beebs

I may be wrong, but that's Stephanie Braxton in that clip. I'm PRETTY sure that would be AMC, if my timelines are correct for what show she was on at the time.

1 hour ago, AbcNbc247 said:

I think that might have been rewritten by Elizabeth Harrower or Nina Laemmle or someone and Donna really did turn out to be Don's daughter after all.

Yayyyyy retcons incoming

23 minutes ago, OzFrog said:

 

Woah woah woah... Donna wasn’t even Don’s daughter after all???

Unless Ann Marcus did a 180 on this, it seems he isn't! Donna blew the whole scam by telling the lawyer who was representing Lorraine in the custody suit all about the scam because she stupidly thought he was in on it. Her actual father is apparently some GI who Lorraine slept with before moving in with Don. She was already pregnant when she lived with Don. 

I just logged back in and realized how long that post was. I should never post at 3am with insomnia. I am SO sorry, Y'all.

Made to May 1978 now in the Daytime Serial Newsletters.

Ann Marcus seems to have settled into the job as headwriter now a year in, and is starting to find her groove. It's still not anything like it had been in Bell or Pat Falken Smith, but her show is finding its footing. 

I think if I'm to look at Ann Marcus' run through cynical modern eyes, it's easier to find fault in it than it is in the context of where daytime soaps were in 1978. I'll agree with @Paul Raven that Julie being raped by Larry Atwood was unnecessary, but I think part of me looks at it that way because SO MANY women on DAYS have been raped now, it just seems excessive. But by 1978, only Laura had experienced this, and under vastly different circumstances, so I don't necessarily think the twist was ill-advised. Am I a fan of the Atwood underworld caper? No. But I've seen worse.

Larry Atwood murder story is somewhat interesting, but I think years of GH centring so heavily on the mob has put me off any kind of underworld story on soaps. At least this organization seems a little slapdash, and not omnipotent like some of these organizations tend to be, but then that leads to me not taking them all that seriously either. I never get the sense that Larry Atwood or his associates are a real and pressing threat over Doug and Julie. Doug, indeed, is off singing on cruise ships all this time, and isn't exactly calling on anyone to watch over Julie while he's away. He just seems to sorta...leave her to her own devices.

I also think revealing Arlo Roberts, bit player waiter from Doug's Place who was a plant by Larry to try to undermine Doug and Julie's business was a cop-out. I would've much rather seen someone like Jeri Clayton be revealed to be Larry's killer, especially considering her ties to Atwood, and her anger at what she perceived to be Larry's two-timing her with Julie. Have her kill him, and block out the memory of that, plus the revelation that Julie was raped, which would be what incites Jeri to kill him, and we've got a story. It's not like Jeri was a cornerstone of the show, but she mattered far more than Arlo the Waiter.

Sam throwing Marlena in Bayview and taking over her life is another story that's been done so many times since, I can't help but roll my eyes at it, but it was a well-constructed story, at least. There's scripts posted from when Sam visits Marlena in Bayview, demanding she consent to shock therapy which I was fortunate enough to read (thanks Jason47!) that are very intense. Sam is cold, and menacing to Marlena, even threatening to kill her if she doesn't comply, before realizing that, DUH, SHE'S SAM! She can sign her OWN damn consent form! Of course, Marlena's saved, and Sam goes to rehab, but when Don and Marlena are to be married the next year, Marlena agrees to have Sam be her maid of honour??? Between Sam and now Ben, Marlena may be the most selectively forgiving person on the planet.

One angle of Ann Marcus' show I'm really liking is how she's writing the Andersons. Phyllis and Linda, in particular, have flourished under her. I like how cunning Linda has become, playing Tommy and Bob against each other, all with the plan of not just marrying Bob, but becoming indispensable to his business, and, indeed, the REAL person with all the power at Anderson. It's been a fascinating transformation and I find myself rooting for her at every turn. Mary and Chris have been a decent match as well. I've also been really enjoying Phyllis finally growing a spine against all the sh!tty men in her life. The moment she finds out about her husband Neil carrying on an affair with her daughter, Mary, she begins to sabotage their relationship, calling Neil on dates with Mary that Mary doesn't show up to because Mary never made the date to begin with. Later, Phyllis cavorts about with her tennis instructor right in front of Neil while refusing to share Neil's bed. Mary won't speak to Neil either, so a sex-starved Neil tries to try it on with the nurse at his clinic, and she immediately quits in response! Brilliant! After years of Neil being a slimebucket and a horndog, he finally gets some comeuppance, and Phyllis regains some power. The best part for me was reading that she finally ended up leaving for a few months on a world tour after this because she "got bored" with emasculating Neil. An absolute delight.

I notice the hotshot Dr. Griffin and his teenage daughter who was set to be paired with Mike got dropped with a quickness, as did Danny Grant and Toni's story. DAYS is now back to being lilly-white, I guess. Trish randomly decides she doesn't actually love David and runs off to Gary, Indiana (of all places) where Arlo the waiter has her singing at some random club, and just has her baby adopted out (Timothy but I know he eventually somehow becomes Scotty??). I'm guessing Patty Weaver left the show around this time because this seems like a real sharp left turn in the story, with Mike now hooking up with Chris' new secretary Margo, who immediately is diagnosed with leukemia and we're supposed to care a lot about her because she's mousy and blonde, I think.

Mike goes running after her when she finds out, because she "doesn't want to be loved out of pity" (barf), but Mike flies cross-country to Margo's twatty mother's house and throws a bunch of platitudes at her and she falls for it and now they're getting married. Yawn. Cue what I know to be the slowest death from cancer in soap opera history.

The Barton family saga ended in a nice neat little bow. Abused wife Jean tries to leave her husband, Fred. He trips over her suitcase while he's trying to get at her, falls down the stairs and has to go into surgery for a head injury. Because the hotshot Dr. Griffin was too busy looking for his daughter that night who was on a date with some dweeb he didn't like, Dr. Griffin couldn't be bothered to do the surgery. Bill and Kate found an intern to do it, but the guy was so nervous he ran off, so Bill had to, despite still having a sh!te hand after Mickey shot him while in his psychotic rage over Laura. Fred Barton wakes up and can't walk. Laura says it's psychosomatic. Fred sues University Hospital, so Kate and Bill are up for dismissal with the hospital board. The intern turns out to be a spineless rat who conveniently neglects to share his part in the debacle with the board and says Bill MADE him leave the OR, so Kate and Bill are fired. This is where Kate and Bill get to the point of emotional affair (it so far hasn't become sexual), as Laura feels Bill is threatened by the fact she's working and he isn't, and Bill and Kate were getting close as Bill became more involved in anesthesiology, which Kate is the head of for UH, or I guess, was, until she got sacked.

Either way, they manage to convince the intern to stop being a baby and tell the truth, Kate and Bill are rehired, and Kate won't screw Bill because he's married. So...for now, that's it for that angle. Incidentally, the only discernible characteristic I've been able to uncover about Kate Winograd is that she REALLY REALLY REALLY doesn't want to be "the other woman". So, A+ character development there.

The Bartons, on the other hand...Fred gets on an elevator with Marlena, who tries to shrink him on the fly. He's not having it, but then the elevator gets stuck between floors and Marlena has time to work her magic, and he goes on about how his mom got beat by his drunk dad and he has a sad and that's why he's a prick to his wife when he's stressed. A week later, he shows up to court and walks. His case against UH is dropped, Fred suddenly decides therapy is A-OK, and suddenly, Mickey & Maggie might as well have an empty apartment above them, because we never hear from the Bartons again...

...or Kate Woodville's Marie, who apparently disintegrated into the counselling program she was volunteering at after Alice finally snapped at her for taking over her home and family. Interesting that, other than a few minute conversation on the subject, Tommy and Marie's bonkers history was all-but-ignored on this run. I wonder what Ann Marcus' plan was for Marie, cos it certainly went nowhere.

Also, Janice's bio mom moves into Mickey & Maggie's neighbourhood and is apparently pretending to be Janice's fairy godmother. This will end well.

Aaaaand finally, we get to Don's senatorial campaign, in which the big scandal was going to be Marlena and Don LIVING IN SIN, causing Don to temporarily move out. This becomes mitigated by Don proposing...until Lorraine shows up. Lorraine apparently lived with Don for a month in 1964 until he found out she was turning tricks, and he never heard from her again, but apparently now he has a daughter: Tracey E. Bregman's Donna. And despite being clumsily named after him, he turns out not to even be her father, and it was all a scam to get money out of Don. Except, when it all was exposed, Lorraine skips town and leaves Donna in Salem??? WTF! So now she's Marlena's ward-du-jour. 

*inhales*

Again, I think my biggest complaint about Ann Marcus' writing of this show is that it moves SO FAST she has burned through all this story in just one year. It must have been INCREDIBLY jarring for the audience so accustomed to tightly-focused, slow-moving psychological character studies, and suddenly having so much big-stakes, largely plot-based story thrust at them like this. There really is little room for dramatic tension, and when I read some of these writeups, I am absolutely rolling my eyes at a lot more of the plot points than I ever did under PFS, who I spent more time considering the nuance of the characters' behaviours with. 

It feels like Ann Marcus' intention was to play with similar themes as before, but in a far shallower, perhaps more accessible way, but I think that sells the audience short, as DAYS was extremely successful for a very long time without dumbing down the story. I still really enjoy the more empowering way she writes many of the women of the show, but it really does feel a lot more stereotypically soap opera than what came before, and that's disappointing, because it comes off as lazy writing.

Anyway, onto June we go. More ramblings to come.

1 hour ago, amybrickwallace said:

I wonder why "Loving" was EP'ed by so many producers who not only never helmed a soap again, but seemed to vanish from the industry altogether. Ironically, their first EP was Joe Stuart, who came in with a decade of showrunning TD and OLTL - though I believe "Loving" was also HIS swan song in soaps.

If I'm to believe Ellen Holly, he may have been such a tyrant to work for that nobody wanted to hire him anymore. 

Thanks for the links @victoria foxton, and yeah, I'm less than engaged in Ann Marcus' stories so far, tbh. I watched the March 1979 episode earlier, which is early in Elizabeth Harrower's run. It already seems to be shifting back into a more intense style of the Bell era. Stephanie frying her fingertips off to stop the folks at Anderson from finding out she's actually Brooke is still shocking viewing 40 years later. As silly as the whole "Brooke comes back with a new name and face" story was (another Ann Marcus plotty story twist), I really do wish her identity had come out more naturally, and Stephanie had stuck around post-1980. She was a fascinating character to me.

1 minute ago, Franko said:

Thanks. I see it as a slow burner. Maggie has an extra drink or two at Christmas and New Year's, then other parties, then with dinner, then without dinner. It doesn't have to be a cliché if it's told honestly and relatably.

I love it. And you're absolutely right. Play it so slowly we hardly notice it happening until it's right in our faces. It can so easily be done, especially since the real story is Maggie's insecurity, and longing for the simplicity of her previous country life. Eventually, that could've even led to Maggie resenting Mickey having come into her life, driving him back toward Linda, for example.

Ann Marcus seems allergic to this kind of story so far, as everything I listed above, plus Brooke spying on Bob, getting caught, and trying to run out of town and crashing her car and "dying", all within her first five months. It's absolute whiplash compared to previous years.

7 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

@beebs that was the best rant I've ever read lol

 

I can see why the ratings dropped a little at this time. The change from years of psychological realism under Bell and Falken Smith to melodrama must have been quite jarring.

LOL thank you @AbcNbc247, I'm gonna keep reading the Daytime Serial Newsletters and maybe post a little more about what happens as I go along. Do we know when the last DSN was published? I really like the detail they put into their summaries.

It honestly feels as though Ann Marcus put all the stories on fast-forward and simplified everyone's emotions in order to get a handle on the show. I can appreciate how, as a new writer coming into a show you're somewhat unfamiliar with, this particular show would be daunting and rather dense from a characterization point of view. But, having said this, I totally get why people say she dumbed the characters down. And yes, the stories are relatively melodramatic and less controversial than what PFS was writing. It suddenly feels like a stereotypical soap, which is especially unfortunate, given what Ann Marcus was handed when she arrived. 

The only thing I will give Ann Marcus credit for is that her DAYS seems to have the women more dominant in story, and gives them a lot more agency than PFS, who seemed to have rather aggressive men dominating the narrative. Phyllis exacting revenge on her gross, philandering sleaze husband Neil has been delightful, and a nice surprise considering how psychologically fragile she was previously.

Either way, I'll keep reading and update everyone on my findings, haha. I'm curious to see the change between Ann Marcus and Elizabeth Harrower.

3 hours ago, Franko said:

 

I spent my afternoon trying to come up with alternative story path for Maggie. Suppose she became an alcoholic because of her fish out of water situation. Here she is, feeling like she's coming up short as a wife, potential mother, member of Salem society, etc. A story about anxiety and low self-esteem tells itself in 2020, but it could have worked in the late '70s, too. Maggie could end up befriending every young woman in town (Trish, Margo, Donna, Melissa) with maybe a little jealousy about the liberation she was just a little too old for/isolated from, but also genuine friendship for her mentees. Maggie will still make mistakes (yes to the idea of a fling with Jay), but she's also learning to appreciate herself (and Mickey) along the way.

I really love this angle. It seems a much more organic way to lead to alcoholism for Maggie, and takes the threads PFS laid out and runs with them, as opposed to dropping them like a sack of cement, which appears to be what happened.

3 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

I think that Mickey's recovery /re-integration was maybe a little rushed,

After everything he'd been through, for him to return to being a respected lawyer and upstanding citizen seemed a waste.

Maybe he could have uncomfortable at being pressured to return to his old life and the rivalry with Bill could have been simmering.

Maggie could be caught in the middle dealing with her own issues.

I honestly wonder if that wasn't Ann Marcus abandoning a story that had been accused of being too heavy and unpopular. I don't really fault her for that, given the state the show was in when she arrived, but it seems as though she overlooked the decade that that story had been front-and-centre on the show, and, in doing so, threw away the loyalty of the millions who had stuck with it through all that time. I feel like it would've been far better payoff to stick with PFS' plan to see Mickey through that recovery to finally struggle to earn the trust and respect of the community and his loved ones again.

The newsletters suggest that while Mickey's time in Bayview was heavy, but it was handled carefully and thoughtfully, and was heading in an optimistic direction. Why not stick with it? Maybe follow it through to another big court case that Mickey successfully tries, signalling his return to prominence in the community. Perhaps tied to the baby Dougie custody case?

44 minutes ago, Paul Raven said:

Thanks for posting this - very interesting to read. I have to agree with most of what you wrote.

 

Ann Marcus had a tough job to fill in that Days had been pretty much guided by Bill Bell and the PFS since its debut and they were both top notch writers who had an insight and set a tone that was hard to replicate.

But as you pointed out PFS was beginning to falter and ratings were reflecting that.

Days had 2 powerhouse stories that carried it through the 60's and 70's - the trevails of Julie, culminating in her finding Doug and the Bill/Laura/Mickey saga.

By the end of her tenure, both of those stories had been resolved and we had Bill and Laura/Doug and Julie  happily wed.

The challenge then was to keep those popular couples prominent without breaking them up - always a challenge in a soap.

The story planned for the Duvalls was obviously changed so it was all a bit muddled under Marcus and there was the additional issue of Susan Flannery no longer playing Laura, which changed the dynamics.

Having Mickey and Maggie playing happy families and doing the next door neighbor /social issue story was a poor choice. Why should we care about the Bartons?

There should have been more drama mined from Maggie trying to fit into Salem.

The other issue with these characters is that they were all middle aged and in the case of Bill and Mickey looked every day of it so hardly appealing to younger viewers soaps were always chasing.

 

Thanks for that, it's reassuring to know that the newsletters are giving me a relatively clear picture of what's going on.

It's true, Doug and Julie's wedding seemed to really seal their fate in terms of story prominence. Suddenly both characters are sidelined and mostly are talk-to's after their wedding, up until the custody fight for baby Dougie in Summer '77. I have to say, it's another story I'm kinda going WTF about, largely because, wouldn't this be an optimal time to reveal that Dougie is actually Doug's son, allowing Doug and Julie to perhaps fight for custody? Instead the secret stays a secret, and Rebecca leaves town with her immature, grumpy boyfriend Johnny AND Dougie. I get that it was to give story to Robert, who was married to Rebecca, but I still find it an odd direction to go in, and it leaves Doug and Julie once again on the peripheral of the action, when the fact they're happily married and raising Hope together would only strengthen the tension and stakes of the custody story, IMO. I would certainly care more about Doug & Julie fighting Rebecca & Johnny for custody, knowing both sides have more of a chance of victory. 

Definitely agree about Maggie. Just her feeling like a fish out of water could've really heightened the drama, and with Linda still lurking about, still trying to win Mickey over, there was years of story still able to be told there. Seems silly to throw it all out the window so quickly, but, as you said, the focus on middle-aged characters was starting to be a real problem here. I suspect this is why the focus was shifted so heavily to whiny Mike and perpetual victim Trish.

Not having seen any of the Lauras in any long term capacity barring Jamie Lyn Bauer (and believe me, I know she's Laura Horton in name only), it's hard to really see the dynamic shift in earnest here. I've obviously seen Susan Flannery for years, so I have a good picture of how she would have fit into the role, but the other two are almost entirely mysteries to me, having only seen quick flashes of them. Do you have any insights into how either Susan Oliver or Rosemary Forsythe played the character? 

I also wonder if the recast Marie wasn't working either. I know Lanna Saunders was successful in the role, but I didn't even realize Marie had come back in '77. Do you remember anything about Kate Woodville in the role? She looks, to my eyes, nothing like either Marie before or after her, so I struggle a bit to picture her in the role.

10 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Was it true that she dumbed most of the characters down during her tenure?

 

I know that she was the one who wrote Samantha locking Marlena in a sanitarium and taking her place, which I don't understand how they pulled off. Identical or not, Marlena and Samantha (Deidre and Andrea) can clearly be told apart.

So, obviously not being old enough to have watched at the time, I've been instead reading the Daytime Serial Newsletter write-ups about the show from this era, and...even just reading the writeups from the beginning through to Ann Marcus' tenure, you can see a definite shift the moment Pat Falken Smith leaves in April 1977 and Ann Marcus takes over. The writing is suddenly far less psychological, the stories are less compelling and emotional, though definitely still rooted in the same characterizations as before. The writing is far more broad, and it becomes much more plot-based.

I appreciate that there wasn't a real rush to end the David/Valerie story like I've come to believe. Valerie and David split up, but remain in limbo while David tries to sort out what to do about his fathering Trish's baby, and Ann Marcus even gives Danny Grant more of a story, starting a romance with Trish's roommate Toni, but instead of the drama coming from characters we know and interpersonal drama, the main source of conflict for Danny and Toni is this mob type named Kenny who's stalking and ultimately attacks Toni and Trish in an attempt to track down Toni's baby's father. Of course, in hitting Trish, Trish goes into early labour. Then Danny shows up, and Kenny pulls a gun on him! Trish faints and it distracts Kenny long enough for Toni to get the gun and give it to Danny, who saves the day! It's a bit more the type of story DAYS would take on in the 80s, albeit with far less flights of fancy and high-stakes treasures and such, than what it had been known for in the past, and frankly, I don't like this shift.

Marlena's story also takes a shallow turn. Under PFS, Marlena and Don seemed set to enter into a triangle with Sharon Duval, who seems be written at the beginning as a sexually provocative socialite whose main trouble seems to be replacing the affections denied her by her absentee husband with sex with other men. Suddenly within weeks of Ann Marcus taking over, Sharon becomes a different character, seemingly deranged with "sexual confusion" and confesses her love for her friend Julie, who has an (IMO) uncharacteristically homophobic reaction to the news, considering Julie's otherwise very open-minded attitude toward David and Valerie's relationship, plus the fact she was living in San Francisco for a year or two in the late 60s, you'd think she'd have dropped some of these rather provincial attitudes, but I guess I'm looking at it from my smug, modern perspective. Oh well. Sharon is so distraught by being rejected by Julie she twice attempts suicide (I mean, I know Julie's the most desired woman in Salem at this time, but come on!) and is sent to Bayview, before her husband finally shows up and whisks her away to Spain, never to be seen or heard from again.

It's at this point that Don and Marlena have to deal with Sam showing up, and they proceed to hit everyone over the head with the notion that Sam and Marlena are SO SIMILAR that everyone's always confusing one for the other, despite the fact Sam and Marlena's voices are distinctly different pitches and Sam has decidedly harsher features than Marlena. I could definitely see that this was where folks got the impression the characters were being dumbed down. You'd have to be pretty dim to confuse these two women if you knew they were twins.

Elsewhere you get relatively decent stuff like Tom having a series of strokes that requires Marie to come to town to look after him, taking a leave of absence from the nunnery in NYC. This leads to a story where Marie is so helpful to Tom and effective in the household, that Alice, usually a very active woman, becomes bored and depressed, feeling sidelined by her own daughter. Yet doesn't think to actually TALK to Marie about any of this, just mopes to her temporary doctor, Dr. Griffin about it, who then decides to perform a hysterectomy on her (!!!) because his "experimental testing equipment" told him there MIGHT be a problem later on if he doesn't. Bill and Tom don't like this doctor very much, as they see him as a hotshot, but because Bill was so mouthy about how pissed off he was that Greg Peters got the Chief-of-staff job over Tom (which, in part, caused Tom's stroke), Greg reflexively sides with this hotshot doctor over the Hortons.

Maggie and Mickey's struggles are sidelined, as under PFS, they were still struggling to rekindle their relationship after Mickey's breakdown over Bill raping Laura, suddenly all is well, and they get an apartment in town and nothing's wrong with their relationship. Instead, Maggie's now a confidant to her upstairs neighbour, an abused wife named Jean Barton. I'm sure it's an important story to tell, but there's still enough meat to Mickey and Maggie's story, that I think to rush a full reconciliation when you have so many other characters that could still complicate their road to happiness, it seems a little unnecessary, and I can't help but feel it's a little PSA-story-by-numbers. It may have played out onscreen with a fair bit more nuance, but the summaries are quite detailed, and I've never felt that vibe before Ann Marcus' arrival.

I'll keep reading and maybe fill some more info in, but I am fascinated by the Vietnamese character Ann Marcus spoke of leading to her being replaced by Elizabeth Harrower in '79. I expect NBC were gunshy after the response David/Valerie received, though I suspect the ratings drop was more due to the fact that the stories grew very intense and heavy in 1976, and there seemed to be an intense focus on Mike and Trish, two characters I tend to find rather eyeroll-worthy. I wonder if the viewing audience were similarly put off not by David and Valerie, nor Mickey's breakdown, which are often cited as being the 1-2 punch that caused DAYS' ratings drop in 1976-77, but the intense focus given to Trish's endless string of problems at the expense of other stories during that time. Again, I'm just going off Daytime Serial Newsletter, but considering February 1977's breakdown was almost ENTIRELY centred around Trish whacking her pervy father to death with an iron and immediately splitting into three personalities (which, thanks to Ann Marcus, were almost immediately magically integrated by May), I have reason to believe she dominated story near the end of PFS' run, and considering what a perpetual victim Trish seems to be, and what an irritating whiner Mike seems to be, I wouldn't be surprised if that put more people off than anything else.

Okay, rant over.

Also, if I'm super-wrong about any of this, PLEASE feel free to fill me in, because I'm fascinated by what I'm reading, but since I can't actually watch in real time, the newsletters are the closest thing I have to go on.

I suspect this guy will turn out to be Allie's actual babydaddy in the end.

1 hour ago, Manny said:

While I do agree that there are some great creative people here, I would not only blame today's writers for the state of soaps. I think a lot of them don't get to write what they want. Us here writing our own little projects, we don't have budgets or corporation managers to approve our stories. I think it is not that easy to be a soap writer these days. I would actually blame more the network managers for the state of soaps than writers. Although I am sure some of them at least are useless and stuck in the past. 

No, it's a fair point. I think there's too many cooks in the kitchen right now for anything good to come out. 

I just wish there was at least some coherent story as the end result. I don't understand how the execs are so allergic to compelling storytelling. 

2 hours ago, Lust4Life76 said:

 

Okay, so I wasn't crazy for thinking Catherine O'Hara's "Violet McKay" reminded me of Another's World's Beveree McKinsey's "Iris"? 

Check it out...

 

Yup. Mojo was absolutely Vivien. And I feel like Clay Collins was this fusion of David Banning and Chris Kositchek in mannerism. I'm sure I'm missing a couple more moments that stood out to me, but... Yeah. The similarities absolutely did not get past me. 

On 8/24/2020 at 12:50 PM, AbcNbc247 said:

@Lust4Life76 I've heard of "Days of the Week" but I've never seen it.

I've read some of your fanfic. It's really good! And your original work sounds good as well. 

Lmao that's ok. Not too long ago I realized that I named my little town "Lakeview", yet there was no lake to view lol I'll have to remember to include a lake in the story if I decide to reboot it.

Definitely check out Days of the Week. It's all on YouTube. I'll be honest, whoever wrote that sketch had NBC daytime on all the time, cos there was a lot of little things that stuck out to me as familiar. 

Thank you! It's probably just my own impossible standards that make me self-critical, but it's reassuring to hear others enjoy my ideas. 

We have a world of talent in this forum, and it frustrates me so much that none of that talent is ever seen onscreen on any of the big shows. We struggle through our own little projects here and there, thankfully. But it really annoys me how insular the TV soap world is. Its basically eating itself. 

The ones that seem to get ahead are definitely NOT the ones whose ideas I enjoy seeing actualized. 

I mean, obviously I've been working on a DAYS fanfic here for years. I've got so many years of story mapped out still, and honestly, considering I've been working on this for 6 years now, finishing up a lot of my initial stories are starting to pain me because I've changed and grown so much in that time, that I spend more time filling in plot holes and gritting my teeth through a lot of what I'm posting, while dreaming of the stuff that's to come that I never seem to get to. At least it motivates me to continue, I guess!

As for my own soap, absolutely. When I was 12 (so around 1998-99), I worked as a paperboy for the local newspaper in my hometown, and to make the miserable cold Canadian winter mornings bearable, I'd plot out a soap in my mind. Well, I never forgot about it, and over time, have developed it further and further, while never quite getting it down on paper (on disk? Online???). I think I began to blog it here for a minute as A World Away, and it basically revolved around a small Northern city in some undetermined US state with a automotive company as its central industry. The two quarrelling families being the founding family of the Atlantic Motor Co., and their rival family, who head up the local factory union. I forget the family names but they're written down somewhere there.

A third family would act as a sort of bridge between the two, and by the time I was writing it in adulthood, it was essentially as rooted in messy psychosexual drama as I could make it without weirding myself out. One of the stories that I especially enjoyed plotting out was the twins falling for the same man. The rich family would be highly conservative, they would have fraternal twins, Jennifer and Robert, who both fall for the same handsome doctor at the local hospital, Michael, who ends up being bisexual and in love with both of them, but knowing how rigid their family is (as well as his own), he keeps a lid on his orientation. This is in part to protect Robert, who, when the family DOES eventually find out, is excommunicated from the family, and forced to resign from his job. Robert and Michael then concoct a plan to have Robert "die" very publicly, and then secretly work together to take over the company from under the family's nose, while the family blame Michael for Robert's supposed death. The same family that rejected him now fight Michael over Robert's will, and even try to sue Michael for medical malpractice.

There's a scene I've kept in my mind all these years, of Robert's bigoted family heading to the board meeting where they'll meet the CEO of the company that's taken theirs over, hoping desperately that they'll be able to keep some control of the company they helped build. When the chair at the head of the table spins around, and Robert's looking back at them, the look of sheer horror on their faces as Robert fires each and every one of them is so delicious to me.

Of course, Robert will be as otherwise viciously conservative as the others in the family, but in this one particular instance, he's in direct opposition to his family's views. This would eventually complicate his future relationship with Michael, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

UGH, I need to actually write this show out properly. One day.

DAYS: WILL WILL WILL also WILL

I will also add that many of these new shows (with the exceptions of Generations and Loving, whose timeslots were killers) were hour-long from the outset. That's a major time investment in virtual strangers to make every day, especially at the tail end of a soap lineup. I think a big part of B&B's and Capitol's relative ratings success is down to being a short half hour blip between familiar shows for viewers.

I could easily sit down and sample a taste of a new half hour show daily while I wait for my old beloved hour-long show to start. But I'm way less likely to keep the TV tuned in to an hour of unfamiliar faces at the tail end of the daily lineup. You're way likelier to get folks changing the channel for that hour. IMO, a new soap can never be a full hour from the outset and be successful. Not unless TPTB were okay slogging it out for 5-10 years with mediocre ratings while the show would find its audience. They almost did with SB, but even then...inevitable cracks began to show.

37 minutes ago, VanessaReardon said:

You caught me! How did you find me out? I’m so ashamed that I’ve been outed. RME. First, you people find out that Beth Ehlers is posting on here and now you find me out. Really good detectives, I tell ya. 

Poor Ellen Parker never had much of a career after GL. She did a play near where I live a few years back. The Playhouse sat 50 people. She must’ve made big bucks on that one!  

I don't really care, but your spirited defenses of someone you presumably don't know and whom largely elicits contempt from almost every corner of the soap fandom makes me wonder what stakes you have in it. 

You gave your opinion, folks disagree with it. Move on. No need for the series of petulant, nasty responses because folks had the audacity to say something you dislike. 

10 minutes ago, Vee said:

Don't feed the troll just because it's belatedly attempting to change up its play style. It's about finding a topic, any topic which will inflame users and make people respond. Same as the Y&R threads a few years ago. Memes and GIFs only feed it. Block or ignore. I'd say report, but....

You know, you're right, Vee. *sigh* already given this one too much of my energy. Moving on. 

1 hour ago, VanessaReardon said:

Put out to pasture? lol I picture Jill spending her days counting her Emmys (11 of them) - no other EP has 11 emmys, counting her money, and being glad that she isn’t in the crapfest known as daytime. I’m certain that she doesn’t feel like she was put out to pasture. She sold her home a couple years ago for something like $2.4 million so she’s not hurting for money. She probably lives in an even bigger home now. I’m sure that JFP is just fine and sends her love. 

How could Kevin be let out of his contract in 1981 to do Animal House when Animal House was released in 1978? 

Okay, Jill.

Yeah, it's definitely evolved over time. CBS was more conservative, slow-moving, family-centred, but there's that Bell vs. P&G divide that largely split the lineup down the middle in terms of subject matter.

ABC has always moved faster, been more liberal, lighter, with grittier subject matter, definitely defined by Agnes Nixon's style. GH managed to keep pace, despite rarely sharing writers or producers with the Nixon shows.

NBC was a mish-mash, since their 60s and 70s soaps were successful thanks to both Bell and Nixon's styles, and sort of defined by more daring adult drama, but never really reaching the youth the same way ABC did. That shifted in the 80s and 90s with the dramatic change in style of DAYS, the introduction of SB, and AW and SFT trying to keep pace. I feel like NBC never developed that clear identity of the other two, and that may have contributed to their patchy success after the mid-70s.

 

2 hours ago, ChickenNuggetz92 said:

Hey friends! With the rise of Sony adding algorithms to episodes about to re-air being copyrighted on YouTube (even under uploading them as unlisted), I wanted to create a backup plan. Per my Twitter handle, I decided to create a cloud-based Y&R Vault! I've already shared this on the Facebook group, "The Young and the Restless - The Classic Years" group, so I'm inviting you guys to access as well as contribute to the vault! Best part - no registration required, just click on the link here and it's easy as dragging and dropping! If you're having trouble accessing the site, try using your browser's Private Browsing or Incognito mode.

 

For full disclosure, I bought a OneDrive business account via eBay. This gives me a "lifetime" 5TB of storage. The only main concern is that it's very possible that the account may cease to work down the road - however from what I've read from other people who've done something similar, Microsoft is unlikely to be diligent about auditing these accounts that are sold. I'm also not terribly concerned about the data on this, considering it's just a collection of videos with no sensitive information. I will, however, continue to research some solutions for backing this up in the event it goes down!

 

I've added the link to my signature so the link stays easy to find instead of sifting through hundreds of pages of threads. Perhaps I'll evolve from ChickenNuggetz92 to YRVault down the road...

 

Awesome! I saw your post about this in the Classic Y&R FB group and (haphazardly) uploaded a few episodes, but I can't seem to access the page anymore. I'll try again via the link here. Hopefully it works!

On 3/13/2020 at 3:10 AM, Paul Raven said:

The Young and The Restless (ABC), produced in New York, has done location shooting in Los Angeles; show, time and money are everything. We're spending time and money to make the shows better."

You gotta love how, even back then, the mainstream press could so easily, so concisely, so quickly, get so much information completely WRONG.

Reading through DAYS early history (thanks to the brilliant @JAS0N47 , of course), and in my reading of the monthly summaries, I'm increasingly finding Dr. Greg Peters to be a sanctimonious ass and it's getting on my nerves. Having never seen him on the show in any episodes that have popped up online, I'm curious to know what others' opinions of his character were, watching day-to-day.

They also glaze over a (to me, understandable) overprotectiveness Susan Martin had over her daughter, Anne, but only refer to it in reference to the litany of complaints Greg had about Susan. Was this really how Susan was with Anne, or was it down to Greg feeling resentful toward Anne for subconsciously reminding him that Anne was actually Eric's baby?

With DAYS, that point came surprisingly late: the past year things have gone so off the rails, particularly with the death-means-nothing vaccine, and the stupidity with Steveno and turning Julie into Miss MAGA. The show has been crazy before, but always seemed to hold a sense of reverence for their history, at least enough so not to completely stomp on it. They moved forward instead of constantly messing with the past. I honestly don't know if there is a moment I could really pinpoint as "the last straw" for me, but there were a number of WTFs in 2019 that finally killed it for me.

GH, honestly I tuned out pretty much forever the second it became clear that I was supposed to root for The World's Most Boring Man aka Jason. The propping was constant, and the moral code of the show shifted so extremely by that point that, even being a tween, I could never understand why RoboHitman and The Forehead were supposed to be in any way appealing. They were just awful. Final nail in the coffin was Sonny holding Jax at gunpoint in Robin's foyer in front of her daughter and Robin being totally cool with it and not even chastising Sonny SLIGHTLY for having a gun 10ft from a small child. The absurdity of it all made me realize they would never have ANYONE in the Mob Squad face consequences for any behaviour a normal person would abhor, and it just stopped having any impact for me.

Y&R for me was a combination of Jill's parentage mess, combined with Marrrrrco, and the twin doppelgangers. Once you cross that line into absurdity, you just can't put the genie back in the bottle. They keep trying, but they keep reverting back to it, and it gets worse every time.

GL was absolutely the clone and San Cristobel. I never came back after that, and I was absolutely fed up of every show aping DAYS.