watson71

Every time I saw Ken Jordan on the screen all I thought of was David Thatcher 🤣

Hindsight is definitely 20/20. NBC and the production companies were definitely spending money on their soaps. But the ratings were not helped by ABC airing the Olympics. On a side note, here is an interesting piece of trivia- on the premier episode of Santa Barbara at the 18:00 mark, the reporter is played by Margaret Impert. She was the actress who played Rachel on AW briefly between Robin Strasser and Victoria Wyndham.

Both DAYS and AW featured remotes the week SANTA BARBARA premiered. Bo and Hope in New Orleans and AW featured a remote that was filmed at Coney Island where Cecile was kidnapped as she entered the tunnel of love. This would be the end of Nancy Frangione’s contract appearances as Cecile. She would return in late October 1984 to wrap up the storyline and would make several more guest appearances in 1986, 1989, 1993, and 1995-96.

As we get more ratings posted, would this be the last time that AW would score a higher rating than DAYS?

AW stayed on the air 19 years with not so good ratings. The quality of the show was not reflected in the ratings. P&G and NBC allowed Paul Rauch to stay as EP into the Spring of 1983. They should have gotten rid of him long before that. Allen Potter cleaned up the show in record time and there was a jump in the ratings, but not enough to move it out of the middle of the daytime ratings. From Harding Lemay’s brief return as headwriter to when Mac Cory died, AW was excellent, but again the ratings did not move. The show was relatively stable at this time with Michael Laibson as EP for 6 years and Donna Swajeski and Peggy Sloane as headwriters. Again, no movement upwards in the ratings. NBC still supported the show at this point, giving AW not DAYS a primetime airing before the Daytime Emmys in 1992. In 1993, NBC canceled Santa Barbara and let AW continue, despite SB winning 3 Emmys as best show. I think that NBC started losing faith in AW in 1995, after JFPs stint with her focus on the hospital and police station failed to move the ratings. Once NBC executive Charlotte Savitz was named EP in 1996, she dismantled AW piece by piece. She shouldn’t have been able to stay until November 1998. By the time Chris Goutman arrived, the damage was done. He could not fix in 6 months all the damage Savitz caused. Goutman’s stint as EP was practice at AW to send him to ATWT. His first years there were successful, but we know how that ended as well…

At this point in the ratings, AW was six months into the 90 minute episodes. The Doctors ratings were almost identical to AW’s ratings. Did it ever occur to anyone at NBC to just expand The Doctors to an hour rather than take the risk with Texas in 1980?

The ratings for GL are the first few weeks when Beverlee McKinsey joined the show as Alexandra Spaulding.

November 25, 1983 was the Friday after Thanksgiving, so a football preemption was most likely what happened.

Thanks so much for the info- surprised that DAYS and AW dropped the week of August 1st. Interesting that AW was .2 points from DAYS rating the week of July 25th. We will have to see if this is the closest AW was to being NBCs top rated soap again.

Also add that Carmen Duncan deserved an Emmy nomination as Iris in 1989 when Mac confronted Iris about being The Chief and when Rachel told her that Mac had died. Other AW actresses that also deserved Emmy nominations in the 1980s were Constance Ford (Ada) as supporting actress and Anna Stuart (Donna) and Nancy Frangione (Cecile) gave just as good, if not better performances, than the often nominated Susan Lucci.

@JAS0N47 How did the NBC shows do the week of August 1-5, 1983? Bo and Hope were on fire on DAYS, AW had the expensive remote with the double wedding of Mac and Rachel and Sandy and Blaine, and SEARCH aired their live episode after the “infamous” and well publicized missing tape. I would imagine the shows saw a bump in the ratings during this week.

Regarding the Emmys- I’ve always believed that VW and BM canceled out each other’s nomination at voting time and that’s how a co-star beat them twice. I do believe that VW should have at least received an Emmy nomination for her work in 1989 after Mac died, her courtship with Carl in 93-94, and if she would have put herself in the supporting actress category for 92-93 she would have won for her scenes during Felicia’s intervention.

In May 1984, Peter collapsed at the altar before marrying Cecile on Another World. It is revealed that Donna and Cecile were in cahoots to split up Peter and Sally, and that Cecile was after the Love fortune. Donna and Cecile even get into a fistfight after the revelation. The episode ends with Cecile’s Scarlet O’Hara’s moment - “As God is my witness, I will never tell the truth again” as the Gone with the Wind theme plays in the background.

The Henderson Flood happened in February and by the end of March John Whitesell was the EP of Another World. Was his time at SFT just to give him EP experience with the intention of moving him to AW? P&G always like to shuffle behind the scenes players from show to show.

This seems to be what happened. Once NBC took ownership of the show, this is where the missing episodes begin. NBC simply reused the tapes, and Colgate probably never requested copies of the episodes since they no longer owned the show. We know almost the episodes of Texas during this same time exist because many have already been digitized when P&G used to have its online channel.

Here is an interesting behind the scenes video on how Retro TV had to transfer all the tapes of The Doctors to the digital platform and the discovery that NBC reused the tapes for the final 2 years of the series. Makes you wonder what is going on with all the tapes of the P&G shows…

The episodes look like they stop at the end of September 1980. The entire month of August 1980 is Far Wind and his cult holding the hospital hostage. Some of the dates of the episodes are not accurate. The day Far Wind takes over the hospital is labeled August 2, 1980. This is a Saturday. This episode probably aired on Friday, August 1 as The Doctors would air in a new time slot starting Monday, August 4th. Also, there are some location sequences filmed at the beach regarding Ashley’s storyline.

During July 1980, AW was introducing all the characters and the setting kept jumping between Bay City and Houston. So if a new viewer tuned in to the debut of Texas on August 4th, it was like following a show already in progress since the Texas storylines were introduced on AW in July. Would be difficult for a new viewer to follow.

In April 1982, Another World has 57 characters in the closing credits that were 3 minutes and 34 seconds long. Credits would never be that long nowadays. The credits were so long that they even use a different variation of the theme song.

Felicia shot Kyle with a gun, but Kyle had a fist fight with Ian, causing Kyle to have a brain hemorrhage that killed him.

Back in 1984, Carl Hutchins had his henchmen tamper with the Cory jet. The jet crashed in the Canadian tundra, and for weeks everyone assumed that Mac was dead. The episode below heavily features this storyline only to find out that Mac is very much alive in the Friday cliffhanger.

Not that I know of… Definitely would like to know what she had planned for 1989 had Douglass Watson not passed away. There definitely would not had been any Red Swan lol 🤣

I wonder what the writers had planned for the summer and fall of 1989 had Douglass Watson not passed away so suddenly. Clearly there had to be some sort of storyline where Mac and Iris would eventually reconcile that we never saw.

1988 there were a lot of changes behind the scenes at AW. Margaret De Priest left as headwriter in January to be replaced by Sheri Anderson. Michael Laibson replaced John Whitesell as executive producer. Right before the writer’s strike it was announced that Harding Lemay was returning as headwriter. His work would not air until after the writer’s strike. During the strike, Donna Swajeski, who then worked at NBC was writing the episodes. Lemay would stay about 10 weeks as headwriter, before Swajeski would take over. From Lemay’s return until mid-1989, AW is excellent. It has always been said that Swajeski was using Lemay’s bible for the show. The Who Killed Jason Frame story was a big umbrella story that involves the entire cast, and the 25th Anniversary and Mac’s death are well done. A lot of what was planned for the show probably had to be scrapped when Douglass Watson died in real life.