te.

Well, they cut down his appearances to 15 episodes (out of 29) and pretty much wrote him out. I think it's more that they just didn't want to blatantly drop the character due to the dream retcon. Jamie was also on the show for 12 episodes, despite them killing her off initially in the season 9 cliffhanger.

I think they could've put some of those stories off for a bit to be honest and push them later into the season/series. As I said, it was just too busy and I tend to think new shows need to establish their characters first before having a dozen or so plots. ETA: Like in theory, they could've actually used the journalist doing a story on Racine's modelling agency as a way into this world, but on the other hand, you already had Laurie acting as the viewer going in so there wasn't really much point to him. In that sense he could've just turned up later and had the purpose of stirring things up.

Pretty much this - someone at ABC probably liked him enough on Happy Days to push to add him to existing shows. So it wasn't really his fault or even his characters that were bad (Clay was boring, but so were many Dynasty men). And yeah, Jefferson clearly gave a lot of life to MWC after Steve left.

Honestly, as much as I like Leann, it is odd that it never even seemed floated to recast Anna. There's been a lot bigger daytime characters that have been recast and certainly Anna would've made sense to at least be on the show in recurring capacity since Carrie was pretty much moved into the young lead heroine slot. I guess they just felt Marlena was enough of a mother figure to her at that point.

Paper Dolls essentially needed to drop one element - either Laurie's home life or the Harpers - ironically I don't think the Harpers were present in the tv movie with Joan Collins and Darryll Hannah. Either way, as it was it was just too busy and it felt like you were walking into a show that was in season 5, not season 1.

Honestly, it'd work. Swedish soap Rederiet took place around a shipping company and it was all sorts of trashy fun.

Has he slept with Kate?

They should've turned Love Boat into a full-on soap. Imagine the season ending cliffhangers with the boat being threatened with sinking each season!

Directly after. And Finder of Lost Loves is a Dionne Warwick classic (said no one).

The first season of Dynasty wasn't the huge flop people make it out to be to begin with (it was top 30), but certainly needed a boost considering the large costs. It also didn't help the first season was against MASH. The only show I can really think of that would've benefitted from the 10PM slot is Central Park West, mainly because it would've been out of the way of the Fox soaps but who knows if it could've had a broad enough appeal on CBS beyond improving the demographic numbers.

I think people might confuse Tori dating Vincent Young (Noah) with Jamie Walters. Vincent was definitively hired for that fact while Jamie was seemingly hired because Aaron worked with him on the short-lived The Heights. Though, who knows? I don't really remember the rumor at the time, but Tori "dated" a lot of 90210 co-stars...

WHERE'S THE COKE KELLY?

I think the issue is that they wanted to "revamp" an old drama series and make it into something more suitable for the decade and the television landscape at the time; of course it just led to old viewers tuning out because they didn't recognize the product in front of them and few new viewers are going to tune into a tv show because it featured a grisly murder. I don't even think it's John Romano's fault per se - I think they hired him for a specific reason and probably gave CBS/Lorimar the show they thought they wanted.

Sultry Alice with her hair down.

I remember one of the early reviews of Melrose Place pointing this out - how it was okay for 16-year-old Brandon to learn about racism, but became down-right stupid to have 23-year-old Billy Campbell learn that racism bad. Melrose of course realised this - for whatever reason 90210 just didn't want to drop social issues storylines despite the fact that they were never that good at them at their peak and literally no one watched the show for them, much less in the waning years.

Yeah, I really think that the first 13 episodes before Darren Star was booted in favour of Camille Marchetta is a great prime time soap that only failed because it was on the wrong network. Had it been on Fox I feel it would've succeeded. But I think maybe pushing it to a generational saga with the Fairchilds at the front and center, maybe amp up the mystery what happened to Linda's husband (did Allen off him?), maybe instead of Nikki they could've had the woman Allen had an affair with be the older "unhip" former editor that got replaced by Stephanie at Communique. That would've expanded the older character's storyline a bit and maybe made it more appealing for the older audience, while still keeping youth appeal with Stephanie, Carrie, Peter, Mark, Alex etc. And of course, not airing it in the 8/9PM slot against the Fox soaps.

Yeah, the only one that came close was 2000 Malibu Road and they screwed that up by not securing the cast and crew into contracts and instead having to re-negotiate everything if they wanted more. In an ideal world they could've rushed out more episodes by midseason and put it in Knots's time slot away from the Fox soaps while they took a break to prepare for the series finale in March 1993. But then again, why they later didn't at least try to salvage Central Park West by moving it into the 10PM slot when Fox was doing everything to destroy it (airing a double season premiere of BH90210, airing Melrose's 100th episode etc) is beyond me.

The Spelling shows brought in ad dollars though - Beverly Hills and Melrose Place were regulars in the top ten of the A18-49 demo despite neither show making the top 40 in total viewers (#41 and #50 as the highest position respectively). Both shows also rated highly in the A18-34 demographic, even toward the end of their runs. Add in that CBS was a mess throughout the 90s until they landed the CSI franchise in 2000, it's not hard that they might've wanted at least a stable player like Knots on the air if it only was a bit cheaper.

I'd argue that 2000 Malibu Road and Angel Falls were also attempts by CBS to launch new prime time soaps to replace Knots. They seemed to have a lot of short attempts at prime time soaps in the 90s. Larry Hagman's Orleans was also a bit of an attempt to recapture that 80s audience.

Jill was justified!!!!

Absolutely. They were all meant to be dead up until the moment that Tom Horton's head scared Marlena out of the Horton house. I think the sequence where Marlena comes back and "kills" Alice is where the re-write started. It's almost as if you can see the switch in that episode.

Pretty much. I mean, Netflix went from pretty much renewing everything because they were still starting up to cancelling a bunch of shows within the first few weeks of their debut seasons. Likely the reason why they kept those early shows going was to build up their own content library, but now that they've done so they feel like they can cancel shows that aren't driving subscriptions to their standard.

I'd assume that's how it came about - I think this would've been filmed October-ish? Maybe we'll get high-quality Renée flashbacks so there's that I guess but considering the bust of the Stevano thing I'd just rather not.

To be fair - the ratings were really bad. The last episode had a 0.15 in the 18-49 demographic, which means it was almost adjusted down to 0.1 in the finals and even with the poor broadcast ratings these days ABC just can't let that stand. I hope it can somehow thrive on streaming as I personally enjoy it and like that it's a no frills prime time soap.

I don't know - most cut scenes seems to be "recap" ones. It makes me believe that they might film some extra scenes at the time that they sort of know they can cut in case the episode fall a bit short as to avoid having to go back and film "filler" dialogue scenes later.