te.

This is a bit overdramatic - people are just being shady and engaging in "stan" wars. With that said - The Gates will need room to breathe. Expecting it to be great from the get-go is naive since all soaps started out kind of scrappy. Let The Gates find its own way and work the kinks out before writing it off (which will happen for some on week one).

I mean, Tyler Perry truly only writes quality material really. Imagine seeing a scene with astounding dialogue like this between Will and Marlena?

I think it was partly down to ABC having a 30 minute window at 2:30PM where they seemingly couldn't get a game show to stick. Just looking at their schedule, they had tried out five different game shows in the past two seasons before expanding OLTL and GH to take over the spot. And of course, The Edge of Night moved from CBS, so they couldn't expand the shows the other way. So experimenting with longer soaps + poor performance of game shows seems to be the culprint to the 45 minute experiment. I guess it's not odd when you consider soaps started out at 15 minutes.

I feel like at the time there was a bit more restrictions about talking about characters belonging to a real life agency, involved with real world politics etc. But that's just my guess.

I've never watched Supertrain but I don't think I've ever heard of a train with a gym and a disco on board. It seems like lifting heavy weights on a moving train could go very wrong really fast!

I just realised that the recent documentary (well three years ago) actually did acknowledge that Jonathan Frid was, indeed, gay: https://www.ebar.com/story.php?309942 I remember reading the comments fields on sites like Dark Shadows Every Day while watching it and there were still a lot of ladies in their 50s and 60s who swore Frid was absolutely not gay. Why, I don't get. He's one of the more obvious ones.

I think it's missing "as in - they picked them off the street!".

The first ones I thought was were Brash & Cwikly on DAYS, but they were there for just short of a year! They then got replaced by Higley Round One before she managed to run it into the ground so badly that they had to get JER back. I'm not sure why they replaced Brash and Cwikly in the first place - their stuff wasn't all home runs, but I do remember liking them alright especially efter the messy Langan run.

There were some daily break-down writers on DAYS I wish would advance up in the food chain, though I haven't kept track of them since a while before the strikes. Maybe they're bad at plotting but soaps need to take chance on new people, not just circle the same old same old around.

I don't know why this promo made me laugh, but didn't just everyone talk about The Catlins? The actors seem like real people!

I guess it depends on how you view it - primetime soaps are usually considered soaps that are aired in the primetime with one episode per week and usually seasonal orders. I guess Peyton Place sort of curbs this rule as it aired 2-3 times a week all weeks of the year. Daytime soaps are usually seen as five-day-a-week soaps. The Catlins aired at 11:05am and 11:40pm in April 1984: https://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/archive/index.php/t-40642.html No idea which one was the new episode and which one was the repeat, but it wouldn't surprise me if the late night airing was the new episode in this case. Is that a daytime soap or a nightime then? Most would probably still say daytime soap due to the five day a week nature of it.

I'm definitively not counting on greatness from the get-go since soaps usually take a bit to land properly. I'm just going to be happy if it's not a complete mess, lol.

* Adoptive sister. Kristen and Peter were adopted. Hence why marrying Tony (/André) was only weird, but not incest.

I don't know why, but sometimes I think of this gay soap opera with Tracy Scoggins and I'm dyying to be with them. Dyyyying.

I'd assume it might be a bit of both - Linda might not per se have been pushed out, but been asked to do less episode / take less pay and she just decided that it was time to walk away and do other things.

I assumed this was going to be about soaps that were mostly lost to time, but I guess not since Dark Shadows showed up first. Just skipping in this (I guess I'll spoiler it if anyone wants to be surprised:

Paramount has launched official channels for Melrose Place: https://www.youtube.com/@Melrose_Place. https://www.instagram.com/melroseplacetv Hopefully this bodes well for the rebooted reboot.

It's just nepo baby things...

I'd imagine the first scene would be someone entering THE GATES (dun-dun-dun).

Sami was obviously justified in everything she did and was always the wronged party.

I genuinely never thought she was dead - for now they're still using Marci Miller's image, but I guess the big "uh-oh" sign will be if all of a sudden Annalynne starts showing up in images.

From what I can tell, there's a lot of people who watched "Swans Crossing" as children/tweens who have nostalgic memories of it - the issue of course is that the appeal is very much limited towards that crowd. As I said, it comes off as an odd cross between a childrens program and a soap opera; I think it's the attempted action-adventure elements that does it (but they didn't have the budget to properly pull that off either). Just look at the difference between it and 90210 that aired at the same time; while 90210 isn't exactly realistic, I think it at least is somewhat aspirational for teens and still manages to relate to a lot of things that teenagers go through (albeit in an OTT manner). Swans Crossing really doesn't have that quality. IDK. We'll see if I make it through the entire series. It's up there and it's *only* 65 episodes around 22 minutes but... ---- Here's a fansite: https://www.oocities.org/~missswan/ Includes a press release where they state it was directed towards the pre-teen/teen audience: https://www.oocities.org/~missswan/prshow.txt Somewhat interesting that it mentions that 130 episodes are "in production" and they had funding for 325 episodes. It must've done badly for them to cut it short (but then again, I think it ended with a to be continued).

It never ceases to amaze me how this somehow keeps chugging along since I've never seen anyone talk about it. I guess it's making profit somehow so fair enough. I'm just curious where all the viewers are.

I guess they're not listing their daytime shows there? In general, most aren't interested in syndicating daytime soaps - Dark Shadows is an outlier. Plus it probably hasn't been digitally transferred and isn't really a brand name...

I was surprised there's no dedicated thread to this, at least from what I could find, especially since the entire series has been available on streaming for quite a few years now. I'll have to say that I'm surprised at how it seems to mostly direct itself towards tweens rather than teens - it doesn't really feel aspirational for an average teenage viewer (well, from just watching three episodes) and a lot of the storylines seem to be those you'd find in a kids show (ie living in a sub marine, kids with unfathomable tech skills, cheesy dance and song routines). Compare that to what Beverly Hills 90210 was doing at the same time and you can see how they limited their audience a lot - it's more Saved by the Bell without the laughs. Apparently Sarah in natural haircolour means she's Queen Bitch. ETA: apparently it even had a toy line, so I guess the writing falls in line with who they were trying to appeal to: https://diaryofadorkette.blogspot.com/2012/02/toy-chest-tuesday-swans-crossing.html