the makings of a solid show that still could have captured the zeitgeist. However, all that potential was cut short, and then discarded, because the Shapiros' ambitions for their creation outsized their actual abilities as writers and producers. They doubled down on fantasy, ignored the reality and, in the process, whether intentionally or not, they gave us quintessential camp. True, but I think their first catfight carried more weight dramatically, because it was the only one that was properly motivated. Alexis had caused Krystle's miscarriage and (temporary) infertility. (She also inadvertently caused the brain damage that would result in Krystle leaving Denver and ending up in a coma, but that's another subject). She had done everything she could to re-insert herself into Blake's and their children's lives: moving into her old art studio on the estate grounds, painting Blake's portrait, paying Sammy Jo to leave Steven, etc. What woman wouldn't feel as outraged by Alexis as Krystle felt? What woman in that same situation wouldn't feel driven to rip Alexis a new one? It all might have looked silly on-screen, but from a story standpoint, I totally get it. (Of course, if I were the Shapiros or the Pollocks, I would have saved the catfight for the season finale, but that's just me.)

There has to be a happy medium between the living room and a mockup of Winchester Cathedral, though. Thanks, @Soaplovers, for clueing me in about female serial killers. I really had no idea.

Too bad Doug Davidson (ex-Paul, Y&R) is pushing 70, or else Bradley could give him a call, lol.

Salvaging that storyline was one of the few things, I think, Hogan Sheffer did right as HW on ATWT. Granted, he went the typical, "I must've passed out in between giving birth to twins!" route in explaining how Rose and Lily looked so much.

Ah! I knew there was more to that insane story than what I remembered! Thanks, @BoldRestless! I can see why Bill Bell moved the hell on from that story. Even for a show like Y&R, which could be creepy and gothic on occasion, that story in particular feels more exploitative than your lowest budget slasher movie. "I smell pizza. Does anyone else smell pizza?" "Dude, you are SO high!" "...Wut?"

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.