te.

Honestly, the Meg situation is just bizarre more than engaging. Greg loses Laura and is unable to cope properly so neglects daughter (so far quite normal), so Karen convinces him to let them adopt her (?!) and she and Mack are the good guys? I think the writers wanted to have Mack and Karen have a kid but realistically, Karen was too old (and maybe Michele Lee would've put her foot down, lol) and then they had to write Laura out so...

More like there was no need for the reunion. It had only been four years and it left on no cliffhanger (unlike Dynasty and Dallas). The fans might've enjoyed seeing them together again, but everyone else had moved on.

I always felt like the Stuart arc was meant to bring Brenda and Dylan back together; by all accounts David Gail was told by Aaron that Stuart was going to turn out to be a "bad guy", then you had Dylan's warning, then he disappears for two or so episodes before turning up again and acting like a spoilt little b-word during a road trip, then boom gone. Apparently things were going much better behind the scenes at the start of the season (I think they've mentioned in the podcast that while filming 4x03 The Little Fish (Brenda's return episode from Minnesota) the drama from the previous season just seemed to have cooled down considerably before starting up again). So yeah, I suspect he was meant to stay on longer initially, plus I guess Aaron Spelling would've shot the pilot to Robin's Hoods around the time he left.

I always felt like his arc on 90210 got cut a bit short - I wonder if that had to do with the whole backstage drama with Doherty (them setting her up to potentially leave) or if it was just that Aaron wanted him for Robin's Hood? He must've liked the guy since he cast him in The Round Table, 90210, Robin's Hoods and Savannah. Surprised he didn't end up showing up on Charmed or 7th Heaven.

No wonder they cancelled Search For Tomorrow and moved up Scrabble - that show was low-key killing it in its slot!

Re-watching it now and I realised that the setting is a huge issue for the show as in it's not distinct enough. Besides obviously filming in California, when Lane at the end of the pilot does some dramatic speech about how she'll one day live on Flamingo Road it's like... okay, why? There's the Weldon's house and I guess Titus'? In all honesty, LiliMae's house seems really nice. They needed to do more to sell the angle of "bad part of Truro" vs the "good part of Truro", but even then it's hard to imagine that a character would be desperate to live in any part of Truro, especially once she gets a multi-millionaire boyfriend.

Looking at the schedule, it seems like it was the lone soap on NBC at that point, plus their inability to create a long running soap at that point bar Hawkins Fall (which "only" ran five years) and then a new format to boot? It was also against Art Linkletter at the time; still it was odd how quickly they gave up on it; Today Is Ours didn't do much better, so maybe they should've just moved it up a half hour to see how it did when From These Roots premiered to build a block.

Very interesting to see how the total viewers differs from the actual Nielsen ratings. Makes me wonder how the charts year-to-year would look if they just showed total viewers; would there be the same drastic drop-off over the decades pre-00s?

I mean, that's a no-brainer for Sony / NBCUniversal to do - they want them to watch on Peacock or wait until it comes onto whatever international services that carries DAYS. They need as many viewers / clicks as they can get in order to keep getting renewed and they're not measured by some flimsy Nielsen rating system anymore; streaming sites know exactly how many that watches, what they also click and watch on the service and duration.

I think Pam and Bobby (and Christopher) leaving Southfork in that red car, leaving JR all alone finally getting what he thought he wanted all those years would've been a good finale. The final shot would've been JR at that dining table, getting served by Teresa with nobody else there.

Which was dumb, especially when these shows started shedding cast members left and right (although KNOTS managed to keep a lot of its cast intact for a long time). You'd think bringing back someone with connection to the canvas would be a good way to help transition the show, but it rarely happened.

Even in 1991 they were afraid of reality programming replacing the soaps. Interesting read.

I mean...

Interesting how similar these numbers are, yet if I read this right, Knots had 12.5% coverage yet had pretty much the same numbers as Dynasty and Dallas which both had around 50%? Makes you wonder if Knots could've done better than both of them with more coverage, but maybe these just overperformed in some and bombed in others.

I'll admit I always thought the whole thing was more of a set up to keep Deidre happy by vaguely promising a spin-off and just keep it permanently in development, but from those articles it sounds like it was ready to go ahead. I wonder what changed their minds, especially once Santa Barbara exited the screens? They ended up premiering Sunset Beach a few years later and Manhattan Lives could've, if not anything else, worked as an effective placeholder (I guess a bit like Capitol).

I guess it depends on how you deal with it really... personally, I'm not really a people person, but there are those that are. Apparently the guy who owns the "real" Casa Walsh is very much someone who'll chat to people if he sees them stop to take pictures. I think he invited the woman who runs IAmNotAStalker.com into the house from memory.

Unfortunately, with How To Survive a Marriage being a pet project plus the line up of Days / Doctors / Another World flying so high I guess they expected more from Return to Peyton Place, despite being slightly higher rated than Somerset. If they had bumped that off instead who knows if NBC daytime had developed differently. Probably not though.

Lots'o'tea about Charmed in this:

I'm just happy a daytime soap is getting a prime time outing.

Really bad year for soap actors as it feels like there's been a lot of young-ish losses. RIP.

Yes, I know I'm starting to wonder if this is the weird stalker dude I had on another forum. It's the same sort of talk and formula. It's stupid to post this in public but yeah, since I was accused of being him it's just weird, lol. But maybe soap opera fans have an over-arching mental health issue we need to deal with.

Ashley Benson's character on Pretty Little Liars was called Hanna Merin

https://deadline.com/2023/12/days-of-our-lives-casts-annalynne-mccord-90210-1235671750/ Signed a one year contract playing "Marin". She was one of the bright spots on the 90210 reboot (the CW version, not the Fox meta-reboot), so I hope they don't screw her character up (they will).

Ultimately, both have its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of a "found family" / work place / community soap is that you can just introduce characters without much explanation. You don't have to do a contrived backstory for someone to move in or to write someone off. It leaves less headache in terms of having to recast or introducing random cousins or secret children. The disadvantage of course is that eventually you'll have to ask yourself why these characters are even talking to each other, or just doesn't move, especially when there's a notorious schemer amongst them? Even Melrose Place utilised the bad sister bond with Jane and Sydney. Family soaps of course are easier to explain in that way - families will fight and do bad things to each other, but will still be in others lives because blood is thicker than water and all that. I said it before and I'll say it again - airing The City and Sunset Beach at noon was such a mistake when they obviously targeted a very specific demographic (ie people who liked the Fox Aaron Spelling soaps); not saying that either would've lasted for a long time, but it just felt like a death sentence from day one to place them there. They needed to be later in the afternoon. It's like when they moved old-fashioned Love of Life to an afternoon slot. Kids and college students coming home from school wasn't going to tune into that...