DeliaIrisFan

Carl, thank you! I was never quite sure if this story/subplot actually happened, or if it was some sort of urban legend. Claire Labine acted like she had no recollection of it in interviews, but as that July 1975 episode that surfaced a few years back in which Ben and Betsy were still "married" established - and as the dates in this article corroborate - Labine would have long since moved on to create Ryan's Hope by the time this prison story happened, even though she wrote the bigamy story that landed Ben in jail in the first place. So it would have been Margaret DePriest who pushed this particular envelope? Well, I guess at its crux it was violence against a character who could be construed as promiscuous, which fits with her '80s and '90s serial killer stories, but for DePriest it was kind of egalitarian that in this case it happened to a male character. I admit it is amazing that this story went as far as it did at the time, or at any time in soap history, and yet it's also illustrative of how paranoid the daytime PTB have always been about any sort of queer sexuality, in that the writers went to such lengths in the deus ex machina department to keep Ben from actually being raped. Cynically, I wonder, had the rape been consummated, if Love of Life might have ended up being the one soap that could have gotten away with bringing us daytime's first gay antihero and its first same-sex "supercouple" - namely, the ringleader of the prison gang rape and his and Ben's rapemance, respectively.

Does every soap need that, though, and to what end? As a completely disinterested bystander, the latest debacle behind the scenes at DOOL really makes me question whether the so-called stabilizing core family on some of these shows that have otherwise been adrift for decades is a positive thing or just a legitimizing token. The latest "new era" of DOOL didn't even last 6 months, but all they had to do was invoke Alice Horton's name in a story that sounds like it was pretty much DOA and all of this spin about how the show was going back to its roots practically wrote itself. A part of me can't help but think that AW may have been mismanaged by and large, but it ended more or less as a show about interesting people who were worth watching in their own right, even if the revolving door of writers couldn't figure out how to integrate them into a canvas that was greater than the sum of its parts. In a way, I wonder if that may have been a blessing. That's the other thing about Mary Matthews that I am loath to bring up, because I have literally seen no footage of her, but I can't help but wonder: If she wasn't all that interesting in her own right, then would this figure have been much of a draw if viewers could just watch the real deal on other shows?

Did viewers at the time really derive that kind of comfort from Mary Matthews, though? It's hard to say, because so few clips exist. I know the ratings were abysmal when AW premiered, but then Lipton downplayed the Matthewses which didn't work out at all either. When Nixon came in, did she focus that heavily on the Matthews family as a unit, or just on the younger members of the family and their romantic exploits? Was the comfort that Alice was able to take from her parents when Rachel was making her life hell really a huge draw for viewers at the time? This is probably blasphemy, but I sometimes think the real reason NBC and/or P&G named the show "Another World" - lofty poems about "we do not live in this world alone" aside - was because ATWT was such a phenomenon and advertisers at the time would have been salivating at the chance to buy ad time during "another World," (aka a clone of ATWT). Weren't the Matthewses extremely reminiscent of the Hugheses? Although Lipton didn't dare do anything as radical as killing off any major Matthewses, and the show eventually thrived during Agnes Nixon's Alice/Steve, Bill/Missy era, my sense was that viewers weren't as invested in that family's tentpoles as they were in their counterparts on the CBS Phillips shows, or even DAYS. Whereas, for better or worse, I think that under Lemay, the Another World/another World title took on a more interesting, albeit darker, meaning: as in, it became a bold declaration that this show was very different than what was airing opposite it on CBS at the time. I remember when ATWT was going off the air, someone posted that Reid getting killed off was something Irna Phillips might have done - because he wasn't from the core family and he was expendable, if his dying meant a resolution for the Hughes family that would lead to them having a happy ending. I'm not sure I completely agree that the idea for that particular story, let alone the execution, was true to Irna's legacy, but I think that was a really interesting take on what classic ATWT was about...and what post-Lemay AW was often not about. In its last 25 years, AW tended to show the outsiders triumphing and finding their own families/support networks and actually evolving into the good people that they might not have been when they were first introduced. You could say that AW was more realist, in a sense, because it showed that sometimes, even good parents died before their time and left a void that couldn't be filled, and many people didn't much like their birth families. But it still had an element of escapism in its own right...in a lot of ways, I'd have rather been friends with Cass and Felicia and Wallingford than a blood relative of the Matthewses or even the Bauers or Hugheses. Unfortunately, lesser writers over the years had an even harder time identifying and staying true to that thread of AW's history than they did with the more traditional shows, where the obvious core families were more in tact. I do think AW might have been better if, over the years, the tensions of Rachel evolving into the matriarch by default had been played up - with Aunt Liz being more of a presence, subtly taking umbrage with Rachel's place in Bay City society (while currying favor with her so she herself would still get invites to the parties), and with the next generation(s) of outsiders being more consistently posited as kindred spirits for Rachel. (I loved that one, rare scene in the early '90s when Rachel was planning a "tasteful" party to welcome Paulina into the family and Carmen Duncan's Iris snapped, "What does Rachel Davis know about taste?" and proceeded to have a fit because Rachel was siding with Paulina over her because they were both climbers from the wrong side of the tracks.) Of course, racial diversity would have also attracted more people who didn't necessarily identify with the Matthews family, and been a good thing for the show in general. Also, I suspect Lemay/Rauch didn't get to go as far as they wanted with phasing out the Matthews family. Did they really want to keep Alice around played by a new actress, or did NBC/P&G balk at writing out Alice at the same time as Steve and Mary and they came to a compromise? Was there anyone on the inside who's said publicly in the past 40 years that they thought the Alice recast was an improvement over Courtney? From what little I saw, she seemed like even more of a generic, cookie-cutter soap ingenue than JC. At very least, I would have thought they would have hired some celebrated avant garde character actress of the stage at the time to play Alice as more and more of a supporting character, watching - a bit bitterly - from the sidelines as her archrival who had treated her so badly seemingly got everything she wanted while Alice had to rebuild her life as a young widow. (Or at least, I could see Lemay wanting that. Rauch would have probably wanted a more generic blonde bimbo with cleavage.) I do have to say that I doubt, even if the Matthewses had survived the mid-'70s, that their presence would have changed what happened to AW when AMC and GH surpassed the P&G stable. If ATWT could be dethroned so badly with Nancy Hughes, et al still around, then would AW have fared any better imitating that? Of course, anything could have been possible with strong writing and acting. And DAYS came on the scene after AW premiered and the Hortons certainly followed the formula of the Irna Phillips core family, and that family probably had a lot to do with stabilizing the show during a lot of radical changes over the years.

Awww...it's strangely nostalgic to see this again. The show wasn't exactly good at this point, but it still seemed to have so much life in it. Within a year or so, that would be gone, IMO. A lot of the writing was so dopey (I think Rachel must have asked Iris about three times, "If you thought you were firing blanks, why did you aim at his heart?" and did she ever give a straight answer?) and even recent history was blatantly ignored (Jake and Paulina, who had just reunited, were horrified that Carl in his addled state had a thing for Iris after she shot him, and nobody seemed to think this was ironic). I guess my teenage self was mostly just fascinated with Carmen Duncan's Iris and I wanted to see how she was going to get out of this predicament...I realize I may have been the only such teenager in America, but alas. Maybe I should have flipped the channel to ABC an hour earlier before GH, which I believe I was already watching at this point, to see OLTL's Dorian in much the same predicament, because she certainly got a much better resolution. Anyway, I actually remember Iris's "Where's Waldo?" outfit, as you put it but, at the time (again, early teens + '90s fashion), I thought it was fabulous, and somehow apropos as she was barging into a hospital room demanding that a guy on his deathbed admit what she wanted him to say and getting thrown into jail. And after all of these years, I still remembered that line of Rachel's when she visited Iris in jail, "I sometimes think it was that betrayal that killed Mac," and leaving Iris to stay there to think about what she'd done...so much potential for this dysfunctional family that was completely wasted. The rest of the show was certainly a mixed bag. Angela, the mother of the baby Tomas was trying to get back from foster care, was just the worst. And what on earth was Donna doing in their scenes? I don't really remember that plot point (I may have fast-forwarded it to get to Iris's scenes), but Donna looked fabulous and was having the time of her life with young Matt. I forgot that the first "glimpse" of the Evan recast was from the back, shirtless, as he was doing weight training...I guess that was fitting. I'm probably in the minority but I really liked this Amanda. I was stunned, years later, that one of my favorite parts of the first round of AW reruns on SoapNet was SF's Amanda's early relationship with Sam, as I always assumed they were just a B-version of the '80s "supercouples" on the higher rated soaps, but other than that brief interlude when I liked SF's Amanda, CT's Amanda generally seemed to have at least 50 more IQ points. In hindsight, it's kind of silly that they brought back a recast Evan to pair with a newly recast Amanda, especially an Amanda who didn't seem like she would have ever fallen for his line. And I actually liked the Marshall character and his relationship with Felicia and remember being sorry that that was sacrificed, probably for racist reasons.

Oh, I do remember reading something about that as well, now that you mention it. It was during the week of Thanksgiving, I believe. It was a one-time occurrence, for whatever reason, and it rebounded completely the following week and stayed strong until the other shows started dropping. The longterm drop was sometime later - almost a year later as far as ranking - and again I think the circumstances of Labine's final months were not representative of her tenure overall. Again, her heart was only in one story that was inherently sad, and changes were afoot at ABC that would only get worse in the decades to come. The interview was fascinating. I can't wait to hear the subsequent installments, when they'll presumably talk more in-depth about her work, but she sounds like a fascinating person even from her more personal recollections.

The end of 1995, and so did every other soap - this was during the OJ Simpson trial - except, for whatever reason, James Reilly's DOOL. GH's ratings held steady in the high 5s and low 6s - and remained in the top 3, quite often beating AMC for # 2 - for almost two years. Even after the ratings dropped when the OJ trial started, GH remained up there in ranking until Labine's last 6 months or so, when she reportedly extended her contract to finish the AIDS story that ABC had been stalling on. A writer in her 60s(?) who was admittedly burnt out after writing an hour-long show for two years (and for the first time in her career) staying on to finish one story which was admittedly emotionally difficult to watch was not an ideal creative situation, to be sure, and there were missteps. Add to that the fact that Disney bought ABC in that time period and who knows what kind of newfound meddling she started dealing with. But I still liked much of the show at that time and, considering what came after Labine left, I am very glad we got to see her bring that important story to its conclusion.

Hmmm... Jan 2-6, 1995 HH 1. Y&R 8.2/26 2. AMC 6.6/20 3. GH 6.3/20 http://boards.soapop.../28874-january/ That was the week or so after that promo would have aired. I'm sure GH would kill for those ratings now (or even those rankings, even with only 4 soaps on the air - there were 10 at the time). I think what was Labine-esque was people finding happiness and fun, which there was, amidst the depressing aspects of life that are indeed all too realistic - in a hospital, no less. This era of the show is a cherished part of my youth, and I still love it.

Fascinating... Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that dinner party with Doug Marland and Millette Alexandra, et al circa 1986-87(?)! And I believe this was the first we've ever heard of Marland having a "significant other"? It's probably also the first we've heard that cast him in a less than saintly light. Which is a good thing...he created so many iconic, but obviously flawed, characters - some of whom live on to this day - so of course he must have been a human being himself. His work was before my time, largely, but knowing how much of what this genre did best and having seen clips of his work over the years, it's nice to think that he was loved until the end, warts and all - surely what Nola, Bobbie, et al always longed for. Thank you!

Thanks! I remember reading the Clear Horizon one at the time you posted it because I'd never heard of the show and I do follow this EON thread because I've seen some of it on the old P&G AOL site and on YouTube, but with SS and YDM I always fall behind...I can never keep track of who was who without a visual and I tend to get the stories I've read about mixed up with similar stories on other shows. Anyway, the part about Myra being on "the verge of spinsterhood" before she married her older husband aside, those were less offensive than this one. Still, this doctor gives me the creeps. Clearly in some areas of medicine some physicians were doing more harm than good back then (i.e. recommending one brand of cigarettes over another), and psychiatrists in particular really seemed to have cart blanche to try whatever scientifically unproven, drastic "treatments" they could think up on the mentally ill. At least this one spent (part of) his time analyzing fictitious characters, where he wasn't able to cause (direct) harm to real people. Well, I wonder if this guy ever reviewed GL or ATWT: "Bert clearly drove Bill to drink by being a harping shrew and she may have permanently damaged her children's psyches by leaving him no choice but to abandon his family. Housewives would be wise to learn from this tragic outcome for Bert and her family and remember to be seen and not heard." "Lisa is a loose woman and should not be allowed anywhere near her son. Although Nancy has been helpful in caring for Tom while his mother was neglecting her wifely duties and then skipped town following the divorce, it is not at all clear whether Nancy has been doing so out of genuine concern or because she resents Lisa's youth and beauty and her place in her son's life, and is seeking to usurp Lisa in the one arena in which she can. As neither maternal figure is suitable and the child is already confused enough about who his mother is without introducing yet another female influence into his life and making him think he has more 'mommies' than 'Heather,' from that obscene book, he would be better off in an institution."

I've seen very little of Edge and I never even knew that Nancy wasn't Mike's first wife (or Laurie Ann's biological mother), but I am addicted to this series. I can't wait to read what "popular daytime drama" this prig "looks in on" next, and what chauvinist, condescending medical wisdom he had to share with America! Any chance you have more? I'm surprised ABC didn't drag this guy out of the nursing home a year or two ago to explain in an interview how showing two "daddies" on OLTL raising a child together would have really confused America as far as real fathers' rightful authorities being usurped, and that was why the gay couple had to go. Thanks, Carl, for sharing this fascinating, if disturbing time capsule.

This is really cool. I've definitely been to DBS. Nancy Reardon was perfect for the role and I should have known that any bit part of such significance on RH at that time would have been cast with someone with interesting ties to the NY theater scene. I wonder what other acting work NR has done. It was good to see her make an appearance in this week's episodes. I forgot that Kathleen was in town when Delia's sailing-off-with-Roger scheme came to a head. I did remember that sequence of Jack spying on Delia spying on Pat and Frank and Maeve arguing about whether they should try to stop Delia from running off (one of my favorite scenes from this show, ever), but Kathleen's presence added yet another dynamic in the already crowded Ryan homestead and provided a nice contrast to her siblings' drama. As far as Kathleen never returning again after 1980, I'm sure when ABC bought the show, they saw no use for such a character. It would have been nice if she had made a cameo at the end of the show, at least - all of Maeve and Johnny's (living) children together again, one last time.

Fascinating! I had never even heard of this show. The concept sounds really interesting, especially at the time, I'm wondering if it was any good? I don't recognize the names of any of the behind-the-scenes folks. It looks like it was stuck in a cursed timeslot... Thanks for posting! Also interesting that a magazine ran a series in which a doctor provided commentary on the way that soaps portrayed characters coping with problems. Too bad they chose a doctor who seemed to be extremely condescending and chauvinist...he sounds like the psychiatrist Betty Draper went to see in Mad Men.

That's true, by 1982, characters like the Kirklands would have been old hat. I hadn't thought of 1981 as particularly bad, mostly because I don't think of RH in that year being a cohesive show... There was the beginning of the year, which just seemed like Labine and Mayer at their most burnt out (either from battling the network or just 7 years of writing the show in and of itself) and resorting to things like the Frank and Faith pairing, along with stuff like Kim and Joe thrown in to satisfy someone's agenda, but some bright spots like Jack and Rose. Then there was the writer strike, which was just horribly mindless garbage (petite Kim realizing she was pregnant for the first time when she went into labor, about three months after the kid would have had to have been conceived). And then the end of the year actually showed promise, with Kim leaving and the intro of Maureen Garrett and the soap within a soap plot, and even the Egyptian artifact story - which could have been an interesting infusion of new blood that took advantage of the NYC setting with that completely fictitious museum - but that all amounted to nothing. I don't think of those periods as being the same era, but you're right, not a great year for the show at any point, and that was when it had the best chance to capitalize on ABC daytime's higher ratings across the board. And then there was this, which is what really did RH in: the timeslot change. And my god, who had the brilliant idea that Jacqueline Dubujak and some himbo with a ludicrous soap opera cliche name would make those people whose affiliates were still going to be airing RH in its new timeslot tune in?

This feels blasphemous even to suggest, but I've wondered what might have been if any of the attempts to make Ryan's Hope more like GH, etc. in the '80s had been successful? At least from a commercial standpoint. So many soaps strayed from their roots and it paid off, at least initially. RH actually took place in NY, and some of the larger than life plots that soaps desperately tried to shoehorn into sleepy Midwestern communities in the mid-'80s would have fit in more readily on RH, in some ways. But nothing ever took off. The 1982 synopses got me thinking along these lines. The Kirlands (who really didn't last that long) weren't so different - at least on paper - from the Spauldings on GL, the Buchanans on OLTL, and of course the Quartermaines on GH. If anything, the biggest difference was that most of those shows went to an hour around the time that the new, wealthy families came on-board. The RH 1982 synopses just seem so off-kilter, because these new characters were sharing only a half hour timeslot with the eponymous core family. I wonder if there was ever talk of taking RH to an hour (I know Claire Labine was opposed, but I mean while she was away from the show). Would it have had to change its name to reflect a broader canvas? The Pat Falken Smith era in the mid-'80s is in some ways even more sacrilegiously intriguing. The material itself was awful, IMO. It was enough I could do when some of those episodes turned up on YouTube to watch enough episodes to see how Faith, etc. were written out. And yet, it's ironic that one of PFK's biggest contributions to daytime that still lives on to this day is the introduction of the Bradys on DOOL: a working-class, Irish Catholic family that later owned a bar (I know that part came much later and wasn't her doing, but still). She was at RH about a year before the timeslot change completely removed RH from the competition for healthy ratings. Actually, I think RH was comparable to DOOL itself ratings-wise around 1983 or so, when the NBC lineup had taken such a hit. And of course it was GH and not RH that was initially on the chopping block in the late '70s, because RH had higher ratings. Could the GH/DOOL formula that failed when it was foisted on RH have been successful there, with a few tweaks? What would have happened if PFK had successfully grafted a really overwrought supercouple onto the show, with a bona fide tie to the core family - the kind that could make the show # 1 in the ratings the week of their weding? I guess they tried that with Siobhan and that much-criticized Joe recast. And Yasmine Bleeth and Grant Show were along those lines, but ratings-wise, the bottom had already dropped out by that point, and it was enough of a stretch to start aging the grandchildren even in the late '80s, let alone earlier. Beyond Siobhan, the other Ryan siblings were a bit mature by the time PFK came along... The other interesting historical what-if is that James Reilly was on PFK's writing team at one point. If RH had continued in that vein, I wonder how close we came to seeing Maeve and Father McShane helping Dakota - who turned out to have been a priest in his mysterious past - perform an exorcism on Jill, after her torrid affair with Dakota on the bar at Ryan's made her vulnerable to Satanic possession and the Max character returned to make her his Queen of the Night? I'm not saying I would have wanted to see any of this happen, or that RH buying time so as to have a similar outcome to any soap on the air now would have justified it. The most I can think of is that there might have been a few amazing years in the early '90s or so, if Claire Labine had come back after the supercouple fad ended and had integrated the best of that era with her own material, as she did with GH. Even if RH had managed to survive into the 90s/21st century, which would have been a big if, for the most part, I think it was better off going out with its dignity. Plus, I got to see it at its best on SoapNet, and none of the shows that made the transition into the present era have ever made their tape vaults available, for whatever reason. I'm just thinking out loud. Early RH had some similarities to early OLTL and GH (the working class ethnic family and medical aspects, respectively) and both of those shows took such drastic turns in the '80s, etc. It's probably a mixed blessing that RH never established a successful identity apart from its creators' vision, but in some ways I really think that may have been more a result of chance than anything else.

Haha, thanks! I don't think I've ever seen Genovese's commentary on OLTL's Tina, or Paul Rauch's work in general. Come to think of it, other than several pieces on Ryan's Hope, which I only saw in reruns on SoapNet, most of what I've read by him was about shows I wasn't old enough to watch the first time around and have never been resurrected (Capitol, etc.). But it didn't matter, it was still just fascinating history. It's so hard to think of SOD being known as the hard-hitting soap mag - I remember when that was SPW, and then of course they merged and both began filling kind of the same niche. And, wow, JKG is on Facebook. I'm not that avid a user and I am not connected with any soap people - even those I've actually met. I guess I'm overly cautious about invading people's privacy, etc. But I'm tempted just to see his reactions to the state of the genre.

I'm always curious to read anything about Generations, which I wish I'd seen/been old enough to appreciate. I am ambivalent at best about catfights in soaps to begin with, but that behind the scenes article was a very interesting read. However, the main thing I have to add to this thread is that I heart John Kelly Genovese. Even when I vehemently disagree with him - like a scathing review he wrote of Ryan's Hope circa 1983, and the sequence with Jack and Mary's "ghost" in particular, which from YouTube I consider some of the most moving and beautiful material I've ever seen on a soap - I've always just admired the way he expressed his opinion and held soaps accountable for producing quality material, the same as any other creative form. And such a good writer...he could well have been reviewing any art form. I even bought a copy of his soap opera trivia book from the mid-'80s a few years back (one of those Amazon used book deals, where the shipping cost more than the book itself). I think this may be the latest piece that I've seen from him. I read something a few years back that he is (or was) still with us. Does anyone know what became of him? I really believe that, if he had stayed in the soap field, he could have been a powerful voice against the perception that soaps are these mindless pieces of trash that could be twisted around, with no regard for logic not to mention taste, to suit the agendas and the prejudices of the network higher ups. I'm assuming he was one of the first casualties of the collusion of the soap magazines in the dumbing down of soaps, so long as they got access to the lame spoilers that (their editors believed) were their bread and butter. But I wonder what would have happened if he had found a forum to continue expressing his opinions. For all I know, he had no interest in providing in-depth critique of what aired on soaps as we got further into the '90s, not to mention the millennium... Anyway, thanks for posting, Carl!

I think some critical bridge between Pat's first fling with Faith and their later relationship got lost in translation amidst the Faith recast(s). I'm not sure what would have happened originally, but I think it would have made more sense. I suspect that when the cast finally stabilized for a little while, the other pieces in the story were working - Delia/Roger, Frank/Jill (well, after 2-3 recasts), Seneca/Jill - and also MG's Pat and CH's Faith were both very likable on their own even if they didn't light the screen on fire together, so the writers kind of picked up the original thread as if whatever was supposed to happen to make us buy Pat and Faith as a couple had happened. Or maybe they genuinely forgot - it must have been hell launching a new daily show with so many cast changes, and doing such an amazing job overall. Pat certainly had more chemistry with Delia than he did with any of the Faiths, and him having genuine feelings for Delia would have been interesting. I kind of remember thinking (a decade ago) thet deep down he did. But she was at her most damaged at that time, and their marriage turned very ugly, and I think it's natural that any good between them would get lost after that. And, in the end, I loved Roger and Delia together so I wasn't too broken up about what might have been with her and Pat. One of the very first YouTube episodes from 1983 that Freeflyur posted has a scene of Faith reacting to his death, but that's it. When I first saw it, I think my main reaction was that it didn't sound like his death was nearly as weird as how some of Faith's other love interests died. I wouldn't say one-dimensional, so much as she regressed a lot. But, I could see how losing every emblem of having moved beyond the Ryans would do that. The St. Patrick's Day scenes where she framed Little John for shoplifting to get attention were painful to watch, but to me this having sex in the bushes of a public restaurant (with someone named Ox) sounds much more silly and completely removed from what Delia's character was about. I think whatever plans Labine and Mayer had for Delia when they returned in 1983 got lost in the tug-of-war with the network, in which it sounds like Ilene was a specific target for ABC. I think she was off-screen for something like 4 or 6 weeks that summer, even before Labine and Mayer were forced out and she was too not long afterward. From what I've seen on YouTube, it seems like when she did show up sporadically she was just inserted as a plot device in what was happening with other characters. Not the best material she was given to work with, but she did have a few very fascinating moments. I thought the scene where Delia met Charlotte Greer was extremely psychologically riveting: http://www.youtube.c...yer_profilepage The 1987-89 Delia stories were much more about her and gave her more of a chance to grow and mature (though it was surreal that the most obvious impetus for that maturity was that she was playing a grandmother - not to mention a mother to a son who looked like he was about 30). YES! Although she may have run into the same problem with the network as Sarah Felder - not being "glamorous" enough, etc. At least her track record as a star of another (higher rated) soap would have preceded her, I guess. Then again, she certainly could have played more glamorous if that's what they wanted - when she returned to GL a few years later, Holly was one of the most elegant female characters on the show. That timing was weird. Both Barry and EJ were kind of an awkward fit for the show, because their only connection to the Ryans was through their father, but Johnny didn't like him very much and he hadn't been apart of their lives until now. And after reading these synopses, you can see why Johnny would hate his brother! The stuff about EJ's childhood in here sounds really dark, and yet it was glossed over. The Ryans' only reaction to it was trying to minimize EJ's "shame" (over being abused?) instead of how Johnny was affected by the fact that he had a brother who was such a monster. In any event, had Barry and EJ's time overlapped, at least their relationship with each other might have helped add some other layers to the characters that their tenuous ties to the Ryans did not. I think that's what the thread is here for! Thank you again for posting these.

Thanks for this. I definitely have never seen anything this detailed on the 1982 stories. A lot of it sounds interesting, if a bit off for Ryan's Hope. I don't know what to make of Mary Ryan Munisteri as a writer - in some ways, it's a shame that she seemingly was never really groomed to take over by Labine and Mayer, but rather stepped into that role without warning when they were pushed out by the network. Agnes Nixon stayed on in some capacity at both of her shows - at least for a while, in OLTL's case - while her sub-writers assumed progressively more responsibility. Munisteri did bring some new ideas, some of which sound like they could have added something to the show, and it seems like she did a better job of integrating the new elements with the existing characters than the mid-80s writers did (I guess she couldn't have done much worse). But with no one more experienced on hand to smooth over the rough edges, it must have seemed kind of jarring. I would so love to be able to see the scene of Delia arguing that faking a suicide attempt is proof of being unfit for motherhood! The irony may well have been intentional on Munisteri's part, as she was with the show from the beginning, but unless some nuance got lost in the recap, it seems like the fact that Pat was Kim's intended mark just as he had been Delia's when she herself pulled that trick never registered for Delia. I think it would have - not in a purely selfless or entirely rational way, and in fact maybe just to reaffirm her dislike of Kim as a way of justifying what she already was planning to do. But I guess the new writers were trying so hard to shoehorn Delia into some sort of Alexis Carrington-esque role that they overlooked her roots. I didn't realize Maureen Garrett's EJ stayed on for so long after her and Roger's aborted wedding. It sounds like she might as well have left then, if her material was as uninteresting on the air as the recap made it sound. It's too bad the character didn't work out, for a lot of reasons - none of which had to do with MG, who is one of the best actresses daytime has ever had. She came on as an ill-conceived character when the show already was on shaky ground, and then all of the backstage turmoil happened. She could have fit in really well with this company, I think, with a character that was actually integral. I'm glad Maeve and Johnny had something to do during this lost era when I've so often heard that the show was overrun by newcomers with few if any ties to the core family, but the dancing story sounds kind of isolated and inconsequential. I also had no idea Siobhan and Johnny clashed so badly over Joe. But even when Johnny was at his harshest here, it sounds like he still didn't bring up Mary's murder as a reason for hating Joe. The show really swept that under the rug at this time, trying to reinvent Joe and Siobhan as RH's answer to Luke and Laura. Anyway, I'm not sure the friction with Johnny rings true, though. Originally, of course, Siobhan had always been closer to Johnny while Maeve took exception to just about everything Siobhan did. It would have been more interesting if Maeve was the one who couldn't bear the thought of Siobhan reconciling with Joe when it was their relationship that got her beloved Mary killed, and Maeve went off to her dancing as an escape from her continued grief over Mary's death and her repressed anger at Siobhan for her involvement. The Mitch character and Karen Morris Gowdy's Faith seem like they would have been the weirdest couple ever. It could have been a fiery, opposites-attract dynamic, except I can't picture her sparring with anyone. I didn't realize that Seneca's mother appeared in the '80s. I wonder who played her? Probably not Gale Sondergaard. IMDB was no help, but they do have a record of another actress playing her after GS in the late '70s, which I do vaguely remember. I had no idea that Jill and Seneca ever were romantically involved again after their divorce either - I guess that explains why I think originally, the point was that Pat was someone who didn't quite know who he was, himself - he had always been the middle child, always in Frank's shadow but going with the flow and not actively challenging his family like Siobhan and Mary did, in part because of sexist double-standards but also in part because he was lost in the shuffle of a large family. I thought that was a believable dynamic and MG played it well. Then when Pat saw what a hypocrite his brother was and felt like he was the only one in the family who wasn't going to go along with whatever Frank wanted to do, he turned to self-destructive things to cope - first Delia when she was at her most toxic and then, when he got in over his head with her, to drugs. I do think the recasting hurt the character, or rather the fact that the character never fully moved beyond that downward spiral while Malcolm Groome was still in the role. Ilene Kristen and Kate Mulgrew also left around the same time, when that first cycle of contracts came up, and they too were recast - with different levels of success - but Mary and Delia both got a sort of closure with the original actresses in the roles. Whatever happened after the recasts (not much better than what happened to Pat as far as the Mary recasts, and mixed results with the Delia recasts) the original arcs could kind of stand on their own. Whatever growth the writers may have planned for Pat, the recasts weren't up for playing it, and then I think the show didn't know what to do with him.

OK, yes, I am remembering that now. Clearly, those episodes really didn't make as much of an impression on me. Like I said, SIobhan was just a completely different character post-Joe. SF and RM were amazing together and maybe Joe and Siobhan could have worked as a brief interlude. But she should have gone running back to Planned Parenthood (and become f--- buddies with the also now widowed Jack) after Joe died the first time - for good - and she saw how her experiment with marriage and family and tradition turned out. I'm really not sure where to put the blame for what happened to Siobhan, though, and the problems went so far beyond her stance on a woman's right to choose.

I'm trying to remember Siobhan's abortion choice...was that when she actually had the baby, with Marg Helgenberger in the role? I guess that would have been in the lost 1982 episodes that never got reaired on SoapNet and were completely skipped over in those YouTube episodes that were posted from the 80s? I never saw those episodes. Or was she pregnant before that, with Sarah Felder in the role, and miscarried or whatever? I'm having a vague recollection of that. Either way, that was such a weird time in general for the show, with all kinds of competing visions, etc. After Joe, Siobhan essentially was a completely different character, sad to say, but I don't think that was any writer's decision so much as a network directive to make her a generic ingenue. Even before characters like Siobhan started blatantly changing into different people, there weren't that many abortions on other soaps, even after Erica Kane, were there? Except for the series of heroines who went insane from the guilt after having the abortion...and compared to that, I think a woman truly choosing to have the baby because it's what she wanted is a more empowering scenario to depict. And I don't think any character besides Kim had an abortion? Am I blanking?

Oh, I don't know if I would agree with that...the thing about Ryan's Hope was that Maeve and her Irish Catholic dogma were essentially the moral center, but there were definitely cracks. A lot of things would have turned out a lot better for all parties involved if nobody had listened to Maeve, and the scene that sticks out most in my mind in that regard is when Maeve went and "rescued" Delia from an abortion clinic. (When Delia had no intention of having an abortion, just conning Maeve into pressuring Pat to marry Delia so she wouldn't try again.) And I have to say I was really impressed all over again with the episode that just reaired last week, in which Jill went to that abortion clinic. It didn't even seem like soap opera - it was basically If These Walls Could Talk, except twenty years earlier and a lot better. I don't know who could have watched that sequence with the teenage girl (who actually looked like a teenage girl) and heard her pitiful story and still think that any law passed by men should be able to dictate what a woman does with her own body, regardless of Jill's ultimate choice. As for Nancy, I think she was an amazing actress (and person from all I've read/heard about her) and I admire how she brought her feminist perspective to that character and I suspect I would have liked Jill a lot more if she had been more like Nancy, but Jill was not Nancy. Jill was a mess! She couldn't really be without a man for ten seconds, and she couldn't be without her world of privilege and the hypocritical social stigmas that came with it, at least for very long. That scene that re-aired a week or two ago in which she consulted an old family friend who was a gynecologist who wouldn't perform the abortion for her because "the law may change, but the old standards remain" was really creepy...I half expected him to give her advice on which brand of cigarettes to smoke while she was pregnant, as long as he was talking about sticking with those old standards. And that was the world Jill came from. But, she was portrayed as having a better life because of the gains that true feminists like the real-life Nancy made happen for women, and she was a pretty groundbreaking example of a female tv character who had a prestigious profession and clearly was as good at it as any man. So, I could buy Jill making the choice that she did. I could have seen it going the other way, too, and really Jill was one of the last soap opera heroines who should have had one of these paternity stories (not just because of Roe v. Wade but also DNA testing, which surely wasn't that far behind, not to mention AIDS). Also, plot device or not, they did say Jill physically couldn't handle the pill and I have heard anecdotally from women of that era that the pill was a huge step forward for women for many reasons, including that it was more effective at preventing pregnancy than condoms.

Oh, wow, I hadn't even thought about the fact that it's been almost as long as the original run, but you're right. I, too, loved Sarah Felder's Siobhan from the start. I'm really sorry we won't get to see any of her run again (then again, if someone in that position can neglect to have the red tape in order to shut down a whole cable network and they have to put it off for so many months after already announcing it, I suppose anything can happen between now and then). And I'm sorry you're not enjoying the current material. For me, they've just gotten into my favorite stretch of soap opera that I've ever seen, starting with Jack and Mary's wedding and Delia's affair with Roger (which I just missed this go-round). I'm hoping we make it to Delia's fake nervous breakdown (complete with her reading up on the symptoms in that heart-shaped bed, and doing her nails at her mother's grave while waiting for everyone to come find her) and Jack and Mary trapped in the basement of Ryan's Bar. If my memory/math is right, they just might. If RH had gone to an hour during this era and introduced original Siobhan at the same time of these stories, I would have been in soap opera heaven.

Awww, I wouldn't say that. I think she played the concept of Faith as she was originally written, but after she had crashed and burnt and then healed and come out of it a stronger person. I guess it was a very '70s idea that a few months of therapy could really repair a person who was that damaged so completely, but it was "hopeful" (no pun intended) and I think where the character came from was always incorporated into her stories. Plus, maybe in part because she reminded me physically of Sandy Dennis, I always thought a little bit of the repressed crazy was still there, somewhat beneath the surface. Also, Faith stayed remarkably down-to-earth and mousy considering they cast an actress who would go on to play Marilyn. I could totally buy that Pat should have gone for Faith and he'd have been very happy, but he got bored - whereas Delia walking around the Ryan household in various states of undress throwing herself at him made him completely horny and her pretending that she couldn't cope without him gratified his male ego. (I'm not saying this was pretty, but it was believable.) CH's Faith was just about the only one of Delia's rivals whom I genuinely felt sorry for (Jill and Mary could be so self-righteous and hypocritical). But not too sorry, because I knew that Faith was together enough that she didn't need Pat or any man, and as heartbroken as she was, she knew that she didn't, as well. Incidentally, I've just started watching this (presumably last) go-round of Ryan's Hope on SoapNet, and I'm really glad that I'm getting to see CH's run as Faith one last time. While I had every intention of tuning back into OLTL and maybe even AMC until the end, and I do feel very sad that those shows are going off the air, the idea that these 35 year-old episodes of RH that I've already seen at least once will never air again on TV after this year actually has had at least more of an immediate impact on me. Incidentally, I can't quite believe that it's been over 10 years since I saw these episodes the first time SN rebroadcast them, but I'm enthralled all over again. Incidentally, thanks for posting these articles. All very interesting - even Michael Hawkins, who was pretty sexy when he wasn't fumbling over his lines.

From what I've seen of this show on YouTube and the old WOST site - especially that horrendous final episode - and everything I've read about the various phases it went through during the revolving door of writers and cast members, I can see how people would have watched this show but never really fell in love with it to the point that it was their favorite show. It seemed like everything it tried to do had already been done - and done better - on another show. The spy/mystery stuff that Slesar tried to do had already been done better on Edge of Night; the soapy young love stuff had been done before on so many other shows, often even with actors instead of models being cast; and sadly even the political stuff was done better on Ryan's Hope, which wasn't even set in DC and had to keep coming up with political scandals to wreck Frank Ryan's latest campaign so he could stay on the show! And then of course the laughable nonsense at the end involving the made-up Middle Eastern monarchy to which the blonde Irish hunk was the long lost heir to the throne, culminating in the show's longtime heroine facing a firing squad, had never quite been done on a soap because it should not have been done. Too bad...this show seems like it had so much potential. The DC setting should have been better used, because the initial concept for the show, with the feud between two political families dating back to the McCarthy hearings - has anyone before or since on a soap ever discussed the McCarthy hearings? - was really groundbreaking. From what I know of John Conboy, it seems like he was the wrong producer to realize a groundbreaking concept, though, because he seemed to prefer style over substance. Why wouldn't they just come right out and say that the McCandlesses were Democrats and the Cleggs were Republicans (McCarthy was a Republican...it seemed pretty obvious) so they could do genuine political stories with depth that actually pushed the envelope? CBS primetime was successful at the time with political shows like Murphy Brown and Designing Women, which featured characters openly and frankly discussing politics every week and the audiences loving them. And why on earth did a show set in DC (OK, I know it was a fictitious Virginia suburb of DC, but close enough) in the '80s not have any black characters? It seems like this show just took the worst cliches of soaps and transplanted them into the DC political setting, and the writing and acting were not consistent enough to compete with other shows that were already doing it better.