soapfan770

Ladd was done wrong by the show. Not to spoil you but sadly beginning in Season 7 Ladd as Emma stopped appearing in every episode and for the last 2 seasons only had shortened arcs for better for worse. Emma’s story is wrapped up and given a happy ending in the finale but between the hastily rewriting of the final episodes and as @kalbir mentioned the budget, Ladd wasn’t rehired the same way she was for the S8 finale. Indeed. I know you previously mentioned you couldn’t point where but I did deduce to a point somewhere S7 where there was at least 1-2 eps where it was just Angela, Lance, Richard, and Maggie and no one else of the main cast appeared, which is pretty slack and unbalanced.

Agreed; I think the only thing lacking was the show didn’t bring back at least Emma onscreen and maybe have Angela bring in at the very least Cole to help her get FC back. Tbh that would be interesting, as long as it was Maggie herself lol.

Falcon Crest was the only one of the big 4 that never did a reunion movie. Had they been able to do one, what do you all think an appropriate plot would have been? Had one been done 92/93, I could have seen a holiday themed reunion movie in which Angela not only invites her absent family members ie Julia, Emma, Cole, and Vickie (with Jamie Rose returning) for the holiday, but then conspire with Lance to have them all stay permanently. And maaayyybe reunite with Peter. Idk that’s all I could think of.

Good point. JR Returns had earlier in the season back on a Friday night and did very successful. But you do have a good point about the quality of the story for the miniseries lol. Plus unlike Dallas & Dynasty, Knots had been neatly wrapped up. JR Returns and the Dynasty miniseries allowed for those two shows at least were able to wrap up some loose ends.

@DRW50 @kalbir @Paul Raven @Khan @Soapsuds @Vee @te. TV ratings for the week of May 5-11 1997. The first half of Back to the Cul-de-Sac did fairly well at #23, but then part 2 ratings weren’t as good and finished at #51 on a Friday night and behind NBC and CBS in the slot….I’m surprised CBS didn’t try for a Sunday and Tuesday night showing since that was their traditional movie nights at that point, or at least Tuesday and Wednesday? Meanwhile Pacific Palisades just did not do well at all did it? What a huge drop-off from lead-in 90210 here getting less than half of 90210’s viewers. Would it have done better paired with MP?

@DRW50 @Khan @kalbir @Mitch64 @SFK @Vee @Soapsuds @dc11786 I appreciate seeing the Frank & Eleni clips and episodes again. I loved MK’s Eleni during the whole story with Alan-Michael and SS Blake as a rival along with Frank’s unrequited love there 1991-92. Unfortunately after Kanakaredes left the two replacement actresses, Kaplan and ER were very subpar compared to MK and the character was also neglected so badly it was hard to care about. Frank having the affair with Signy Coleman’s Annie Dutton was the most interesting thing the couple had in years yet they wrote off Eleni for good shortly afterwards and Frank for whatever reason just existed there for the rest of the show.

Thanks @Soaplovers for the details! It’s been ages since I watched that show I do remember liking back in the day and catching a few eps. You’re right about the bad timing and not so good timeslot at the time (Friday nights on Fox were always notoriously cursed outside of The X-Files). I actually remember Friday nights that fall being my “soap night” and living in New Mexico at the time it was Providence on NBC at 7, Pasadena on Fox at 8 along with the second season of That’s Life on CBS, and Once and Again on ABC at 9. Sadly 3 of the 4 shows were treated badly and shafted. Providence actually ended up ranked and tied at #27 for that season, but it would end the following season. Primetime soaps after that took a break until The OC, One Tree Hill, and of course Desperate Housewives ramped it back up.

I miss us talking about Y&R as well!! Even though it was uneven and had its flaws, I enjoyed some of his work there from 2022-24 but then losing AL Summer and killing off Heather, Chance Damian, and Cole was just absurd. Bringing back Cane, a shining achievement JG had on his belt by ditching the character, was undone. How do you destroy your own success? Since then the show reeks of desperation (Matt, Patty, psycho Mariah) and devolved into complete trash. Obviously JG has lost control at the helm if he’s saying he needs to focus on his writing. On the flip side the man’s head needs to examined given his long tendency to sabotage himself as well a write some awful depressing OCD story of a preteen boy being institutionalized while touting it was a touching tribute to his daughter dealing with OCD. Yikes.

Steve Kent is gone as the Executive in Charge of nothing? I didn’t know, thank GOD! Long overdue, especially with Y&R being such a sorry unwatchable mess for the past year.

I will echo a little bit what @YRBB said, I definitely start with Dallas as well!! Even though I agree Knots is the best out of all the 80’s primetime soaps, Dallas is still the gold standard. There’s something remarkably fantastic about Dallas 1978-1982, and it still makes for some very compelling drama to this day. Once the overall episodic 78-79 season comes to Julie Grey’s return and murder, the show is on fire. Knots of course as others the best and most consistent soap overall, particularly Season 4-12. Dynasty has a slow build, but then Seasons 2-4 and parts of 5 are fun and on fire. A mix of compelling drama and sheer entertainment for the most part. There’s an amazing final season, however it also takes three very bad, utterly pointless and bloated seasons to get to that point. Then there is FC. Out of the big 4 80’s soaps, it to me is the funniest and most charming out of the four. Yet it is also the most wildly inconsistent. The first three and a half seasons and the 6th season are good to great. While IMO there are worse parts to FC (parts of Season 5, the entirety of a very boring and miserable Season 8), the final season is definitely a completely different season and feels like a different season of another TV show. At the least the show concludes on a high note. 90’s soaps? Definitely recommend Sisters, specifically the first 4 seasons make an almost perfect series. Sadly like FC the last two seasons the show becomes unhinged but the series concludes on a high note. Melrose Place is like Dynasty, slow build in Season, wild ride for S2-S4, crash and burn for S5 and S6, and then a more or less solid final season. 90210, Party of Five, and Providence, and Once and Again have their ups and downs but definitely still worth checking out.

Just QUIT altogether!!!!

Thanks for the tag @Franko!!!

The idea alone sounds interesting and with the right talent both on-screen and behind the screen maybe one of them could have pulled it off. Problem was all four of the big primetime soaps often didn’t develop a good secondary cast in addition to the core. I could see some ideas working out like focusing on Knots younger cast ie Olivia, Paige, Michael, Eric etc. and/or the Williams family or FC giving us lighter fare like focusing on Emma’s misadventures during the summer; but nobody was going to put up with stuff like focusing on Amanda and/or Leslie Carrington on Dynasty, Casey and/or James on Dallas, Vickie or the Season 8 younger cast on FC, or I could easily see Knots deciding to introduce new psycho obsessed with Gary just for the summer.

Thanks for sharing @Paul Raven . Interestingly I had shared a Margaret Ladd fan letter in the FC week thread a couple months ago from 1988 which also mentioned as well that FC was also looking at moving away from a serialized format. Obviously someone must have have looked at Freilich’s short term arcs on that show and was like “uhhh, nooooo…” @kalbir Thanks! That’s why I came looking to this thread after seeing it on FB in multiple Dallas groups. The 1996 reunion movie always represents the true ending of Dallas for me.

Oh that limo scene is everything lol! Actually for me the pieces slowly start to fall into place once Sheri Anderson leaves and the OG season bible was then heavily rewritten. Problem was by that point the show only had Richard, Lance, and Pilar to lean on with newbies Danny, Sydney, Genele (S9’s highlight for me) and a Maggie clone thrown in the mix. It didn’t work. Come to think of it, Angela and Genele never shared a single scene together. LMAO I can only imagine what occurred if and when they did meet.

@Khan @kalbir @Romalotti There may be some truth there… The reason for Angela being written off the show is primarily JANE WYMAN's frail state of health; doctors advised her to quit working. Besides, the new producers consider this as the perfect opportunity to enhance their idea to lead the program into a new direction — another bad decision, as the rest of the season will prove. Before LORIMAR and JANE WYMAN mutually decided Angela would be going into a coma for the major part of the season, the new producing and writing staff had even crazier ideas for season 9. According to a crew member, who wants to remain unnamed, JANE WYMAN was so shocked about the first draft of the seasonal bible that she angrily demanded her character rather be killed in order not to have to play what she felt was disgusting. The idea about the coma was the final compromise. Wyman also apparently convinced the crew to give the show a proper resolution and happy ending, hence why the second half on Season 9 was heavily rewritten and actually starts feeling like FC all over again, especially with the last 3 eps.

Thanks @Paul Raven Interesting that Tartikoff was still toying with primetime soaps this late in the game despite having an alleged disdain for them. He actually never abandoned this idea, towards the end of his time at NBC in 1991 he actually said this in an NBC interview with the L.A. Times on 5/6/91: Above all, says Tartikoff, networks “have to back up and start with the viewer. If the viewer wants to watch ‘L.A. Law,’ then you damn well better figure out a way to pay for it.” As an example, he says that CBS may have erred in canceling “Dallas”--which ended Friday--and might have gotten a lot more mileage out of it with some ingenuity. To wit: “ ‘Dallas’ was getting a 21% audience share. Now why is CBS, which averaged a 21 share, taking it off? Because the costs have gone up, the demographics aren’t great and they can only play it once (soap operas do poorly in reruns). You could reduce the cost by cutting loose some expensive cast members and treating it like they do in daytime when somebody gets too big: Start giving storylines to new characters and grow another generation of characters, like we’re doing on ‘L.A. Law.’ “Also, the audience would watch ‘Dallas’ all year long, but every year ‘Dallas’ and ‘Knots Landing’ have stopped in May and not come back until September. The habit is broken. And you know from daytime serials, that habit should be nurtured. If you can make 265 episodes each year of ‘Days of Our Lives,’ I’ve got to believe you can make 40 to 45 episodes of ‘Knots Landing.’ It’s not that hard. Give the audience what they want. They want to watch it every week. “Maybe some of the cast doesn’t want to work that hard. So start some of your newer storylines and newer characters when you hit the month of June and build them up. You’ve got to be thinking that way.” Obviously now I have to wonder if Aaron Spelling and Fox took interest into what Tartikoff was trying say here, because just 2 months later 90210 would go ahead and start airing Season 2 in July ‘91 to considerable success.

@kalbir @Khan @Soapsuds @DRW50 @Chris B @Vee @slick jones I didn’t know where else to post this, but I did feel slightly attacked when I watched this last night since I’d probably be watching this on some Fast channel 🤣🤣🤣

@YRfan23 The ep is available at the moment free for streaming on Pluto TV I just checked 😊

Yes!! I actually watched that episode live when it aired. The funniest bit was when Fran told JC about her mother being nauseous from the facelift 🤣

31 Years Ago:

Yeah I had just mentioned Taxi’s issues after ABC moved it out of its Tuesday night slot along with moving Soap out of its Thursday night slot to unsuccessfully counter program against DS and Facts of Life. A darn shame.

Interesting topic thanks for starting @Paul Raven , a reverse of our usual discussion. Some other examples I can think of that worked over the years: As @kalbir has pointed out before, moving L.A. Law from Friday night at 10 to Thursday nights at 10. Just over 14 years later, CBS moved growing new hit CSI from Friday nights at 9 to Thursday nights at 9 in February 2001. The results were absolutely spectacular for CBS and shattered NBC’s longtime dominance on Thursday nights. Fox moving the X-Files from Friday nights to Sunday nights in November 1996, although the show had already become Fox’s first top 10 hit in the Friday night slot basically the move to Sundays solidified a widespread audience and Top 20 ratings. Lastly one last Thursday moved that worked was ABC moving Grey’s Anatomy to Thursday nights 20 years ago.

@Khan That thought had crossed my mind too lol. I could still see CBS debuting at 9/8 in ‘84 following The Mississippi had it been a hit but now my next question is would MSW have then gone the way of Crazy Like a Fox or would have been successful enough CBS just held off on Sunday night movies? Hardcastle & McCormick? That show always struck me as the poor man’s Simon & Simon 🤣🤣🤣 This is probably the better alternative solution. The Mississippi could have easier aired at 8/7 and be something fresh on the Friday night lineup. CBS seemed interested in trying to program Saturday nights again in the 83-84 season, if they were still so intent to keep Dukes I would have started their new Saturday night lineup off with Dukes and then have something like Cutter to Houston air after it.

This SOU cover from 2001 made think about how much ATWT wasted MBE and Sierra throughout the last decade. What were your all thoughts?