DeliaIrisFan

PS: In answer to the question posed earlier, no, Delia was not like Roxy...Delia presented herself as being innocent and helpless; only when she felt threatened did she show her claws, but even then it seemed more like a child having a tantrum. As the years went on and her misdeeds piled up, more and more characters started to see through her, but she was not overtly outrageous like Roxy. Also, Delia was not an alcoholic. In short, having lots of forgotten children as the plot dictated would not have been her MO, and a teen pregnancy would have been a big deal for this character -- and probably would have sent her desperately searching for a Ryan boy to seduce and claim to be the father.

Wow...well, Delia was the best soap character ever, AFAIC, so I'll be watching and hoping for the best. I do hope that Delia being Maura West's character's mother is just a rumor; as has been mentioned, I don't see a daughter that age fitting into the character's back story, and even to the extent that it could be explained, I wouldn't want to see a revelation like that handled in two days, without any of the RH characters that were central to Delia's life. Honestly, I don't see these two shows' histories "melding" at all. I'd rather Delia be someone who knows who this characters' parents are, but isn't directly involved. If that's all it is, then I guess it could be a fun bit. On the other hand, if she is going to be shoehorned into some convoluted parentage story and they wanted to make some in-joke that likely a fraction of the people watching would even be in on, then I wish they would have just unearthed Ilene's "Loving" character.

Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting. I don't think I've ever seen such an in-depth look at this show at this time - details about what worked as well as some insight into what didn't work as well. And I love how Reed said a paternity story would have been "hackneyed even in the 1950s." Where are the soap "journalists" who are willing to say that nearly 40 years later?

I have to add that Maureen Garrett deserves particular credit for being able to take Holly on that journey without a recast. Holly at her most bitter was a revelation. Seeing Holly and Blake reconcile when Curlee, et al were still writing again on YouTube recently was touching (again, I don't know if I could completely buy SS's Blake as sincere in thoe scenes) but part of me wishes they had kept Holly and Blake at odds but found ways to force them to deal with each other. What I saw of Holly and Blake during Blake's phase of repeatedly cheating on Ross in the mid-late '90s, it almost seemed like second-rate Erica and Mona. If they had to do that skeevy twins-by-different-fathers story, Holly could have served as a Greek chorus if she caught onto Blake just as Blake found out about Holly's latest indiscretion with Roger, and they had to help keep each other's secrets: Holly: I think I need my headache pills. Is this even medically possible? Blake: Well I Googled it [when did Google come to be?] and apparently it is. Holly: Well, I never dreamed I'd feel sorry for you, Blake, but here I thought I was at my wit's end when I turned up pregnant with you. To think, I could have been carrying twins: one Roger's, and the other, Ed's. They didn't even have DNA testing then, so nobody would have even believed me...until you started whoring around, and the other one was the pillar of the community.

True. Still, I don't know if I could have bought SS's Blake playing the victim to Holly at her maternal worst, though, after all that Blake put Holly through. I give LK a lot of credit for stepping in at such a pivotal point in the story and staying true to what had actually transpired between the characters, but showing a slightly different perspective. In hindsight, I would have thought that, compared to the revolving door of underwhelming Mindy recasts and the year-long search for a new Alexandra, more notice would have been given to LK for pulling off a successful recast of a popular actress who just picked up right where her predecessor left off. (I think they gave viewers a good six months to forget Kimberly Simms's Mindy. But maybe part of what helped was that Blake was part of a vital story, but Mindy wasn't really needed?) The show would have been really hard to watch at that time with a disastrous Blake recast, on top of all the other cast shake-ups that left voids that were not filled as successfully (including Maureen).

' Oh yeah, she and Ross had a great dynamic, but with Holly, I never saw SS's Blake as anything but a petulant child having a tantrum. Again, I only saw bits and pieces. I just feel like LK had great comedic timing and could pull off the bitchy Blake, but she also brought a vulnerability with Holly and Roger.

I also love this scene (so glad this episode is online 20 years later) but I have to say, I don't know that SS could have played this scene or Blake's transition as effectively as Liz Keifer did. I saw little of SS's time on GL and never watched ER or any of her other projects, but I tend to think of her Blake as being cold and kind of two-dimensional - which is not to say she wasn't entertaining or compelling. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think LK was the definitive Blake. On that note, I forgot that Blake spent this Thanksgiving with Frank. As dopey as the non-story that brought them together in the show's final episode (literally) was, seeing some of these early scenes between them only reinforces that the fact that they did end up together was one of the things in the finale that I actually liked. I mean, after Ross had been killed off and JvD was under contract on another network, it made the most sense for Blake and made me happy. Not that SS's Blake didn't have material with Frank back then, and arguably the most memorable material - it was a backburner character dynamic that stayed consistent and endearing through both actresses.

Has it ever been addressed re: why P&G didn't try to sell AMC to ABC when they were first shopping it around for Nixon? Was GH already enough of a success that ABC didn't think they needed P&G as a middle-man? For that matter, did ABC own GH outright at that point, or was it initially owned by the Hursleys like Nixon owned her shows and Labine and Mayer owned Ryan's Hope?

Didn't it play out in the middle of the baby switch, as well? I assume that still-unresolved plot must have been intertwined in some way - if Ivan were so omniscient, surely he must have figured out the huge secret that Karen was keeping, etc. I wonder if it seemed jarring at the time, for Karen's guilt and/or desire not to be caught for stealing a baby to pale in comparison all of a sudden to her concern that her (ex?) husband had a chip implanted in his brain by a mad scientist? And was this interlude referenced at all in the scenes where Karen had to explain her actions, or if it was just glossed over...OLTL seemed to be back to being more realistic by that point, at least judging by the scenes on YouTube from around that time, when Viki went to jail for not revealing her source, etc.

I completely understanding starting with Julianne Moore's first episode, and not that I'm complaining - I will probably buy this sooner or later - but wasn't there a short-arc story that transpired on the cruise that Bob and Kim went on for their honeymoon? Didn't I read that Doug Marland managed to work that into the Douglas Cummings story a year or so later...there was a revelation of some sort that Douglas had been onboard? I would have been interested in seeing that, as well.

Count me in as someone who ordered the James DVD within a day of the release. I hesitated, because I had nothing else to order it with and I'd just used the Mother's Day coupon to buy the last of the DVDs that I had any interest in watching...and which I have not even finished watching. But I felt strongly that this set, even more than the others, is really a classic, because there was no attempt to round it out with subpar newer material. And frankly I will have plenty of time to watch these episodes eventually, since there is no soap left on the air that I've watched regularly since I was in high school. I'm sorry it's not doing as well...speaking only for myself, I have absolutely no interest in buying the last 10 episodes of either ATWT or GL on DVD, or of any show that's been canceled since at least AW. I get why a James DVD was a good idea and I'm waiting with baited breath to see these episodes from what I've read, but as someone who didn't watch when any of these episodes first aired, I agree that James might not be the most accessible character for newer viewers, based on his short-term returns in the last decade or so. I would hazard a guess that the idea was to do DVDs for James on ATWT and Roger on GL in quick succession, and if that's the case, I wonder if starting with Roger might have done a bit better, because he was on the show full-time and was portrayed more as a leading man. But then I remember that it's been over 15 years since Michael Zaslow last appeared on GL - so sad - and for much of the last decade of GL's run, the show did its best to pretend that he and Roger Roger had never even existed... Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting this DVD and hope that sales pick up and we get to see more truly rare material.

Oh yeah, I forgot that soaps finally went there a few years ago, via GH. It's funny, while reading the soap cliche thread, I also almost forgot, until someone brought it up, that Lulu on GH had actually had an abortion in recent years, unlike pretty much every other soap heroine with an unwanted pregnancy. I tend to overlook GH when making generalizations about what soaps have devolved into, because I have absolutely no desire to watch it in the shape it's been in for the past 15 years or so. Maybe they got away with those touches of realism every now and then because the show is otherwise so focused on invincible alpha males and women who only exist for their uteruses.

It is an incredible find. Thanks again, Carl. Too bad Marland must have left GL right after this.

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.