Khan

The first ad makes it look as if Abby is standing with Sid and Karen. Was she in the room for that moment?

Right, lol? But, I've wondered whether Angela Lansbury liked the idea of Jessica teaching criminology at a university, because the season after the second show-runner, David Moessinger, left, it seems like that was dropped entirely. There's also a point in the latter seasons when I really start questioning whether Jessica needs a home base. I mean, if she wasn't still in NYC, she was traveling all over the country (and the world). It seemed like she was in Cabot Cove maybe one week out of every three months, lol.

I like that idea. I also would have had Frasier move "across the pond" and begin a new career at his OTHER alma mater, Oxford. In fact, I would have even gone as far as have the new series taped entirely in England.

For the most part, I think OLTL remained very solid in '88...but it was also clear even then that Paul Rauch and S. Michael Schnessel were starting to take the storylines in very strange directions.

I'm sure Don Hastings felt the same way, lol. For me, the problem with Bob and Miranda's marriage - aside from the fact that it never made sense even on paper - is that DH and Elaine Princi shared no chemistry. TPTB would have been better off reuniting Bob with Kim (which they did eventually) or even with Lisa. I realize I'll always be in the minority on this, but I truly thank the soap gods for Justin Deas. True, he could go over-the-top sometimes in his performances, but except for that period of time on GL when even he admitted he was on auto-pilot, he was never, ever, ever boring to watch.

Could someone who'd know explain Brian Emerson's backstory to me? Reading these latest synopses, I get the impression that Stephanie gave birth to him in Oklahoma City. Yet, whenever I've seen the character, he speaks with a thick "Noo Yawk" accent. Was Brian adopted out of Oklahoma and raised in NY?

I'm not sure either, @te. Younger viewers (who aren't in bed already) tend not to be home on Saturday nights if they can help it. I wonder if they would have been more successful airing, say, on Monday nights, as an alternative to "Monday Night Football"?

Agree. When Frederick was a child, he came off more like his parents than he did his grandfather. I realize people can change as they grow older, but not to that extent, lol.

I thought so, too! It was just so out of left field that it almost gave me whiplash, lol!

In his Archive of American Television interview, James Burrows talks briefly about William Devane's audition. He says that Devane was "very good" and that he brought an "old sage" quality to Sam that would have been interesting to watch. They really wanted to cast Devane, too, more than they did Fred Dryer, who certainly had Sam's swagger, but who was very inexperienced at that point. However, everyone involved in the process - Burrows, Glen & Les Charles, their agents, the brass at NBC and at Paramount - agreed that the chemistry between Ted Danson and Shelley Long was just too undeniable. (Also of note: years ago, I read that Devane chose to perform barefoot at his audition, which turned out to be an unfortunate choice, because he accidentally stepped on a broken glass but carried on with the audition anyway. IIRC, Burrows and the Charles brothers were more than a little freaked out about that, lol.) The first time I saw that ending, I thought, "Wow, what an odd way to wrap up an episode." But that was the Lechowicks for you: always turning left when story logic says go right. I tend to go back and forth on my opinions about the Lechowicks and their work on KL. On the one hand, at a time when the other primetime soaps were getting stale, they smartly infused KL with more humor, more irreverence, more unpredictability, so that you, as a viewer, never knew what to expect from one episode to the next. On the other hand, however, it's only in retrospect that you realize: 1) the Lechowicks adopted a reductive and less nuanced view of the characters that really hurt the show in the long run; and 2) they leaned too often on their narrative tricks, especially in the latter part of their run, to camouflage illogical plotting - and on a show like KL that became more plot-driven as time went on, that could be very exasperating to experience.

In a way, I see Rauch's point. For one thing, because ALS remains incurable, we do know the outcome, so the suspense is already gone. (As Agnes Nixon reportedly told Michael Malone after OLTL's Megan died from complications of lupus: "And then what?"). For another, I think it's just depressing to watch even a fictional character go through the stages of a disease that we know is real and can result in only one outcome. You want to entertain and even educate your audience, but you also want to give them some hope, which you can't do when the disease they're battling is an incurable one.

I know TPTB at both shows (DALLAS and DYNASTY) seriously considered a crossover at one point, but I'm glad that the plans, if there were any, ultimately fell through. IMO, DALLAS and DYNASTY were pitched differently. DYNASTY was the epitome of glamour and high camp, whereas DALLAS seemed more grounded. On the other hand, if DALLAS had ever considered a crossover with FALCON CREST, I think the results would have been quite interesting to watch, lol.

IMO, they took RE's Delia in a different direction almost out of necessity. IK said it best in the chat: she (IK) was a "street kid" from Brooklyn, and that quality bled into her performance as Delia (who likely grew up in a neighborhood similar to IK's real-life one). RE, on the other hand, seemed classier, more upscale, like an Upper East Side version of Delia, so it made sense to surround her Delia in more posh surroundings, like the Crystal Palace. Admittedly, I didn't see much of Delia's faking blindness, because I was just getting tired of the show's claustrophobic storytelling by that point, but I know that the whole premise of that storyline sounded so preposterous to me that it must have been played for laughs, or else how could anyone involved in it get through the damn thing without collapsing into laughter or frustration (or both)?

Great chat! Thanks for sharing, @Soapsuds! I'd have to agree with IK. IMO, Patrick James Clarke looked like he belonged in that family in ways that the other Pat recasts didn't. He could've worked as a Frank recast or as a Pat recast. Michael Fairman mentioned people in the chat who said Robin Mattson was "boring" as a Delia recast. RM was definitely miscast as Delia, but I don't think her lackluster performances were entirely her fault. I think IK hit the nail on the head when she suggested that RM might have been scared playing Delia. Plus, I get the impression that ABC was interfering tremendously with RH at that time, and that between them, Pat Falken Smith, Joe Hardy and the directors, she was probably struggling to get any kind of handle on the role.

IMO, Christopher Atkins was just an odd actor for DALLAS to create a brand-new character for. He would've fit much more easily into DYNASTY or THE COLBYS.

I think that's because Ed Trach still believed in GL, even though others at PGP and at CBS probably wanted it gone.

It's insane to me that CAPITOL was cancelled despite being in the middle of the ratings pack.

It's hard for me to picture Loni with the rest of this cast just because I don't automatically think of her when I think of "ladies of the '80's." "WKRP in Cincinnati" was her claim to fame; and that, IMO, was more of a '70's show than an '80's one.

Please let there be a Donna/Nicollette confrontation as good as this one:

In a way, I think Angela's tightly controlled emotions were what made her more human and relatable than either J.R. or Alexis. Angela was a single-minded person. Her grandfather - at least, I *think* it was her grandfather - had instilled in her a passion to turn Falcon Crest into the "jewel of the Tuscany Valley." As head of her family's winery, Angela, like any woman looking to make her mark on a male-dominated industry, knew that her work was cut out for her. However, she was determined to make her grandfather's vision for the land a reality at any costs. Therefore, Angela had no time for displaying warmth or vulnerability, not even toward members of her own family, because doing so would have distracted her from her life's work: to make FC the best in the valley, and to ensure that it stayed that way for generations to come.

For me, the biggest flaw in the Empire Valley storyline is that the emotional stakes that made an otherwise incomprehensible story like the Wolfbridge Group so palpable just weren't there. Nearly everyone was affected by Wolfbridge, but Empire Valley seemed to pull the focus away from what mattered. I don't think Ann Marcus gets enough credit for salvaging s13 -- not just from the disaster that that season had been, but also from the latter half of the Lechowicks' tenure, when the show became more about shocking viewers, and less about telling moving stories. For the first time in years, KNOTS felt real and grounded again.

I agree, @DRW50. Tina wasn't malicious the way other soap vixens could be. She always operated under the belief that she was doing the right thing. However, one dumb decision on her part always begat another, even dumber one. Pretty soon, Tina would find herself backed into a corner. As a viewer, part of the fun was watching her try and squirm out of that trouble, knowing (even if she didn't) that it all would blow up in her face eventually. IMO, Sam Hall, Peggy O'Shea (who was HW'ing the show throughout '86) and Gordon Russell were the best writers to work on OLTL. The three were masters at writing umbrella storylines like the ones you're describing, @soapfave06, where even the smallest, simplest event could ripple throughout all of Llanview. They also knew how to take some very far-fetched ideas and ground them in enough reality that you didn't mind it; and there was an earthiness to their work, too, that really helped the show stand out from the others at that time.

I know many GL fans don't love this period in the show's history, but I do. I love mid-to-late '80's GL as much as I love any era of GL's history up to the late '90's, when I *really* thought the wheels had come off the old wagon. Perhaps it was due to the level of acting, or perhaps it was due to the fact that even when the show was experiencing a run of bad stories, there still were great moments and scenes to be found. I don't know. But the truth is that I miss just about all of GL - the good, the bad and everything in-between - today as much as I did when I watched the final episode.

Frankly, I find the timing of it all suspicious. Twitter users far and wide were expressing their outrage over the SCOTUS rulings on affirmative action, LGBTQ+ discrimination and the (now-dead) student debt relief plan. The next thing anyone knew, users were getting crazy "Rate Limit Exceeded" messages; then, Elon Musk, citing "data scraping" or some such nonsense, announced the new rate limits (which are supposed to be temporary, but we'll see, lol). Moreover, I've read that it's all a result of Elon Musk failing to pay Twitter's Google Cloud bill. I don't doubt that that's true. Again, however, the timing is what strikes me as odd. I think - and this is just my theory - that Elon has picked this particular moment to do what he had set out to do at the beginning - namely, to break Twitter for good. I mean, it seems awfully silly to waste $44 billion on a company you plan to destroy. However, as the ridiculous news about his and Mark Zuckerberg's planned UFC-ish match has proven, Elon Musk is a spoiled, immature, overgrown brat, who WOULD think nothing of wasting billions on wrecking a social media company because they were mean to him or something.

FWIW, I am a Twitter user; I use the app on both my desktop and my phone; and I'm experiencing difficulties using the app on both at the moment, too.