Going back to 1986 for a moment. I don't remember if I've written anything in this thread or just privately to Reverend Ruthledge, but the Lorna / Zach / Jane / Kelly seems like a watered down conglomeration of Guiding Light's Meta / Joe / Kathy and Kathy / Robin / Mark / Meta / Ruth. I think where the Loving version fails at its core is the Guiding Light version was using an intricate network of characters who had story tied to the current situation. In Meta's case, the trial was for the murder of her child's father, who had caused said child's death. In addition, Meta was an outcast, to an extent, within her own family unit. In the later Light story, the history of Meta / Joe / Kathy and Robin's parentage both were, at the very least, ghosts that haunted the present day and allowed for the events within the story to ricochet across the canvas. None of that seems to happen in the Loving story.
Like Meta, Lorna is a model who had got pregnant by a man who wasn't hers and didn't realize the child. While Meta gave her child up for adoption, Lorna aborted her child. While Lorna wasn't an outcast like Meta, her low self worth manifested into manipulative behavior that caused chaos within her own family. Former daddy's girl Lorna would fall for an older man and marry him, and, like her father, an attorney. I think the show would have gotten more mileage out of the Zach role being filled by Clem Margolies, who was also Roger's friend, as that would have caused more internal strife within the Alden / Forbes clan and would have allowed people to directly comment on Lorna's daddy issues.
In a perfect world, I would have gone a step further and had Clem return to Corinth for the murder after having a brief marriage to Merrill Vochek and the Kelly role being filled by a young child Merrill and Clem claims is theirs, but would later be revealed to be Merrill's child by the late Roger Forbes.
I think it would be easy to blame the failure of the story on poor casting. O'Hara Parker has none of the bite Susan Walters had in the role of Lorna, but the writing is also not there either. While Walters did tend to lean into pain, rather than Lorna's malice, Walters' Lorna was a more complex character. I don't think Walters could have salvaged the story, either, to be honest. I don't think John Gabriel was right for the role of Zach, who I think needed to have more energy than Gabriel did in the role to entice Lorna. Deborah Allison's Jane seems such a neurotic mess, and not in the fun way. And poor Kathleen Fisk was too young, or appeared too young, to make Kelly anything more than childish rather than spoiled.
It does seem like, at one point, there was more legs to the story than I was aware. In one of the episodes online, Jane announces she is leaving during Kelly's disappearance story, and she announces she is off to Milwaukee to stay with her cousin and revive her advertising career. And this is how Jane the ad woman and Lorna the model would have remained in conflict professionally.
I wonder if any of this had been planned with Warren Hodges and his daughter. I could see some of this working out with Merrill Vochek in the Lorna role, but when Noreen assumes the part, that dynamic would have been different. In the original Bible, Nixon makes it clear Merrill wasn't the type to settle down in the long run so I could see this being a difficult dynamic with a manw it's a daughter.
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