LoyaltoAMC

Kind of hazy on this, but I think AMC either hit or tied for #1 twice in 1987. The first was Memorial Day week (which I seem to recall was fired EP Jorn Winther's last week of episodes before new EP Steve Schenkel started appearing in the credits the following week) and then again in late November/early Decemeber with the climax of the Silver Kane/Damon Lazarre storyline. Damn, this all seems like yesterday. Hard to believe it was nearly 30 years ago!

Thanks so much for the 70s pics. Have never seen any of them before. I think what struck me most was how godawful cheap some of the sets looked.

Anyone know why Irna and subsequent writers chose to SORAS the Stewart children so drastically? That effectively threw Patsy Bruder prematurely into matriarch territory. If you started watching the show in 80s, you would've thought that Ellen was Nancy's contemporary, when in actuality she was part of the Bob/Kim/Penny etc. generation.

From what I read, Dwyer's changes weren't meant to better reflect her character, rather to make the lines more simplistic. From what I read, her suggested changes would essentially negate Lemay's intended subtext. No doubt, thought, that Lemay and Rauch played faves. Hugh Marlowe was horribly wooden, yet was never fired.

RIP. Was she really that terrible? I heard that she was fired because she depended too heavily on cue cards. In her WLS interview from a couple of years back, Judith Barcroft (Lenore) mentioned that she maintained contact with Dwyer throughout the years.

That's funny. In an interview, I think it was also with welovesoaps, Claire stated that Agnes wanted Julia for Brooke. Claire was very diplomatic about it, but she did make is sound like some power play on Agnes's part. Maybe she just remembers things differently.

Regarding Julia Barr/Reenie Szabo, Claire Labine said that Agnes wanted Julia for AMC, so they had to let her go. What Agnes wanted, Agnes got!

Don't recall who Horan played. It's not in his imdb bio. It must've been between his AW and GH stints. He may have been a drifter type. I don't think he was related to any of the major characters. I do remember him shirtless a lot LOL. If I'm not mistaken, he shared scenes with the actress who played Pam Lewis. Pam I think was Brian Lewis's niece. She definitely wasn't Biff's sister. Re Jane Elliot, I don't think she was ever intended to be a major character. She was great friends with Marland, and I think he asked her to appear to add a little "daytime star power" to the struggling show. I don't think the role was ever intended to be very big. Near the end, they introduced a character named Isabel Kitteridge. Must've been around the same time Jane Elliot joined. In fact I remember a dinner party hosted by Miranda at Brian Lewis's in which we first meet Madge and Isabel. Looking back, I think Isabel may have been one of Miranda's lovers. Anyone else remember this character. Sorry, I was 15 at the time. Even though I watched every episode, I only remember bits and pieces and I don't recall the scope of the storyline.

Thanks for the info. It sounds very interesting. It's a shame that so soon after this was when the next puritanical wave hit, because of AIDS and other issues - it just retreated cable back to safer areas. I'd really like to see this show. I'd especially like to see Lara Parker, and also to see what Marland's writing was like, since his writing after this veered more towards a family-oriented area, with less cheese or camp.

On the surface it was very racy and very adult, but at the heart was a very traditional soap, with intergenerational and class conflict, and with Marland's trademark well-conceived and layered stories & characters. In a way, it was to ATWT what Curb Your Enthusiam was to Seinfeld LOL..essentially the same show but much more provocative and with "dirty words" and nudity. It was obvious that Showtime wanted to have a soap with the basic daytime template, but with the erotic factor amped up 1,000%. Looking back it wasn't really that campy. I never found Marland's stuff very campy anyway. At least not intentional camp. Even the craziest stuff he wrote with a straight face, and Eden was really no different.

Thank you both for all of this information. I still hope we can see this someday, as it is something very rare and I wish they'd try it again - instead Cinemax just has these little limited run soft porn things (Lingerie, Life on Top, Forbidden Science, Co-Ed Confidential, now, Femme Fatales). Why not try a show that will run a bit longer?

Did New Day in Eden have any nudity?

Yeah, there was some brief upper body female nudity with at least of the characters, Pam Lewis. She was the girlfriend of the Jack Wagner character. I think she was trying to become a rock singer or something. I remember a scene of her swimming nude in the pool at the Lewis mansion one moonlit night. I think that was the scene where she has a lesbian experience, being seduced by the older evil Miranda (a kind of less-caricaturish version of Y&R's Jill as played by Brenda Dickson LOL). It was all very cheesy and soft-pornish, but incredibly addictive. There was also a character named Emmett Clayborne, with a chiseled bod, square jaw and mustache who looked like he stepped out of gay porn at the time, who I think showed his backside. Lara Parker from Dark Shadows was also in it, playing a very concerned mom of a teenaged girl. A year later, my PBS station began running Dark Shadows, and I remember thinking how great an actress she was to play these two polar oppposite characters.

Loyal, do you remember the one called Romance? We were discussing it in the print ad thread, trying to find more info.

No, I don't recall Romance at all. I went into that thread, and it doesn't ring a bell. And I thought I've seen them all. All I remember are Eden and LF&PC.

The show can only be described as "ATWT on viagra." Essentially it was "Soft Porn Comes to Oakdale." It had these wild sexual situations played out against a very traditional soap structure. It was a very sexy show. I was about 15 when this was on and just coming of age as a gay teen, and I had a wild crush on the blond stud who played Biff Lewis. I mean a WILD CRUSH. James Horan was so hot too. It was just a very fun, provocative romp that I was probably too young to be watching LOL. I remember they paired it with a show called Loving Friends and Perfect Couples with Cali Timmons, just before her Ryan's Hope days. That bored me to tears, but I was enthralled by Eden. It definitely should've lasted longer than it did.

I swear there was one point on AMC, probably a few years ago early in JHC's tenure, that the music was so loud that it drowned out the dialogue, and it played constantly throughout a scene. If you watch some of the youtube episode from the 80s, the music was very light-hearted and romantic. A lot of the music now tends to be very melodramatic, which I never thought was a good fit for the show.

Honestly, I think most TPTB are embarrassed by those old soapy cues, which is the reason we get a lot of new agey music.

For those of you who watched regularly in the 70s, was the show as fractured as the summaries make it sound? Seems like everyone, even members of the same family, was islanded in their story. In the Martin family, you had Jeff in the Chris-David-Edna abyss, Joe & Ruth looking for Ray Gardner, Tara caught up with Phil & Chuck, while the Tylers saw Ann, Chuck, and Linc involved in separate stories as well. Did these characters ever have any interaction besides, say, for the occasional throwaway recap-exposition scene? This type of fractured storytelling worked very well through the 80s, because the show became more about the town than the individual families. So, for example, you wouldn't need to have Phoebe involved in the Greg-Jenny story, or Palmer care about Jesse and Angie's baby plight. Not sure that would've worked as well in the 70s, when the show was essentially about two families and Erica. I think Chris Schmering in his book refers to 1970s AMC as "a good but flawed show" (before going into how magical the show would become in its golden age from the late 70s thru early 80s). I always wondered what he meant by that, and I wonder if this is what he meant.

I began watching AMC in 1976. I was in 4th grade and home sick with a terrible cold. My mom's favorite show next to AW was AMC, and I remember sitting in my pajamas with the race cars and my blue terrycloth robe with the white trim, at the foot of her bed watching AMC with her for the first time, sneezing and coughing away. It's amazing the things you remember. The first scene I recall was a party scene with a very comically drunk Phoebe and a bunch of other guests. I was only 9, but I sensed something special about the show, and I became hooked, asking my mom which storylines were on a certain day, and always watching when I was home for holidays and on summer vacation. I fell in love with Phoebe & Erica & Charles & Mona & Chuck & Donna & Billy Clyde & Estelle & Benny & Kate & Joe & Ruth & Linc & Kelly & Myrtle, Phil & Tara, all those wonderful characters from those magical early years. Yes, I even loved the much-maligned Christina Karras And later of course with the Cortlandts, the Chandlers, Opal, Greg, Jenny, Liza, Marian, Tad, Langley, Jeremy, Natalie. The list just goes on and on. Although I fell in love with other shows too, including OLTL, there was just something about AMC that I found enormously appealing. I loved the great sense of humor, feeling of community, and social consciousness with which Agnes imbued the show, which grounded it in a certain reality.

My mom and I definitely bonded over AMC, and to a lesser extent AW. Later I used Pine Valley as an escape from the torment inflicted on my by others, as well as the torment I inflicted on myself, for being gay, something I realized about myself when I was 13. PV was my home away from home, a place where I felt I could just laugh and get caught up in the stories of these marvelously conceived characters. What I loved was that Agnes and Wisner Washam, whom I believe has never gotten the credit he deserves, incorporated light-heartedness and humor into even the most dire situations. There was a sense of humanity to the show. In a way, it made me look at my own seemingly desperate life the time with a similar sense of humor. I came to realize later that my mom also used the soaps, specifically AMC and AW, to escape the torment of her life--the physical abuse by my father that she'd hidden for years. Later when I began to straighten my life out, I still watched the show daily. It saw me through going away to college, coming out, enduring my first breakup, coping with the deaths of friends and family members.

I think most of us long-time viewers realize that the show hasn't been itself for quite sometime. Yet, we still watch, partly for the great memories it provides, partly in the hope that things will get better, and partly because however much the show has been stripped of its identity over the past several years, there's still a shred of the old AMC that pops up, yes, less and less often now, that reminds me of why I fell so desperately head over heels in love with this show so many years ago.

James Storm (Mike Powers) comments on TD in 1989 SOD interview-

"That's one of the worst jobs I ever had in my life",Storm gripes. "Nobody recognises me from The Doctors. They were a lousy, dreadful organization. They were cheap. They wanted to drive it into the ground and get it out of NBC. There were a few people I was close to (including Ben Thomas, who played Jack Garner,and is godfather to Jim's younger son.). I loved working in New York. I just wish they had kept that show alive".

Along with Tom Hughes from ATWT, Mike Powers has to be one of the most recast roles of all time. If you're familiar with "The Boys in the Band," Robert LaTourneaux, the actor who played the cowboy hustler, also played Mike for a bit.

Wow, the deaths of these old soap vets is pretty symbolic of the impending death of the genre itself. Sad to think that all the soaps will probably be gone within the next five years, and that in 15-20 years from now, the last of the remaining soaps and their actors will be nothing more than a distant memory. Very sad to think that years from now the genre in its current form will be little more than a footnote in entertainment history.

I'd still love to see what the show would have been if they'd killed Frank off as they had initially planned.

With the plan to kill off Frank, who did Labine and Mayer have in mind to be their main hero? Seneca? If so, I wonder if John Gabriel's role was somehow truncated with the 11th hour decision to keep Frank.

Can someone summarize the Carter Jones crossover story? I know that Jeremy and Ceara had crossed over before Jeremy's permanent transplant, must've been 1991. Was that in connection with Carter Jones, or was that for something else? I distinctly remember some Loving characters (Trucker, Trisha and some others) appearing at Jeremy and Ceara's wedding on AMC, which must've been early or mid 92. Timelines are a bit hazy.

NBC was a wasteland until Cosby arrived in '84. Their highest rated shows like Facts of Life and Diff'rent Strokes barely made the top 25. If FR has been on ABC or CBS it probably would've been a hit. I enjoyed the hell out of FR its first season. The second season with David Selby and that voo-doo stuff wasn't very interesting to me. Love, love, love the theme song...perfect mix of smarm and cheese, with some very campy shots of the actors.

I'm not sure. I think it was the early 90s.

Do you think they should have written Ann out?

I also wonder why they brought Lily back. I guess it was just as a foil to Jack/Stacey but it must have seemed a little random.

All the stuff about Gwen's secret son with Clay also seemed random to me, reading about it, then the actor left because they weren't using him, yet they still recast, then he was killed off. I would have kept him on and had him compete with Curtis.

What did you think of the Curtis actors? I was surprised when I learned Curtis was the only soap character to fight in the Gulf War. Yet by the time I started watching he was just this sad crazy guy who was mercy killed.

Never clear why they fired the original Ann, Shannon Eubanks. She had a very regal quality about her. Her replacement Callan White was dull as dishwater. Come to think of it, they probably decided to take Ann in a more "victim" direction, and Eubanks might not have been right for that.

Bringing Lily back as a homewrecker never really worked. It was a totally different character from when Jennifer Ashe had played her.

I thought Chris Marcantel was great as Curtis. He was a fine actor. I think those original young actors--Marcantel, Perry Stephens, Jen Ashe, LMT and Susan Walters worked really well together. Some nice dynamics. I also liked Stan Albers' interpretation. I had a little crush on him when he was on AMC as Laura's hit and run driver, so I was a little biased

I didn't know Peter Brown was on this show. Was he any good? I didn't care for him on OLTL and I've only ever seen him on one other show, B&B (his B&B character was a non-starter so it didn't matter). I know he was also on Y&R and on DAYS. It seems like only his DAYS character was popular.

So you think all that about the haircut was just a story?

I wonder what plans Marland may have had for Lily, since he wrote heavily for Jennifer Ashe for the 4 years she was at ATWT. I don't know a lot about the teens at the time. I know that Lauren-Marie Taylor said she was meant to have a small role and then the show liked her and gave her more to do.

Do you think all the stuff about Ava passing off the baby and the pillow baby and all that was any good?

I've wondered sometimes whether they should have gotten rid of Jack Forbes or not.

What role did Cabot have before he was written out (the first time)?

I think they brought Peter Brown in as Roger just to tie up loose ends. I don't think they had any story plans in mind for him. Brown's son was my cousin's college roommate. My cousin met him several times and has said that he was a very nice guy.

The Lily thing was of course siderailed by the whole "Something About Amelia" thing, which I'm sure was discussed upthread. Also with Garth gone, I wonder where any conflict in a Lily-Jack romance would have come from. I'm sure Marland had plans beyond the initial incest stuff, but we'll never know. I don't know if Marland was forced to kill Garth in order to truncate the story, or if that was his plan all along. Lauren Marie Taylor always seemed likeable and she had some nice chem with Perry Stephens. I think the show was throwing anything against the wall to see what would stick, and Jack and Stacey seemed to click as a couple. She definitely lucked out in the whole Jennifer Ashe firing situation. Good point about whether or not Jack Forbes was even needed, esp. once the Forbeses were all a memory and Stephens left to be replaced by another actor.

LOL I remember Ava preggers with the pillow. It was definitely stupid, but I remember it being very entertaining. Roya Megnot RIP was pure gold.

I forgot, when was Cabot written out? Was that when his wife Celeste Holm came aboard as Isabel? I was watching on and off at the time.

I definitely think they got rid of Merrill Vochek way too soon. From what I read, and this may have been mentioned upthread, ABC expected Loving to be huge success right off the bat. When that didn't happen, I think they ran a bit scared and decided to get rid of Merrill, their central heroine, in favor of a more traditional (translation: romantic) heroine in Shana, hoping that would raise ratings. Shana essentially replaced Merrill in that capacity. Also when they dropped John Shearin as Roger Forbes, whom nobody seemed to like, in favor of Peter Brown, the whole Merrill-Roger affair fell apart. In keeping with giving the show a more "romantic" feel, I think they de-emphasized the Donovans and Forbeses, who seemed like average (translation: dull) people, in favor of families with more of a stark class difference (the OTT Aldens with Clay, Gwyneth and Tricia; the poorer than dirt Sowolsky-Rescotts), again to give the show a more romantic feel. This is all JMO, but this is what I suspect happened. From a creative standpoint, I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to make these changes, which were obviously dictated by their focus group research. I think the show maintained its tone during this transitional phase, which I believe Marland guided. I think when Millee and Tom came aboard as HWs, the tone of the show began to change. I can't put my finger on it, but it just became darker IMO, and the storylines were terrible. So many EPs and HWs came and went that any vision the show originally had was totally lost.

They should have put it between the shows - I think AMC was strong enough then to survive, and that was also when OLTL was starting to climb back up.

It just makes me wonder sometimes because some of that cast was so damn good and yet I've never seen them on soaps since

What did you think of Shana? In the Episodes feature she seems like a spare part, even though she'd been around, off and on, for a long time.

There was actually talk in the early 90s to move AMC back a half-hour to 12:30 to compete directly with Y&R, and cushion Loving in the 1:30 slot before OLTL. I actually remember Susan Keith and James Kiberd talking about this in some SOD interview back around that time. The feeling was that AMC was strong enough to go head to head with Y&R and hold its own, but it obviously never happened. I think ABC really tried with Loving because of the Agnes Nixon pedigree but it could never get going. I really enjoyed the show for the first four or five years. I was literally in love with the show, but then pretty much stopped watching, probably around the time Millee Taggart and Tom King took over. Must've been around 1988. It was just all over the map, I grew frustrated with it.