Contessa Donatella

Amen. Isn't it the truth?! We the fans could have been jubilant. The actors would be anxiously awaiting every script! Morale could have gone through the roof.

And, we all have our biases & I was a huge RoMar fan. For the longest time I couldn't stand Drake. And it was ridiculous to consider him Roman. I mean, he just wasn't. So, the cop & the doc fans still exist. And there are places where you can talk about this & there are places where you just can't.

Well, I've just begun Dec. '91 so everything you say about after is stuff I've not re-watched yet. And, there's really nothing I can reply with except that when I watch it, I will see whatever I see. I know that in watching clips in the Ugly-X traffic that very frequently I would disagree with whatever was being captioned as the set-up to the clip and/or the reactions to what was seen. For example on the rare occasions when Roman & Marlena would have a fight I would see two people, both reasonable, both loving each other & having history & because of circumstances beyond their control they would have an argument or a fight & I would see good communication between people in a rough situation. Others would see Marlena as perfection & Roman as some sort of gargoyle. But, you have hit upon the thing that finally made me decide to do this project & that is that the very idea of Roman being a misogynist is so patently offensive to me that it warranted doing something. Roman historically is not only a good person but a very good person, a hero. There's no way a hero can be a misogynist. There's a whole range of people's reactions to RealRoman in the 90s. On one end people who say Wayne had really crummy writing. On the far other end are those who label him a misogynist. In between you find jerk, male chauvinist, and some people talk about us being a product of our times. From watching The Doctors back in its original run as a teen & re-watching it now, I am feeling some of that! See, I think how I would feel if I were in his position. Right now he has kissed her twice. Both times she first responded & then pulled away, to talk.

August 19, 1996

Oh, boy, getting into Frons Feverishly Freestyle Freeform Dreaming, whataday! And, @Taoboi I have forgotten to say just how very totally really unimaginably happy I was to have MONICA!!!!! on my screen. I went down a Leslie Charleson rabbit hole.

Personally I am VERY concerned! The compound retcon of John Black is gargantuan! I cannot think what good they could do & I can think of tons of bad! With the DVD week & finding out he was a Robechaux, they actually stabilized John's identity for the first time in years. Now, I am afraid they will mess it up again! I don't exactly know why I care, but I do.

I have no idea if this is a minority position or not but I do not feel that Colleen Zenk was wasted, not by a long shot.

DAYS Classic: I'm doing a project about Real Roman, OG Roman, Wayne Northrup as Roman. It's called Roman, a jerk or not a jerk? 11-15-91 Day 1 not a jerk. 11-17-91 Day 2 not a jerk. 11-18-91 Day 3 not a jerk. 11-19-91 Day 4 not on. 11-20-91 Day 5 not on. 11-21-91 Day 6 not a jerk. Far from it. Romantic, funny, kind, talkative, gentle, absolutely at his best. 11-22-91 Day 7 not on. 11-25-91 Day 8 not a jerk. 11-26-91 Day 9 not a jerk. 5-16-94 Day 10 not a jerk even though Marlena lies to him & tells him she's having a wonderful time with John, made to say so on phone by Stefano. Roman knows their marriage is over. 11-27-91 Day 11 Roman not on. 11-29-91 Day 12 Roman not on. 4-8-94 Day 13 Not a jerk. 4-11-94 Day 13 Not a jerk. It is clear to me that Marlena still wants to be with Roman. But he is going forward with a divorce. She wants him to forgive her. He can't stand that she loved John in the same way that she loved him. 12-2-91 Day 14 Not a jerk. 12-3-91 Day 15 Not a jerk. Roman & John on hands & knees crawl into the Mayan pyramid. Outside Izzy & Marlena are awkward. Bo is mostly running from somewhere to here. Roman & John have to work together, which they do. Just as they finally get somewhere Lawrence & Gretchen catch up with them & hold them at gunpoint. Suddenly Stefano appears only we only hear him & see his shoes. It is not Joe Moscolo. Victor is chained to the wall. Carly finds him & frees him. 12-4-91 Day 16 Not a jerk. (12-31-23) No idea who is playing Stefano but their accent is horrible! John finally acknowledges that he is not Roman. Roman looks forward to putting his family back together, beginning with Marlena as his wife. She has a funny expression on her face as he expresses this.

Well, the numbers definitely say YES. I've really enjoyed our expedition.

The thing about her, & also about Rauch, is that for all the bad there was also good. She was a fierce defender of her shows. She wielded power, sometimes in a good way. She was responsible for a number of people getting their jobs or being promoted from within. And, when she retired & they also retired the position of Exec in Charge of Production, it became obvious that she'd done a lot of good that wasn't noticed until it was missing. Of course, there is no way that "wizened old man" is ever forgivable.

Did anyone remember him from ATWT?

You just can't imagine how happy this list makes me!!! I both strongly disagree & strongly agree with you, which is like, soap fan heaven. Of course, I have to draw the line at Otalia, so imagine me with my fingers in my ears going "lalalalalalalal can'thear you lalalalalal"

Bringing this over from the discussion about dark stories on soaps. It was a segue from the murder of Frankie Frame. Write-ins, phone calls, petitions, you name it, we threw it at it! We had Eddie Drueding working with us. Tom Freeman was our fearless leader who applied political experience to fan campaigns & who had single-handedly gotten AW back on the air in Seattle. He talked to Victoria every day. And then Diva Lisa who talked to another cast member, also every day. They relayed info & strategy to all of us. And, the rest of us did what we were told, if you see what I mean! I don't know if you will credit this or not, but 6 of us are still in touch. It was invaluable that the actors were savvy & could not only give us advance info but could suggest strategy to us. That's how we knew ahead of time, usually, what they were planning. Frankly, in retrospect I find it gratifying that we drove JFP crazy. And, the next EP Charlotte Savitz hired bodyguards. Recently I have learned that NBC forced RKK on JFP. So, in effect, the fact that DAYS stopped using him as Bo (supposedly thanks to KA) indirectly caused Frankie's murder because NBC didn't want to pay him without playing him. Weird to learn this so many years later. Who knew?! There were 3 waves of Another World Fan Activism. 1.Tom Freeman's campaign to getAWback on the air in Seattle. He ran it by what he'd learned in political campaigns. It was offline, had a large mailing list, phone calls, petitions, etc. He named it the Another World Fan Brigade. 2. Then, in the 90s, he used the name again, the Another World Fan Brigade, but this time online & centered around Usenet's RATS soap group & Eddie Drueding's AW Home Page website. That's when we saved Donna Love but lost Frankie, which I mentioned before. After the gruesome onscreen murder of Frankie Frame by JFP & MDP, many AW fans gave up the show & the fight. 3. The Committee to Save Another World led by Silas Kain. This is an article about Tom Freeman in THE OLYMPIAN, Dec. 8, 1994. In the past 20 years, Olympia resident Tom Freeman has certainly made sacrifices for the sake of his favorite daytime soap opera, "Another World." As a high school student, Freeman skipped classes to catch the really good episodes. And years later, he impulsively spent $1400 on a new televsion and VCR one afternoon after his co-workers in the office television lounge refused to let him watch the soap. Of the purchase, he admits, "It was just so I could watch 'Another World,' adding with a touch of shyness, "It's a little embarrassing." But nothing compares to the full-fledged attack, Freeman, 35, is  aunching to bring back his beloved show, which was pulled from the Western Washington market in October 1993. A devoted fan for about 20 years, Freeman still remembers the fateful morning in October 1993 when - with no warning - his show was canceled. "When I tuned in on Monday morning, it wasn't on, and I went ballistic," he says. "I called (KING-5, the NBC affiliate that canceled the show) immediately, and of course the lines were busy," he says, so he kept calling - and calling, and calling and calling. PERSISTENCE In fact, Freeman has called every day for the past 13 months to request that the show be put on the air. In addition to calling KING-5, Freeman, business manager for KAOS Radio, has contacted people at NBC and at the soap opera itself. And when his solitary efforts seemed to be getting him nowhere, Freeman, a self-described leftist political activist, employed his political campaigning and organizing skills for a concentrated, organized group effort. "I thought, same skills, different campaign," he says. "And after the last election, I thought this was a lot more fun." Taking to the electronic mail network, Freeman first solicited advice from about 100 "Another World" fans nationwide. After hooking up with some other local fans, Freeman also started the Another World Fan Brigade about a month ago. One of the club's goals is to "work to bring 'Another World' back on the air in the Western Washington television market," Freeman says. SOME HELP Freeman has been helped by a friend and devoted fan, Seattle resident Rita Blood. "When it got taken of the air, (Freeman) said, 'We've got to start doing something (like) inundating them with phone calls," says Blood a fan for eight years. Blood and Freeman have also gotten friends, co-workers and other fans to call the station, they say. But the club also serves as a social network and support system, Blood says. "After 'Another World' was pulled from the schedule here, fans suddenly found themselves with almost no one to talk with about their show being gone," Freeman says. "We know there are a lot of fans out there, and we need an organization to help them communicate with each other." For both fans, there's just nothing that can compensate for the loss of this show. "That's the only one I watch," Blood says. "It's just the one that caught me. I like the story lines and I like the characters." Freeman's devotion to the show stems from a long history of watching the characters. "When the guy who played the main character died, I sat and sobbed," he says. "It was just like a member of my family died." DEVOTED FANS Although it may seem extreme to some, Blood and Freeman's devotion is far from unusal, says Tony Twibell, president and general manager of KING-5. "Soap opera audiences are very hard-core," Twibell says. "You get a lot of calls." Twibell says the decision to cut the show was based on low ratings and a decreasing number of viewers. "It was the lowest-rated daytime show and no one was watching it," Twibell says. After repeatedly asking NBC to improve the show, Twibell says they had no choice but to cut it. "A soap opera has to have some kind of continuity," Twibell says. "Unfortunately, the show just had been going nowhere for a long time." "Another World" was originally replaced with the talk show "Sally Jessy Raphael," which Twibell says drew six-seven times the audience "Another World" garnered. But Blood disagrees, calling the shows that have replaced "Another World" "garbage." "I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't for the fact that they put absolute trash on," she says. "That's the thing that bothers me the most." Luckily, the two fans are not completely starved of "Another World." Soon after the show was dropped from KING-5, a close friend of Freeman's who lives in Minneapolis began taping the shows and sending them to him. After he and a friend view them, the tapes go to a co-worker of his, and then on to Blood, who sends the tapes back to Freeman's friend. COMING TO AN END? Their complex (and expensive) mailing system may soon come to an end, however. KING-5 dropped the show in Western Washington, Twibell says NBC has brought in new producers and writers, and the network is now considering resuming the show next fall. "We will continue to look at it (and) monitor what it does on a national basis," Twibell says. Meanwhile, Judith Kritch, the regional director of West Coast affiliate relations for NBC, says the network can do little more than sympathize. "The only thing we can do is say we understand that, being a loyal viewer, it is upsetting to them. We are working to get (the show) back on the air," Kritch says. -30- I have just learned that Tom Freeman died Aug. 12, 2023. I have messaged with his husband, Mauro. He had been suffering with Alzheimer's & he broke a knee & then he got an infection and he died. When we saved Donna, Jill took it to one of her focus groups & had them decide between Frankie & Paulina. Alice Barrett thinks, and I agree with her, that she had been rested, or back-burnered most recently & that is why it ended up being her. Then other strange things happened at & near the end. In Jan. 1993 the Dobsons, finished with Santa Barbara, were headed to Brooklyn to HW AW. P&G 100% on board & they're excited but then NBC blocks it! Then companies came calling: Columbia-TriStar (now Sony, previously Screen Gems) wanted to do a deal to co-own AW with P&G. FOX wanted AW to start a daytime schedule. Angela Shapiro wanted AW for ABC. (Where was she gonna put it?) What became Paramount wanted to do the same deal that what became Sony wanted. And, P&G said NO to everyone! I have realized that the original poster was also asking about the DAYS/RKK connection. I will try to explain. When DAYS released RKK as Bo , and Peter Reckell came back on as Bo, they did not fire him per se, they just released him from work & he had 2 years left on his contract & at first he was being paid but not working. Naturally no one liked that. So, NBC told AW that they should find a way to use him. But, then, his pay would come out of AW's budget. When he began to have an ongoing conversation with Jill Farren Phelps, who was then EP at AW, she said upfront right off the bat, that he was being forced on her & she didn't like it, not one bit. And, this meant she had to find money in her budget to cover him. She had been planning to kill off more characters, anyway, and they had a serial killer story at the time, so she decided to pick a medium income actor so she could use that money to cover him. And, that is how RKK indirectly caused the gruesome murder of Frankie Frame. Tom Freeman with Victoria Wyndham & Charles Keating

Okay, I answered your last 2 questions but I moved this because it was off-topic here, being a segue from the gruesome murder of Frankie Frame. Now this intact discussion can be found in the Another World Discussion topic. 1. Tom Freeman 2. RKK. And to you & also to @md1347 & @OpportunisticSlut thank you all, most kindly, for your interest in soap fan campaigns back in the day!

Ratings Feb. 14-18, 2011 (week before) TV: GH 2,508,000 (-73,000/-718,000) HH: GH 1.8/6 (-.2/-.2) W18-49: GH 720,000 (-38,000/-276,000) W18-49: GH 1.1/7 (same/-.4) W18-34: GH 0.7/5 (+0.1/-.4) M18+: GH 469,000 (-64,000/-113,000) Ratings Feb. 21-25, 2011 (week of) TV: GH 2,925,000 (+417,00/+157,000) HH: GH 2.2/6 (+.4/+.2) W18-49: GH 874,000 (+154,000/-89,000) W18-49; GH 1.3/8 (+.2/-.2) G12-17: GH 29,000 (+3,00/+6,000) W18-34: GH 0.8/5 (+.1/-.3) M18+: GH 496,000 (+27,000/+7,000) Ratings Feb. 28 - Mar. 4th (week after) TV: GH 2,788,000 (-137,000/+206,000) HH: GH 2.1/7 (-.1/+.2) W18-49: GH 811,000 (+63,000/-48,000) W18-49: GH 1.3/8 (-.1/-.1) G12-17: GH 19,000 (-10,000/-16,000) W18-34: GH 0.8/5 (same/-.1) M18+: GH 304,000 (+8,000/-131,000)

Thank you very much!

@carolineg @titan1978 @BrendaB Okay working on ratings, week before, week of, week after, early report, headline from week of reads GH #1 in W18-49!

No, I never thought it. But, I can kinda see what you mean.

Personally I think Frons wanted to go ahead & cancel it before people took it off the chopping block. That perverse situation where a soap is getting better & TPTB act precipitously before the show can actually save itself. That's why I think Susan D. Lee acted in April 1999 instead of in May as had been pre-planned. The shows all had deadlines & ratings goals & she even called MADD back from out of the country.

Okay, well, 2 years is certainly better in terms of all the Brenda-Only fans who are gonna come & watch & if it is tolerable they're going to stay "a while". Plus, that is actually easier to plan a good promotion around a longer timeframe like that!

When AW was canceled, it was announced on April 12, 1999 & the last work day was end of May 1999 & the last air date was June 25, 1999. These were the ratings at the bottom. Through a special agreement between NBC and BEACH they got a 6 month extension even though they had a lower rating. (And NBC half-owned them.) Their last air date was 12-31-99. (I use BEACH for Sunset Beach since I use SB for Santa Barbara.) #9 AW 2.4 #10 PC 2.2 #11 BEACH 1.7 After the pre-emption hiatus PSSN debuted with a 1.9. Does anyone know any demos for AW April '99 or for PSSN at their debut (July something '99) or any of the few early weeks? Thanks for anything!

I was thinking 6 months ...

I'll try to find time to do some as a thank you to you.