Khan

Actually, I regard SORAS'ing as a necessary evil in soaps, but I definitely see your point. I just ask that ages be consistent, for lack of a better word. Don't tell me Kendall and Josh are decades younger than Charlie and Tad when I know that ain't so!

Agree. When AMC began regarding their fans as idiots who will swallow any story, that's when the party was over.

Yes. And if they don't (anymore), then they should. A soap opera must treat its audience with the utmost respect and intelligence. We know some creative license must be taken. That's why we have SORAS'ing. But these shows need(ed) to be consistent about it. If Kendall was born before Charlie and Tad, then AMC needed to acknowledge that, regardless of how old Charlie and Tad were on the show or how old they would have been without SORAS'ing.

I don't know what to say to all that...except those critics can go [!@#$%^&*] themselves.

That's fair -- and out of respect for you, I hereby don't make that claim anymore.

Nah, I can't see Jerry Zaks having much to do with the guy who played "Peter Brady."

You have the timeline worked out well. Unfortunately, AMC suggested toward the end that Erica was born around 1962, so....

Don't make me pull a DeeeDee and ruffle your hair, R!

For those who might not know, Willie Aames (yes, that Willie Aames) portrayed Robbie Hamlin, and acclaimed stage and TV director Jerry Zaks portrayed Louis Van Dine.

IIRC, Robert Costello, who had worked with Nancy Barrett on DARK SHADOWS, asked her to play Faith after the original actress, Faith Catlin, was let go; and that Barrett agreed to step in, but only until a permanent replacement was found.

Or, you could look at it and say Erica responded the way any woman, rape victim or not, would respond if threatened that way. It isn't unreasonable. Again, though, it never was even a subtle factor in Erica's relationships with men as they were occurring. With OLTL's Viki, at least, you knew something had happened to her early in life to have caused her to create Niki to help her deal with it. That was apparent every time the tramp re-emerged to wreak havoc, lol. Now, I didn't like Michael Malone's efforts at explaining Viki's turbulent history because it demonized Victor more than ever and contradicted what we had accepted as fact (such as Niki Smith's origins -- although, there has to be at least five different versions of how she was "created" -- as well as the fact that there suddenly were other alters we'd never seen before). However, MM based it on something (namely, Viki's fractured psyche, as well as Victor's domineering relationship with his daughters) that had been part of the show all along, rather than create it from scratch. I never bought that either. To me, that's almost like explaining "after the fact" how OLTL's Jessica's alter ego, Tess, was the one really responsible for stalking and trying to kill Dorian after Jessica had miscarried her and Will's baby, actions which fans at the time felt was OOC for her. It might justify certain actions or behaviors that fans don't otherwise understand or accept, but it cannot provide the motivation for that character when it wasn't there to begin with. IOW, Erica had a breakdown because her dream marriage to Phil Brent had fallen apart; and their baby, real or not, was, in her mind, the only way to keep their marriage alive. That's the way Agnes wrote it. Assigning any other issues to it after the fact, like saying Erica had the abortion in part because of Kendall, is retconning history. I'll have to continue in another post.

Yes, along with "Miss Piper and the Cottage of Doom" (casting Carrie Nye, who'd played the shady real estate lady years before, as Carrie Caruthers) and the Roger/Rita "Hall of Mirrors" sequence (Marina, Marah and Michelle running around in a similar fun house at the story's climax). Here's what I think: allegedly, Ellen Weston was HW in the sense that she'd pitch ideas for which the rest of her staff would do the actual "heavy lifting." I think Weston's idea for this story amounted to one sentence -- namely, "Marina, Marah and Michelle uncover a secret from Alan, Billy, Buzz, Ed, and Josh's pasts." That's all. And because the other writers were stumped as to how to make that idea work, they resorted to cherry-picking from their show's own history rather than scrapping the idea altogether. Again, though, that's my theory.

Yeah, but even AM was too young, IMO. At best, Kendall should have been as old as Tad. (Same goes for Josh. If you're going to say that Erica's aborted fetus actually survived, then cast an actor who'd be as old as MEK and Chris Lawford. Then, hire Colin Egglesfield to play his son.) Given SMG's age, I would have had no objections to her being cast as, say, Bonnie McFadden. And AM definitely would have been good as Mark Dalton's daughter from a past relationship.

For starters, the fact that it was retrofitted into Erica's history. I know Susan Lucci has explained how the event filled in some blanks for her in terms of Erica's motivations. For me, though, it's enough to say Erica felt abandoned by her father and thus needed always to prove to herself that she could be loved. If Agnes Nixon had felt that the rape needed to be in Erica's background, I think it would've been there from the very beginning, just like you could say there always was an undercurrent of incest in the relationship between OLTL's Victor Lord and his daughters, Meredith and Viki, from the beginning (even if I felt saying it outright decades later damaged his character). Yet, neither the rape, nor Erica's subsequent pregnancy, nor Mona and Erica's attempts at hiding it, were there even in subtext in the original, on-air story, which is really odd when you consider that Erica must've had Kendall either at the beginning of the show, when she was busy dating Chuck (and excuse me, but you're saying she wouldn't have tried to pass off Kendall as well-to-do Chuck Tyler's baby...) and coming between Phil and Tara (...or as Phil's?), or directly before. Moreover, there's Mona's actions regarding the rape, which I felt were OOC for her. Mona loved Erica, of course, but never to the point of shielding Erica from the truth or sugarcoating it. If anything, their tension was built on the constant friction between Erica's romantic fantasies and Mona's penchant for cold realism. Mona had tried all her life to get Erica to see Eric Kane for who and what he really was, but Erica simply wouldn't believe her. In her mind, her father was a fabulous and successful man who adored his daughter, and who left only because Mona drove him away with her provincialism. So now, all of a sudden, Mona catches a glimpse of Erica coming out of the shower (or however it was explained), deduces she was pregnant and that she had been raped, and decides almost immediately to cover up the whole episode? I don't think so. I think Mona would have recognized that Erica was covering up something very traumatic and decided then-and-there that her daughter was in need of serious psychological help. Between Nick Davis and Dr. Charles Tyler, too, the Kane women would have had a very good support system. And even if Mona had decided Erica was too fragile to face the rape and her pregnancy, she most certainly would NOT have given up Kendall. I believe Mona would have consulted either Nick or Dr. Tyler as to what to do about the baby. Together, the two (or three) would have come up with a plan to conceal Erica's pregnancy for as long as possible (with Dr. Tyler, Mona's boss, acting privately as Erica's OB/GYN), then send Mona and Erica out of town with the cover story of visiting some relative (a sister, maybe, or a cousin) who was pregnant and bed-ridden. Then, when they returned to Pine Valley -- that is, if they had returned to Pine Valley, because I think Mona would have moved away permanently and made it appear as if the newborn Kendall was also her daughter -- the story would be that the relative had passed away in childbirth and that Mona had agreed to become the child's guardian, with only she, Erica, Nick and Dr. Tyler knowing the truth. Plus, let us not forget that force of nature known as Phoebe English Tyler. I've no doubt that Mona would have taken Erica to see Dr. Tyler the minute she learned of her pregnancy, something the actual, on-air story did not address. Hardly anything in that town escaped Phoebe's attention, though, so the fact that the daughter of "that Mona Kane woman" who worked for her husband, and who herself (Erica, that is) was sniffing around her stepson, was pregnant did escape her attention...it just boggles my mind. I mean, not even falling-down-drunk-in-a-wheelchair Phoebe would not have suspected something was amiss (and then try to use it as blackmail in order to get Mona out of Pine Valley). I'm just saying. Finally, there's the added and extremely unnecessary twist of saying Eric Kane himself was partially responsible for the rape. Granted, Eric was a vainglorious, self-involved bastard who thought only of his career in Hollywood. But wasn't it enough just to say he was a selfish man who disregarded the affections that others, and particularly his daughter, showed him in life? Why add the fact that he once went low enough as to pimp out his own "fifteen"-year-old daughter just to get some pedophile to agree to be in his movie? Not that Eric would not have resorted to prostitution to curry Richard Fields' favor -- it's been done in Hollywood countless times -- but I think he'd have been more likely to pick up some stars-in-her-eyes runaway at Schwab's drugstore. To me, having Eric use Erica like that (with Vanessa Bennett standing idly by and watching the whole thing, which brings up other issues I don't wish to go into right now) is about as bad as saying Victor Lord was in reality a gold-hoarding Nazi who lured pretty young things to his secret lair whenever he wasn't busy screwing his own daughter. It takes a fascinating and complex character and turns him into the devil. Uh, I hope that answers the question?

Ah, Philip Brown.

They should have cast an age-appropriate actress for Kendall, SL's ego be damned, and brought on SMG instead as Ray Gardner's illegitimate daughter, conceived during a conjugal visit with her mother while Ray was incarcerated. I could have accepted her much better as a rebellious teen whom Joe, Ruth and Tad took under their wing after her abusive mother, upset that SMG's character would accuse her latest boyfriend of trying to rape her, had thrown her out of the house.

Exactly. It was bad enough that Kendall existed. Her age, and the inaccuracy of it, just made things even worse.

In a perfect world, Destiny would have been Carla's granddaughter or great-granddaughter, tying her and Matthew's kid to two important families in OLTL's long history.

Oops.

Unless Ms. Bedsow Horgan doesn't like to speak ill of the dead (LOL!), I'd really love it if she could share more memories of working with Robert Calhoun & Mary-Ellis Bunim at ATWT, and Allen Potter at GL. How was each EP's relationships with writers, cast, crew, etc.? What were their strengths as EP's, and what were their weaknesses? (You could ask that question about Doug Marland as HW as well.) Did she learn anything -- good or bad -- from Calhoun, Bunim or Potter that she applied later on at OLTL, either as a writer, a producer, or both? I say this without the slightest hesitation: I adore Susan Bedsow Horgan as an EP. I didn't agree always with the direction of certain stories under her watch, but I loved (and missed) the romantic and adult sensibilities she infused the entire show with. In my opinion, next to her former bosses Calhoun and Potter, she's the best producer the business ever produced, and one of the reasons why I hate I never got to work on a soap is because I never got the chance to work under someone like her. (And if you want to tell her I said all that, Brandon, that's quite alright with me, lol.)

IIRC, Robin McCall (a name I love, by the way) was a con artist. Not only did they "test" her with Greg (then portrayed by Jack Armstrong) and Tad (in fact, wasn't she at least partly responsible for Tad and Hillary's breakup?), but yes, they did so with Michael Tylo's character, Matt Connolly, as well. As Carl said, though, this was a rather shaky time for AMC, as many characters who'd been front-burner for so long were either being phased out (by death or simply leaving town) or shifted to the back-burner. AMC really wouldn't get back on its feet until 1989-90. Vanessa Bell Calloway should be on Y&R right now, either as Yarmony's AA sponsor, or as Sofia's sister.

Lord.... *shakes head*

Ah, c'mon, Schemering, lay off the Mr. Big story. I thought it was great. (Even I don't think daytime should be "serious" all the time!)

Aside from the fact that it rewrote history and killed off Bill Bauer, it wasn't a bad story.

Once again, I think, network impatience led to a show's ultimate undoing. If they had stayed the course, and allowed Doug Marland to execute his vision for the show, ratings be damned, I think LOVING would have become the success ABC had hoped for within five years. Soaps can build an audience, even in these times, but they can't do it overnight.