te.

6 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Uggggggggghhhhhhhhh

Tyler Perry fired his ass already?

Was it confirmed it was Tyler Perry was where he was going to?

Either way, a lot of shows are getting delayed and outright cancelled due to the strike. Could be what happened to him.

1 hour ago, carolineg said:

Why on earth is Chanel selling baked goods outside in December?  The little plastic table set up has always been silly, but that makes no sense.

 

Honestly, if they're going to continue to invest with Chanel and her bakery, they might as well build a small indoors set with a small café part with chairs etc for characters to chat / meet at.

20 minutes ago, Chris B said:

It’s a shame this hasn’t made if to DVD as they were releasing so many Lear shows.

I mean, they've not released Fernwood Forever (the follow-up to MH, MH) so I'd think that would take precedence than a little known syndicated flop.

On 12/6/2023 at 2:34 AM, titan1978 said:

Those three seasons are Knots in my mind. From Ciji to the twins. I loved the whole show,  but that’s the core to me, the greatest era.

Ultimately, for community soaps it's all about interactions between characters that you'd sometimes not expect to; Knots suffered from the same syndrome Melrose Place did in its later seasons, namely islanding of characters into their own storyline bubbles. The show was still good, but you could tell that probably for budget reasons those interactions became less and less.

Oh, FreeVee delaying their decision on their Who's The Boss sequel/reboot going to series or not makes sense now. I'm assuming they'll be tracking the performance on this.

Thing is that when DAYS (and I guess soaps) made their first stories about "coming back from the dead" they weren't outlandish - men going missing in war, being declared dead and only to return wasn't entirely unheard of. People being misidentified wasn't entirely unheard of. Of course, that's a far cry of what's happening these days on soaps when you can essentially have been decapitated and still come back from the dead.

1 hour ago, j swift said:

Were there repercussions?

No, because Abby managed to turn it around and once again make it seem like she was the innocent baby-saver while simultanously confessing to get Olivia, Greg et al off her back. 

On 12/3/2023 at 7:27 AM, DaytimeFan said:

My bet is the part Morgan played was originally written for Dame Joan. The mention of 5 husbands and cooking English Christmas cake, and the dialog in general, had Joan written all over it. 

Loni's part also sounded like Morgan when they mentioned she studied rare diseases (Morgan does this IRL). 

I said it just by reading the synopsis that they probably just switched Morgan to Joan's character and added Loni as Morgan's. With that said, it's really lazy to leave obvious references like that in, but then again it is a Lifetime movie.

I'm sad that no Susan Flannery episodes have ever surfaced of DAYS because I'm really curious how she played her - of course, she was great as the cold matriarch on Bold and the Beautiful; a role that seemed almost tailor-made for her, on the other hand on Dallas she had no chemistry with Larry Hagman and was one of the worst parts of an otherwise good fourth season. It just makes me wonder what her chemistry with on DAYS was with the male actors? Plus, I always thought Laura was rather "soft" as opposed to the cold steely excellence of Stephanie Forrester (in her prime years), so I wonder if she could really pull it off? She was seemingly popular after all.

3 hours ago, Bright Eyes said:

That's because they just planned on doing a quick recast, but the strike postponed it.

52 minutes ago, j swift said:

 dies in a swimming pool when her diamond ring gets caught in the drain.  Same ol' story 

Well, she had to die once she cut her shampoo commercial hair. Sorry, I don't make the rules. 

On 12/2/2023 at 11:49 AM, AbcNbc247 said:

I’m still holding out hope for a Horton-centric or Donovan-centric season of Beyond Salem

I doubt we'll get more Beyond Salem. In hindsight it just seems like an experiment to see how DAYS would fare exclusively online.

2 hours ago, kalbir said:

Days is making a comeback. Has Deidre Hall returned at this point? I know James Reilly becoming HW is about a year and a half away.

DAYS  might be making a comeback, but it didn't stop the rest of the line up from crumbling.

Yes, but you're potentially comparing someone who started watching a  show when it was good and sticking with it through a rough patch and actually tuning into a new show. You can't start your show off bad and expect people to tune in - to even like the characters there has to be enough good writing and foundation for you to stick out the bad times (and even then we all have our limits).

3 minutes ago, Khan said:

Perhaps you're right.  As far as the thirty-minute, non-Bell-produced soaps go, I think CAPITOL had one of the stronger pitches: the saga of two of Washington, D.C.'s most prominent families, linked together by history and star-crossed romance.  There, you have the multi-generational, family drama, set against the backdrop of U.S. politics, with romance and intrigue of all sorts implied.  Even if the actual show often came up short, the whole "the passion for power...the power of passion" motif still encouraged the uninitiated at least to sample it.  Again, as I've said before, all GENERATIONS seemed to be saying was, "Hey, Blacks are people, too!".

It's the 30 second elevator pitch isn't it? Describe a show and get people interested.

Loving and Generations just didn't have that.

4 minutes ago, Khan said:

I think I would've been inspired to make the family business either "Marshall Communications," which would have been a conglomerate of newspapers, TV and radio stations throughout the Midwest, Northeast and Southeast regions; or a company that manufactured hair care products and cosmetics for the so-called "urban market" (sort of a Black Jabot, if you will).

Yes, exactly. Make the conflict about how a black family owned business would promote "white"* families for profit. This could've been a controversial soap opera forcing people to tune in because it showed how cynical the business is, and ultimately lead to progression! 

* I throw in "" because of how we know diversity is often sold in ads where you have one family member of "ambigious" race.

https://www.eonline.com/news/1390549/shannen-doherty-shares-cancer-has-spread-to-her-bones

Santa Barbara under 3.0 for the first (?) time! That show just suddenly started crashing after the 80s; of course the downfall of NBC daytime and the "supercouple" era didn't help.

5 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

The Generations theme and visuals suggested to me we were in store for a Waltons type family show, possibly set in the past.

Exactly right. It didn't exactly scream glamour and passion - maybe that was a conscious decision in the sense that it's the type of show that does well in syndication reruns, but it's not something that soap viewers would specifically tune into daily. But in all honesty, besides "the first show focusing on black characters" I just don't get the feeling there was much of a pitch. I guess in that sense I feel the same way towards Generations that I do towards Loving - it just feels dated and not really that well-defined. It probably doesn't help that the time slot hadn't housed a soap in the past few years after Search was cancelled.

5 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

Having the Marshall own an ice cream chain was dumb-they should have had a 'sexier' business that could propel alot of story.

Maybe they could've had a production company since they started with the "fake soap" opening - one that ironically would focus on white characters despite the company itself being run by black people. It would've at least opened up some conflict, I guess social commentary and would've been a "sexier" and more exciting business. 

On 11/25/2023 at 8:04 AM, DaytimeFan said:

I also dislike the wig she's wearing there - I think she recently cut her hair for a role, but she would look better with a more voluminous wig like the one Donna is wearing that would frame her face and give some balance.

I think it's unfair to compare anyone to Donna - she's clearly had great styling, plastic surgery and the ability to know when to quit and not go for the "too youthful" route. She looks like herself, even if it's blatantly obvious she's had quite a bit of help over the years.

I think the biggest issue with Morgan's wig is that the hairline looks so very off. Donna's looks like it's based in her own hairline while Morgan is clearly going for the straight-on fake look.

31 minutes ago, Khan said:

Moreover, Linda Evans was already gone and Joan Collins had made it clear she would not be back.

Eh, in the same tv guide interview where she announced she was leaving she also stated that she'd "do some episodes". It seems like a classic case of Joan playing word games plus not wanting to admit that they wouldn't pay for her to do the entire season.

12 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

The Thurs @9 timeslot was a killer. The Colby's had already flopped there and there was no reason to think that Dynasty, at that stage, would do any better.

But there was really nowhere else to place it. Tues had thirtysomething, Wed China Beach which replaced Dynasty and was much more of the type of show ABC now wanted, Thurs @10 would have put it up against Knots Landing, Fr 20/20 and Sat was a no starter.

To be fair, I don't think they expected Dynasty to do well in the slot - usually when they move an aging show the hope is that it'll do well-enough to at least act as a band-aid while they focus on other time slots (as you said, China Beach and thirtysomething were clearly priorities for the "new era" ABC). In Dynasty's defence, it was usually the best rated show on ABC for that night, but of course that maybe just shows you what a trainwreck Thursdays were for them. If Knots hadn't been in the 10 PM slot on CBS they might've moved up Dynasty for another season if they could've gotten it for a low enough budget to attempt to make something work on that night. But obviously, they saw a few years earlier what happened to The Colby's when it and Knots went head-to-head.

7 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

I'd argue Hill St. Blues, LA Law, and St. Elsewhere, although most involved with them would probably have retched if you called them soaps.

Hell, in a recent interview Nicolette Sheridan pointed out that Knots was a night time drama. People still have an aversion to the term soap for whatever reason.

On 11/25/2023 at 2:05 AM, j swift said:

I wonder if certain soaps just fit better with the characteristic programming of certain networks.

For example, I can't imagine a family soap like Knots playing anywhere else than CBS.  The sexy young adults of Melrose Place feels programmed specifically for FOX at that time in history.  And the camp of Dynasty played into the rest of the escapist/bombastic shows on ABC in the mid-80s.

Well, yes. Central Park West probably would've been more successful if it had been on Fox as an example as the only thing that was "wrong" with that show was that it was on the wrong network. Savannah was off-brand for the youthful The WB and was too expensive since it didn't repeat well and they couldn't afford doing more than 22 episodes per season.

NBC is the one network that never found their "brand" of prime time soaps - though you could argue that the Dick Wolf brand of Chicagos are soaps...

Actually, looking at it, I wonder if Morgan was originally set to play the role Loni's playing (which would go well with her whole "always the bridesmaid, never the bride" type of success with prime time soaps) and they might've wanted another name (Dame Joan probably) for the role Morgan ended up with?