Somerset/ A World Apart /The Best of Eveything debut

[Paul Raven]

28 years ago on this date 3 new soaps appeared.

Somerset on NBC was a spin off of Another World.Four characters moved from Bay City to the nearby town of Somerset.The show lasted 6 years.

ABC debuted The Best of Everything at noon followed by A World Apart at 12.30

The former was a ratings disaster and lasted only a few months while AWA struggled for a almost 2 years before getting the axe.

At the same time AMC which had debuted a few months earlier began to show significant ratings growth.

Anyone have any memories of these long lost shows?

[vetsoapfan]

Thanks to its late-afternoon time period, I was able to watch Somerset from its first episode to its last. Even though I was just a kid at the time, it was one of the first soaps that made me conscious of the writers, because its quality took such huge up-and-down swings, depending on who was in charge at any given time. Roy Winsor, and Henry Slesar were by far the best scribes to contribute to the series, while its creator, Robert Cenedella, turned out to be one of the worst, along with the dread Robert J. Shaw and Winifred Wolfe. It also didn't help that every new writing regime made vast structural changes to the cast, tone, and theme of the show, making it feel "jerky" and inconsistent. But when it was good, it was very good. They had some wonderful couples like Eve and Julian, Steve and Carrie, Heather and Jerry, who had good chemistry, and helped make even poor scripts work.

I still have a scrapbook I made for the show, way back in the 1970s, with story synopses, wedding pictures (i.e., Tony and Ginger), etc. I can't believe I've actually kept it (along with similar scrapbooks from the same time period on Y&R, AW, How To Survive A Marriage, OLTL, etc.) I was a weird kid. I remember more about the goings-on in Somerset, Genoa City, Salem, Oakdale, Springfield, and Bay City than I do about the history and algebra I studied in school, LOL!

[YRBB]

You better not throw those away!!! Those are priceless!!!

[LoyaltoAMC]

Now these are the shows I want to see on Soapnet, dammit, and the shows that Soapnet SHOULD be showing! I want to see Somerset, The Doctors, Secret Storm, Peyton Place, Return to Peyton Place, and so many other wonderful old chestnuts. Not endless One Tree Hill and 90210 reruns! I can dream, I guess. My mom was a rabid AW fan in the 70s, and she watched Somerset as well, though not with the same passion. I remember Marie Wallace, who had been on Dark Shadows, doing a wonderful job as India Delaney. From what I remember and from I've read subsequently, the show started out as a companion to AW, with pretty much the same classic traditional soap structure that AW had employed. There were even some crossovers. At some point, I guess because ratings stunk, the show evolved into a mystery serial, a la Edge of Night. I suppose Slesar was involved with the show at that point. I would love to see some episodes. I don't think any Somersets have ever been posted to youtube.

[SteveFrame]

I loved Somerset. I saw just about every episode of it. I used to have to run home from school just so I could see it.

My faves were Heather, Carrie, Steve, Julian, Eve, and Victoria.

I still correspond with Veleka Gray some via the Internet.

[TC]

I know I must have seen Somerset at least a few times but I can't really remember anything but the cool opening theme, with the town-scape coming into being before our very eyes.

And I have no memory of when Someerset and Another World were called Another World: Somerset" and "Another World: Bay City" respectively, but even after they discontinued it, the apellation still lingered for a few years afterward as people would refer to AW as Bay City.

[EricMontreal22]

I'd kill to see some of Somerset when it was at its most gothic--that story about the clown slowly poisining a character, etc... Was that when the wrter of Edge of Nigth was writing it?

I've seen one episode of A World Apart, which showed a sorta hippy wedding--WOST poste dit. It was interesting actually... Otherwise all I know was it was loosely based on Irna Phillips life--at least at first.

Wasn't Best of EVerything created by the supremely egotistical and as a soap (and Broadway) writer supremely untalented James Lipton of Inside the Actos' Studio fame (yes, I loathe the man--I admit)? I still dunno how that man was hired over and over again to write soap operas (twice nearly destorying Guiding Light alone). His constant rehiring proves that the current trend of hiring unsuccessful soap scribes from one show to a new one isn't just a modern trend.

[sungrey]

I still think Capitol eventually would have been canceled, but no question Lipton hastened its cancellation by writing some godawful, dumb storylines.

[SteveFrame]

The sad thing is that I recently watched some of Capitol stuff under Lipton on YouTube and sadly even at it's worst it still was not as bad as some of the stuff we are given today.

[Sedrick]

Yes indeed Lipton was the creator of THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, which was based on a novel by Rona Jaffe which was made into a feature film in 1959 that featured Joan Crawford.

[DRW50]

From the August 1970 Daytime TV. This was a feature on all three soaps debuting.

[SFK]

All of those familiar names and faces... very cool.

[DRW50]

Did Gwen Mitchell do any soaps after this? The soaps had some interesting black actors in the 70s who disappeared.

I love that photo of Patty/Gale/Geraldine. What a cast! What they could have been. Apparently that was taken during a break from rehearsal.

[DRW50]

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