Santa Barbara Discussion Thread

[Marissa Gallant]

I know. I'm grasping at straws here. Lol. There HAS to be more than the music and credits. Lol

[amybrickwallace]

I couldn't come up with anything.

Please register in order to view this content

[Marissa Gallant]

Yeah. I got nothing. 

 

[amybrickwallace]

Judith McConnell was the longest running cast member, joining in October 1984 and staying until the series finale over 8 years later. At show's end, I believe NLG was the second longest running cast member.

[Marissa Gallant]

Yes, she would have been. She was on before Jed. But Jed had a lot of episodes. 

It kind of looked like for a minute, the show was going to go for a Gina/Sophia/Caroline/CC/Lionel story. I'm glad they didn't. 

[Marissa Gallant]

Am I correct that CC and Pamela hid a murder? Isn't that just a retread of Eden/Cruz/Tori? 

[amybrickwallace]

That I don't remember.

[j swift]

Dr. Scott Clark was Vincent Irizarry's character who had helped Gina when she was blind.  She faked recovery from blindness to hold on him (classic only-on-a-soap story because either he was a crappy eye specialist who was unable to tell if his patients were malingering, or Gina went through a lot of trouble to hold onto her doctor, rather than just admitting she liked him, either way nobody was ever concerned about the consequences of insurance fraud).

Any way, in the early 1960s Scott's uncle Hal had an affair with Pamela, she killed him, and young Scott witnessed it but suppressed the memory until he was hypnotized by busty psychiatrist Dr. Heather Donnally.  The Donnally's were a failed attempt to create another family in town besides the Capwells that never caught on.  Soaps being soaps, of course Scott fell in love with Heather.  Then they broke up, but Heather was pregnant yadda yadda yadda.  From Celeste DiNapoli to Flame Baufort, Scott fell for traumatized women and that was his defining characteristic.

Originally, CC was thought to have killed Hal, because he beat him after finding out about his affair, so he helped bury Hal in the boathouse and this was retconned into the reason he divorced Pamela and banished her to Europe.  But, Scott remembered that Pamela actually shot Hal after CC beat him.  Once Scott realized the truth as an adult, Pamela went nuts, tried to poison Kelly, (which created the opportunity for recasting the role, so when Kelly awoke from her poisoning she suddenly looked like Carrington Garland).  Pamela was sent to the sanitarium where she stayed until that one night in 1991 when Mason inexplicably brought her to dinner at the Capwells...

I conflate this with the story of Heather's brother Michael who was an ex-cop turned priest.  He found out that contrary to popular belief Mason may have killed Dr. Mark McCormack, the abusive husband of Mason's first love Mary.  However, it turned out that Mark was actually murdered by a nun.  According to legend, this was a writer's strike story meant to be a short term tale told to hold over the plot until the writers returned.  Personally, I am fascinated by writer's strike stories on soaps because they are usually so bizarre.

Edited October 21, 2021 by j swift

[Marissa Gallant]

J Swift, i adore that description. I am fascinated by the way some characters get replaced. Some leave town, some go into a coma. Others, like Gina, go upstairs and come down the next day without as much as a "Did you change your hair?"

[Marissa Gallant]

You know that the only issue I have with JM being the longest running cast member is the character assassination.

[chrisml]

I know this may be an impossible question to answer, but why was SB unable to develop lasting characters outside of characters related to the Capwells? It felt as if the writers/producers would bring in characters for three months and then lose interest. I would blame the constant change in writers, but even during a specific regime's tenure, the same thing would happen. I'm thinking specifically of Lenore Kasdorf's Caroline and Christopher Norris's Laura. 

[Beach Climber]

Was that a writer’s strike story? When I saw it during my rewatch, I assumed it was just a summer, let’s give Julia something to do while Lane Davies is on vacation storyline. I actually liked it thought that might be unpopular. It was also the only time Michael was remotely interesting for me as well because I found him to be a huge bore afterwards and he lasted on the show way too long. 

My theory is that it had to do with Capwell storylines being so front and center. They would introduce a character, give them one or two storylines, but if they weren’t tied to the Capwells in some fashion, they would disappear once the stories started cycling around and the writers would forget about them. They had some decent non-Capwell characters throughout the show but that’s why I believed that they never lasted for long. The Lockridges were probably the biggest exception to this but I think their feud with the Capwells helped and Julia’s ties to them didn’t hurt. 

[j swift]

To be fair, the Capwells were a very large family. 

You have CC, at least two wives, Sophia and Pamela, as well as their kids Mason, Channing, Eden, Elena, Kelly, Ted, and Greg.  Along with their spouses/significant others, that is 14 characters right there, and if each of them was in a love triangle that would be 21 characters.  Most establishing soap families have 2-3 kids, but the Capwells were prolific.  

Also, Gina drove stories throughout the show.  And Cruz had several families to attend to.

[Marissa Gallant]

I really don't think it was because the Capwells were a large family. I think the constant shifting of headwriters, show runners, owners at New World, and NBC hurt the show. They seemed to always be cutting corners (characters) and they x n't cut the Capwells because that would really cost viewers. The Dobsons didn't really understand "normal" people, so that was a problem from the start. Then Warren got saddled with boring woman after boring woman. Sorry, but Maggie Gillis was a SNORE. She got Joe killed and after that, no one cared.

It always seemed like when the tried to bring a new family in, instead of doing it organically, they brought in characitures, and tried to shove them down our throats.  And very often outside of the Capwell or Lockridges, the talent for the new families simply was not there.

Who wants to watch terrible acting when the show has Marcy, A, Judith, Dame Judith, Louise, Nicolas, Jed, Lane, Nancy- well you know.

[Beach Climber]

While Gina and Cruz were great characters, I don’t think they would have gotten the focus the did had they not had those ties to the Capwells. Brandon fueled a lot of stories for Gina throughout her time on the show and I could see the show losing interest in Cruz over time since he was as close to a perfect guy as you can get on a soap and needed more ambiguous characters to bounce off of.