Since we're talking about Katie, I'll continue some of the thoughts and impressions from reading the SOD synopses starting with this subject:
@Soaplovers analysis is pretty close to my feelings about the arc of the Katie character over her time on the show. (The "judgmental" part especially: Marland turned pretty much every "good" character into a judgmental snothead and Katie was no exception).
Katie and Floyd were supposed to be mostly comic relief characters when they started out. We were speculating that Floyd was going to be involved with Lainie, with both Ed and Katie's crush Mark Hamilton eventually becoming involved with her, too. (This was confirmed, actually, by the parody Marsha Clarke made called "The Guiding Plight," where Lainie is overwhelmed with attention by these three gents, so not only were we right, the cast apparently knew this was the plan for these characters). So it would have been another instance of Katie losing out on a guy to a supposedly prettier girl. (I think Pence is gorgeous, but I guess she was a size or two larger than the other actresses and that made her less desirable, or whatever).
I believe while the Dobsons were still writing they did mention that Katie and Floyd had a hard childhood, and were always dependent on each other. When Marland came in he picked up on that, so Katie and Floyd talked about that a little bit more. And for the first time, Katie got a dramatic storyline. He wrote out Mark Hamilton, but he had Mark send for Katie, giving her the impression that they were going to settle down together and get married, and then Mark ditched her. So she comes back to SF demoralized and humiliated--which made her the perfect victim for Andy Norris.
Honestly, reading about it again, I remembered how much I hated that storyline and hated that for Katie. Clearly, Marland was trying to turn Andy into the new Roger Thorpe, but he bungled that badly. Andy was SO bad, SO fast, it was almost ridiculous. Roger was on the show on and off almost 10 years before he became a full-blown villain. He started off as a ne'er do well who disappointed his father, who tried to get his life together with Peggy and failed, who had a slow simmering hatred for Ed because he always seemed to be in the way of the things he wanted. What I'm saying is, what he did later on didn't come out of nowhere. And most importantly, it was personal.
Andy's motivation was mainly just money. There was a little bit of him being seen as a screw-up by his mother and sister, but mostly he just wanted the cash. He had so many irons in the fire: he was trying to write a best-seller by writing a biography about Alan (a well-known road to riches, lol), he was embezzleing money from the restaurant he opened with his mom, he was courting pregnant Hope because she and Alan seemed headed for divorce, and he became the town blackmailer. He was literally blackmailing almost everyone in town, it was almost funny. Katie was Sara's assistant at the time, so he stole her key to Sara's confidential files and found out every woman's secrets and blackmailed them. He found tapes that incriminated Alan in the Roger Thorpe case, etc. Meanwhile, he was physically abusing Katie and gaslighting his ex-wife Trish.
They burned through the character so fast they had to get rid of him. I think now that they brought in the Joe Bradley character to do what they planned to do with Andy during the Diane murder. Maybe they didn't want to kill Andy off because he was a legacy character and sent him to jail with an eye to bringing him back later. Or maybe they had planned to kill off Andy and have a murder mystery about that, but then Sofia wanted to leave the show, so they switched the story over to her being the murder victim (she was somewhat in cahoots with Andy and had some of his blackmail information, including the tapes).
This whole thing is a perfect example of how bad Marland was at writing villains and mystery stories. I know there are many Marland fans here, but you gotta admit this was not his wheelhouse. Especially reading it sandwiched between the Dobsons era and then Long and Ryder eventually coming in after him. I may not have loved the Barbados story, but at least it came from character and used the history of the show. For some reason he never was able to do that unless it was a story he inherited. I guess there was some of that in the Carrie story, but that was a character he created and especially loved.
After Marland was wrapping up the final after effects of the Roger storyline, where Mike finally got proof Alan was guilty, he had Alan being stalked by some guy. Literally, just some guy. Someone he fired long ago that we never saw, making it really difficult to care about it. Even reading about it, it felt like it went on forever, with Hope endlessly seeing people hiding in the bushes and getting mysterious phone calls. I guess once they no longer had Alan and Hope being threatened by the Roger reveal, they wanted them to have some threat/conflict, but it was just lazy the way it was done. And then the Mark Evans story, which I'm not going to get in here, but it had some of the same problems.
So back to Katie: after Andy left she was being courted by Tony, who seemed truly taken with her. They have some "healing" sex, and then she tells him he should be with Hillary, so once again Katie is the loser. On her YT channel, Pence explains that the Kobe regime took over when she was on maternity leave. She noticed right away that lots of cast members were being axed. On the last day of her contract, Kobe promised her they had story for her, so she came back. She did like that they gave her more comedy to do, but then they wrote her out, too. (I think they did that to Lisa Brown, too--promised her story, never came through, so she jumped to ATWT before they could fire her).
More impressions later, I promise I won't ding Marland all the time...
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DeeVee ·
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