~bl~

Can someone share some context of the episode?

It was a long time ago...then she was back on contract, and then on recurring again. The part that interested me was the part about the BTS person who worked at another east coast soap...who has now left. I think that person may be possible to figure out if one looks at credit lists.

The OLTL reference had to do with LGBT characters. Honestly if they had brought in Arturo and then maybe one other relative, and had them get involved with someone in the Winters family that would have been okay. But wholesale dumping one group for another after decades is insane. Basically it feels like the Winters were there just to fill a quota, which now the Latinx family does. How offensive. The thing is Latinx soap viewers if they are fluent, probably are watching other serialized programs and won't tune into Y&R. Yes UK soaps replace families on a regular basis though I only watch Hollyoaks, which has a high death count. On that show, new families come in and old ones leave, but most are not on for more than two-five years, so it is a different scenario. They didn't stop having LGBT characters on that show once the first actors who played those stories departed.

The Disney channel reran the Torklesons and Almost Home all the time years after it was on, which is why I didn't forget it. I never watched Titans, but the opening is so of its era, so that was a good share.

I think there are more repeat male names than female in soaps, but that follows the regular naming trends in the US as shown below... While I believe there are a lot of Michael's on soaps, some of the other names listed are used a lot less though I think there have been a lot of Williams (Billy) and Robert and John. There are very few Barbara's but perhaps that is partly due to ATWT's Barbara...there really aren't many Patricia's in soaps either. The Social Security website has name lists that can be sorted: The general site with this information is https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/index.html The list is 1918-2017 but only includes people who signed up for cards and not people who were unknowns at birth. (This list came from the following page and people who had more than one spelling like Sara and Sarah are under different totals) https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/century.html Males Females Rank Name Number Name Number 1 James 4,792,954 Mary 3,393,456 2 John 4,594,023 Patricia 1,564,163 3 Robert 4,571,203 Jennifer 1,465,928 4 Michael 4,315,462 Linda 1,448,097 5 William 3,662,399 Elizabeth 1,443,415 6 David 3,557,293 Barbara 1,410,059 7 Richard 2,487,983 Susan 1,106,071 8 Joseph 2,384,205 Jessica 1,043,436 9 Thomas 2,174,023 Sarah 996,554 10 Charles 2,144,937 Margaret 993,136

Didn't they move Ryan's Hope to noon once Loving came to be, and local news pulled it from certain parts of the US? I always wondered how that influenced their drop...

Some names I'd expect to be used a lot because they are popular for babies. Michael was one of the top in the US for guys for decades. I wonder how soap names compare to real life naming trends, (years ago there was an article --maybe it was TVGuide about television and naming trends. There was a mention about how the name Alan-Michael became an actual name for boys, and that it was the only hyphenated male name with some popularity...)

I think one of the reasons streaming is awful when it comes to soaps is this: fast-forwarding. If you have a DVR, you can record your show, and easily only watch the parts you want to see, and skip the advertising. The online platforms at least in my experience can be glitchy and it is a pain to even fast forward the parts of a soap you aren't interested in like flashbacks or scenes with characters you don't care for. You basically are stuck watching the entire show, plus advertising, so it takes as long or longer to watch than your DVR or live. I say longer because of a recent fight I had with watching a legal streaming show on the AMC family of networks. I tried to watch an episode, and well at the 20 minute mark it would start over at the beginning again - even if I didn't try to fast forward the beginning and sat through this portion I saw more than once - this was over a 48 hour period. If something like that happens to you enough times, you're going to probably get annoyed and stop watching.

In the 90s they still had post-season baseball games in the afternoon still and CBS had the rights. You need to check those dates in October 1991. October 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 were the ALCS (Tues, Wed, Friday, Sat,. Sun) and the NLCS were October 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16 - Wed, Thus, Sat, Sun, Mon, Wed. - 12 & 13 were Saturday and Sunday, so soaps weren't pre-empted. But on Wednesday the 9th, they wouldn't have shown two games at the same slot, so one had to be in the afternoon. I can't recall how many days didn't have soaps, but I remember seeing promos about how you won't miss anything due to baseball years ago.

I've watched or rather listened to television soaps on the radio. There used to be receivers with a television band. The radio had three bands, AM, FM, and television, and if you were in an area where you could get over the air reception, you could listen to regular tv. Once the HD conversion happened, this was no longer an option, as these machines no longer got signals as they were airing the analog broadcasts. The last time I used a machine like this was in the 90s, but honestly if someone didn't realize that it was a tv band and thought it was the only way a soap aired they didn't understand the technology (now out-of-date and obsolete) they were using.

I think on Port Charles, he wasn't supposed to be scum, but I think we're supposed to forget Scott in that time frame.

In the early years of the relationship between Ross and Blake on GL, the age difference and the past was part of the story. On one of the episodes before their 1994 wedding, Ross acknowledged to Ed about the crazy age difference between him and Blake - to the point of mentioning that he knew her as a child, and how he never thought this would happen. The age difference stopped being mentioned with regularity sometime when Rauch was in charge (though at least in a subtext way it was part of the Ben part), but through Laibson and the Dinah/Roger/Hart triangle situation, it was not just a line or subtext. That said Blake and Alan were involved prior to Ross coming to Springfield, and Alan historically was older than Ross. Before Holly and Ross became involved, they shared scenes where Holly was skeptical about Ross due to the past, and was not thrilled about the idea of working with him platonically. Ross convinced her that he changed, and he had to have or else how could he and Ed be best friends. There was one line about how he gets along with everyone in town now except Alan, doesn't like him, which was hilariously true.

I was thinking of the house that Vanessa lived in prior to remarrying Billy while Henry had a room at the Club, he spent some time there. Do you have any idea what home that was?

My GL knowledge doesn't go back as far as some others here, but this is what I believe, if anyone can update or provide additional information that would be great. I don't know when they started calling the part of town where the Spaulding Mansion was the Hill. Basically everyone outside the Coopers on 5th Street, and the Reardons/Boarding House on 7th (I think it was 7th) across the street from Cedars. I'm basing this on later 80s designations solely as I have seen more of that material than earlier. So if anyone can correct me that would be great, or at least show how things morphed. It was a big deal for Reva, when she and Josh moved as a married couple to the Hill --Revabend was somewhat out of town compared to the other houses. Ross's home was on the former Wexler property, though obviously not the main building - as Amanda gifted the Carriage House to Ross and Carrie as a wedding present. I don't know whose mansion Henry and Vanessa lived in over the years, (as by the 90s they never called it the name of Quint and Nola's place...so I didn't think it was the same house just based on location.)

As someone who even with the garbage material, still would put Steve and Carolee as one of my top 10 favorite couples in soaps ever, I have a lot of opinions on the acting issue. With David O'Brien's acting, I wonder how much of it has to do with the material in the last few years of the reruns. Carolee Campbell admitted in an interview that she wasn't fond of the last three years worth of story. Being professional is saying your lines, and not causing problems - playing a scene neutral (or even a bit wry) if one believes it is slightly out of character is more preferable to me than playing it for all its worth, when you and the audience know that it isn't right. An actor's job it to interpret the material, and considering how little time actors would have spent in daytime with the directors, if someone had longevity, they probably could do whatever they wanted within reason. It probably wasn't easy long-term for the actors, so it would influence how Carolee and Steve as characters would interact. With the comment about Pam Toll, I loved her on TD, and can completely see her as Mary Ryan. In some ways, I think the Ryan's Hope character of Jack was inspired by Nick Bellini, and Mary reminded me of Liz except with the large Irish family.