Khan

I'd never seen these ads. Love the dancing stuff; cheesy, but who cares.

The way Laurence Lau prances around in that first clip, you'd think his Jamie would rather be w/ Jake. ;-)

You know, I would have loved to have seen what happens when Val's biological father re-enters the fray. Who is he? Where did he come from? What has he been up to? How does all that affect his relationships w/ Gary, Lilimae and Val, as well as their relationships with each other?

In keeping with KNOTS' tradition of hiring trained stage actors, too, I might have cast someone like Jason Robards or E.G. Marshall to have played that part.

Did Val ever really have any good stories after the baby saga? Did Olivia have any worth after the drug use/Peter murder stories?

Let's put it this way: they could have, had more creative people been in charge. I loved the Lechowicks' work, but I also believe they are better at plot-driven material than character-driven material.

To me Lillimae was just a weak character and the only reason she worked was Julie Harris and the initial concept of the character. I would have liked her more if she were a grifter who brought out mixed emotions in everyone and played on those emotions. That's basically what she was in her first appearance. When she came back and they tried to make her more sympathetic and treated her as a mother to Val, I had little patience for her.

On the other hand, Carl, if Lilimae had remained a grifter, never repentant for any of her misdeeds, both past and present, I think the audience would've become tired of her much sooner. Of course, Julie Harris is like Beverlee McKinsey: she can play the hell out of anything and keep you glued to the set, no matter what. So who knows?

Lillimae seemed to work best when she had stories about men who seem nice, take advantage of her, and go insane. That worked well with Chip and especially with Joshua. But you can't do that again and again.

Correct.

Part of me wishes David Jacobs had been more open-minded about Joshua's place on the show. For one thing, I think Alec Baldwin would have stayed much longer with it (if only for the opportunity to continue working with Julie Harris, if nothing else) and become an even bigger asset to KNOTS overall. More importantly, even if the writers had played out his arc as planned, that would have set the stage for an electrifying "redemption arc," something the primetime soaps never seemed to want to do. Joshua never would have had to become a total saint, especially w/ the way Baldwin played him; but I feel like he could've been KNOTS' answer to GUIDING LIGHT's Roger Thorpe.

And I don't think Anne recovered until the final season. I didn't like the silly comedy character she turned into. Especially the homeless plot. By that point the character lost all her appeal for me.

I didn't like those stories for Anne either, but I think they were written to compensate for the fact that Michelle Phillips just wasn't as strong as Donna Mills had been in corporate-centric stories.

If it had been up to me, I would have written out Michael [...], Olivia [...], Lillimae [...], and Val [...]. I also would have been very tempted to write Mack out [...] because it would have left the show with less room to stand on with Karen/Mack raising Meg [...] as it took away a ton of potential drama with Greg trying to deal with a child who reminded him of a woman who loved him yet also deeply hurt him [...].

I'm with you on Michael and maybe Mack. But Olivia? Lilimae? Val?

Here's what I would have done:

1) Keep Laura, Lilimae and Val, but let go of Anne, Ben, Cathy, Jill, Paige and other supporting characters. (Especially with Abby and Olivia still around, Anne and Paige are redundant.)

2) Reunite Gary and Val, while simultaneously splitting up Karen and Mack. (Michele Lee was right: KNOTS needed at least one stable married couple on the front burner. And Gary and Val, IMO, had come to a place where reconciliation seemed like the best option, not continued (and forced) separation thanks to psychos like Danny and Jill.) Give the two some time to be support for other characters, and let them (and their fans) enjoy some marital bliss before plunging them again into drama.

3) Have Laura divorce Greg, as well, leading to an acrimonious custody fight for Meg. Mack agrees to represent Laura, thus setting the stage for a possible Mack/Laura relationship, which seriously tests her friendship with Karen and places Val and Gary in the middle. (At the same time, Abby seizes an opportunity to hook up with Greg, which will impact her and Olivia's relationship as well.) If Kevin Dobson and Constance McCashin exude genuine chemistry together, pursue the relationship all the way to marriage. If not, then write out Mack at the appropriate moment.

4) Karen cannot take the pressure of her pending divorce and Mack and Laura's affair and ends up becoming dependent on prescription drugs again. Eventually, Eric, now working at Lotus Point, agrees with Abby that she needs to step away from the business, sending Karen even further on a downward spiral. By this point, either Mack/Laura are working out or not. Either way, Karen's relapse provides a catalyst for her, Mack and Laura to resolve their differences (with Mack leaving town soon thereafter, depending on the success of his and Laura's affair).

5) By the following season, Karen is back on the road to recovery: she's out of rehab and even back in school, pursuing a college degree. (There's also a potential, and potentially messy, new relationship on the horizon with her professor.) And though she's no longer working at Lotus Point, Eric is there to represent her interests; and thanks to Abby's systematically forcing her own nephew out, she and Karen are guaranteed to keep locking horns for some time to come.

I guess Loving ground people down.

The network always had such ridiculous expectations for LOVING. They wanted it to be the next AMC or OLTL, but they never realized that it took time for AMC and OLTL to become the monster hits that they were.

"Like Brandon"? More like "Like Brandon's chest".

Colonel Winston Mayer, as played by Daniel Hugh Kelly, was probably one of AS THE WORLD TURNS' biggest "wasted opportunities" in its final years. Here we had a quintessential, conservative military officer, who could not and would not accept his son's homosexuality - and who, in my mind, was so outraged by it, b/c it touched off similar struggles with his own sexuality beneath the surface - and instead of dealing with all that and maybe telling a real envelope-pushing story (yes, America, there are families where a father and son are both gay), they took their usual cheap and easy way out and turned him into the latest Psycho of the Month.

Laura was a little too "real" for an increasingly one-dimensional set of characters.

Honestly...? I think KNOTS wrote out Laura, not because they were overbudget (I mean, they probably were overbudget, but it wasn't as if she was the only one who could've been cut loose), but because the Lechowicks could not write for Constance McCashin the way they could for others. Like you said, Laura was definitely more complex than Karen, Val, even Abby. She was neither a total bitch, like Abby, nor a total heroine, like Karen and "poor Val"; and the Lechowicks, as writers and producers, were simply too incapable to know how to handle that.

I've always said that as influential as KNOTS was on me as a writer, the show really lost something when they let go of McCashin and Julie Harris (Lilimae). Up to that point, they were often the go-to examples of how KNOTS' cast was a proverbial cut above the other primetime soaps.

Yeah, I'd love to see Lucinda try and land some defense drafting and engineering contracts via the appropriate departments at WorldWide. Lucinda would argue how it would bring much-needed jobs and money to Oakdale, but Luke would spearhead a campaign to stop it (and maybe fall in love with an employee @ WorldWide in the process).

I swear there was one point on AMC [...] that the music was so loud that it drowned out the dialogue

And that was a bad thing? ;-)

Perhaps this has been asked and answered already, but does anyone here know what happened to Diana Walker, who portrayed Mary? There are a lot of actors from WTHI and LIAMST I've always been curious about, and van der Vlis and Walker are always at the top of the lists.

There's definitely been a noticeable lack of edge on AMC since the NY/LA move. We got bitchy, snarky Annie and we get some shirtlessness every now and then, but not a whole lot. I wonder how much of that has to do with David and Donna. They're P&G people, and those shows were always more conservative than the ABC soaps. GL was probably the least sexy of all soaps (besides Y&R) in its last five to ten years.

And when it tried to be sexier, particularly during the John Conboy/Ellen Weston era, it was either laughable or offensive and laughable.

Maggie DePriest did Anna Stuart's character on ANOTHER WORLD, Donna Love, no favors either.

Is that Stephen Burleigh (ex-Dr. Gary Walton, SEARCH FOR TOMORROW) playing Mike Powers?

He isn't bad. He certainly isn't unattractive, lol. (Then again, I'm biased when it comes to pre-1990's soap actors. I feel even the weakest ones are miles above what passes for "good" in this business today. Plus, I'm more likely to "swoon" over a Stephen Burleigh than I would over, say, a Roger Howarth? But that's just personal taste.) More importantly, he has a nice chemistry with Hillary Bailey Smith, who's playing Kit McCormick. (Their sparring sorta reminds me of ATWT's Tom and Margo, of all things, lol.) I mean, the dialogue or even situation (stuck together in an abandoned/isolated cabin in the middle of a snowdrift) isn't terribly original - perhaps, if the writers had worked a little harder at it, it might've been less cliched. But at least Burleigh and Smith are behaving like adults, and their characters' relationship comes across as a nice sort of counterpoint to Matt and Maggie's.

There are two memories from my early years that I will always hold dear to me. One was Nola Reardon's "Casablanca" fantasy on GUIDING LIGHT. The other was Jenny and Jesse on the run in NYC. And that's something no heartless daytime executive will ever take away.

It all comes down to this: GL's ratings fell after Douglas Marland left, and either CBS or P&G (or both) blamed that on the actors and characters who'd been front-burner during that time rather than the fact that the stories were just too confusing for audiences to follow.

Even after Quint and Nola's stories had begun to get a little...silly, I still loved the duo. Lisa Brown and Michael Tylo's chemistry was just that magical to me. In fact, the only couple who comes close to rivaling them for my affections are AMC's Greg and Jenny. Having said that, though, if GL had chosen to do right by the characters and kill off Quint before they had had the chance to "ruin" either him or Nola...? Well, I won't lie. I would've hated it, probably. But, then again, at least the beauty and purity of their early romance would have remained intact.

It especially frustrates me because I felt like they finally got Barbara and Lucinda again, after a decade or more of misuse, and had incredible newcomers like Reid. It just wasn't time to go.

Screw the ratings and all the other excuses, too. ATWT died, because Les Moonves wanted his wife to have another show on his network. Pure, and simple.

John Wesley Shipp also quit, as he wanted to do a play and they kept telling him he had to make a decision now, and that he was upset about changes to his character.

Well, it did seem odd for the Kelly/Morgan relationship to end that quickly over something as (relatively) small as his jealousy. But I think the real issue here is that Quint & Nola began to take up a lot of the show (the same way Reva and the Lewises would down the road), and others resented that, b/c TPTB treated them like second-class citizens. Plus, with Marland's departure and Pat Falken Smith's arrival, a lot of the stories were suddenly in freefall, and very little of what any character was doing at that moment made sense either to the actor(s) or to the audience.

I don't know. I know many feel only Marland could write for them.

That's because, for the most part, those who came after him didn't have the same feel for Gothic romance that he did. (As usual, though, I think Nancy Curlee would have done right by them, had she been given the opportunity. Next to Marland, she seemed to be the one who "got" GUIDING LIGHT the best.) Once Marland left, Quint and Nola's relationship became more about wild adventure - which was cute, don't get me wrong, but it never had the same enchanting air of mystery that their earlier story did. Also, Quint, an eccentric (and possibly antisocial) archaeologist and explorer, was thrust suddenly into the corporate sphere thanks to a paternity reveal that was entirely unnecessary (Henry Chamberlain could have been like a father to him instead of his actual one - and don't get me started on Quint suddenly became "Sean Ryan"); and Nola just became an all-around kook and businesswoman. (Remember "Nolaerobics"?) These new functions just didn't suit them all that well, IMO.

they were seriously getting married up against a wall, with the four guests standing behind them in a line.

Perhaps, Mallet and Marina were going for a "police lineup" theme?

In spite of the cheapness, I have never understood why the set they started using in 2006 looked so terrible and un-hospital like.

A good set designer knows how to work with any budget, large or small. That set looked so awful, though, it had me wondering if Ellen Wheeler had hired some high school drama club to re-design Cedars just to save a few bucks.

Ross Marler's funeral was an ITL. 'Nuff said. :-(

I think the show hit on a good thing when they had Ben/Val and Abby/Gary and that both characters were strengthened by being apart.

It did ... until they got stuck. As "perfect" as Ben/Val and Abby/Gary were, Ben and Val almost Mack and Karen redundant; and Gary couldn't stay married to Abby, either, and continue putting up w/ her machinations w/o looking like a complete idiot.

For all the talk of the public being too stupid to understand dense plotting, long-term story was what helped you hang on with Knots when the story itself wasn't the best.

Case in point: the Wolfbridge Group. Even David Jacobs has admitted he didn't understand the story. LOL!