Loving/The City Discussion Thread

[Soaplovers]

I always thought deep down Gwyn was framing Trisha out of her anger/revenge for refusing to come back and her mental state caused her to believe it was Trisha during the killings and not herself.

And I wonder if Trisha popping up right after Jeremy's death threw Gwyneth for a loop and she decided to hide her daughter in an attempt to protect her.

[dc11786]

¨The City¨ was obviously intended to have a younger crowd. I always assumed that characters like Tony and Richard were introduced with the intention of being setup for the new series. I wonder if a smaller set of people moving forward would have been more effective. 

Buck has very little story in the material I´ve seen. Tess´ arc in the spring/early summer of 1996 is her attempt to develop herself as a major powerbroker in the City with some tutelage from Jared Chase, which is suppose to escalate the rivalry with Sydney. After Jared rapes Sydney, Tess´ closeness to Jared provides a serious professional moral crisis for Angie, who treated Sydney after her assault. 

In some May, 1996 episodes I´ve seen, the comatose young woman that Sydney goes to visit and confess her secrets, Lauren, the daughter of her chaffeur, Samuel, begins to show signs of waking up. I suspect there may have been plans to pair Lauren with Frankie because both Lauren and Frankie were dropped around the same time. 

I do wonder if Noelle Beck´s refusal to be the killer had any impact on the ending of the story, but not in the sense of Trisha being the killer. I think Trisha putting Gwyn out of her pain at the end, rather than Steffi, would have been a very logical conclusion to the story. With that said, Heinle delivers a dynamite performance and holds her own with Tudor Newman in those sequences, but I cannot help but think about Trisha being the one to relieve Gwyn of the pain that resulted from Trisha´s absence. 

[Vee]

I wrote a lot about Gwyneth/Trisha when I rewatched the whole story in COVID 2020 - god knows what pages those are in this thread. My take was something I think Gwyneth echoes onscreen when talking to Steffi during the big reveal; sometimes she knows it's her, sometimes she doesn't. She clearly has a lot of rage and fury against Trisha as well as a lot of self-loathing, and yes, a lot of her dialogue with Clay, Jeremy, etc. early on in the story suggest someone who is trying to exonerate Curtis or others, or incriminate herself. (She keeps pleading with Alex and other members of the Corinth PD to look at her psych profile of the killer, and she tells Clay flat-out 'Curtis didn't kill Stacey' in a very ominous scene.) She also repeatedly breaks down and pleads for the killer to take her instead. Then there's the incredible scene with Neal in prison where they both know and are talking around it. But there are hints there in her scenes with her loved ones from the very beginning, even if IIRC Tudor wasn't told until late in the day.

Edited November 13, 2023 by Vee

[j swift]

In this re-read I kept thinking that it should've been Ally who finally put Gwyn out of her misery.  Ally was the one who was spared by Gwen, from being on her board of intended victims to the car episode when Gwyn tried the murder/suicide poisoning.   I get that it needs to be Steffi for the Steffi/Tony romance to evolve and motivate her to move away.  But, Ally needed a win after falsely accusing Danny of rape, so it could've made sense. 

An underrated scene that I forgot until the re-read was the community meeting before Ally gets almost gassed to death in the car.  I truly felt the frustration of the citizens that the police didn't have a clue, and the town was being destroyed.  That's also what I liked about Ava's exit.  I was sad that she left, but I admired the bold story telling of having a central character leave and voice the audience's reaction to the destruction of everything in the town not only due to the murders, but how it changed the culture of the community.  A reminder to me of the beat that is always missing in other soap serial killer stories.  On GH, by the next sweeps, everyone has moved on, either because the victims were minor characters, or the writers have changes.  In Corinth, we got the real experience of what it would be like in a small town if an entire family was systematically killed.

On the other hand, I appreciate that The City was going to focus on the liberation of Ally and Steffi.  But, giving both characters young kids, and the intrusion of the real life pregnancy, kind of derailed those plans.  They couldn't be carefree gals in the city, with two little buggers needing constant care.  There's so much obvious plotting that went into the end of Loving, but maybe if they knew what would The City was going to be they wouldn't have burdened those women with kids at such a viable age for romance and upward mobility.  I mean, think about those opening scenes with Ally rollerskating around the loft, and the girls finding the rug with the dead body, and then remind yourself that they're both solely responsible for the care and upbringing of two little kids, it's just not as cute.

With regard to the killer ever having been Trisha, after reading this re-cap it is clear that it was always going to be Gwyneth, and it is a testament to the planning and foresight of the writing staff that the red herrings were so viable that years later we continue to debate their possibility. 

Edited November 13, 2023 by j swift

[Khan]

I agree.  I understand the show and network's need to get viewers excited about THE CITY while, at the same time, allowing the new show to have an identity that was separate from what was essentially a failed one; but it's like what you said, @dc11786, about the emotional fallout from the murders that should have carried from one show to the next but didn't.  The end of LOVING didn't give the survivors or the audience anything to build on for THE CITY.

[j swift]

For what it's worth, my counterargument is that torching the town allowed Ally and Steffi to move to New York and start new lives. 

Obviously, they didn't need to kill all of those characters in order to achieve that purpose.  But, as noted, the murders changed the culture of Corinth, not just the population.   Ally and Steffi would've always been tied to the Aldens if the clan wasn't murdered.  Sure, they left their mother's behind, but by destroying their ties to Cooper's family, it allowed them to start fresh.  And the final scene with Gwyn taught them that mothers can't always be reliable.  Both characters evolved and became adults.  They learned to give up their schemes and live with honest intentions. 

As I noted, I think it was a mistake to give them both young kids to care for, but they were the best candidates to move the story forward to a new setting.  And yet, I think the actual broken promise of The City was that Ally, Steffi, and Angie were going to be able to explore new motivations, but wound up with stories that could've been told in any generic setting.

Edited November 14, 2023 by j swift

[dc11786]

Ally would have been a harder sell for me because the relationship with Gwyn wasn´t there. Gwyn´s pain came from her daughter´s abandonment. To have her surrogate daughter be the one to relieve her pain brought the story full circle. Gwyn was not alone at the time of her death, which is something that Gwyn had suffered from a lot after Trisha´s presumed death. Furthermore, Steffi´s character had historically (in all variations under the four sets of headwriters in the time Steffi appeared) had been the morally gray character.

While Steffi and Ally both had complicated relationships with their parents, Steffi´s tended to be more raw as Ally seemed to come to terms with her parents divorce, while Steffi had in recent years been pimped out by her own mother to Clay in order to secure financial stability and recalled the reason for her father´s absence from her life was that Deborah had insinuated that Malcolm and Steffi´s relationship was also sexual in nature (the larger implication was that Deborah saw Steffi as a romantic rival even in terms of her own father). The Gwyn / Steffi dynamic was intriguing because even though Gwyn did have feelings for Clay she never saw Steffi as a threat. She was kind to Steffi and it was Steffiś insecurities that led her to want to be more like Gwyn. 

Steffi´s career path would naturally lead to New York City so her departure didn´t really need much of a push. The ad agency setting up shop in Soho was enough reason for most of the departures as well as the fact many of the old guard characters (Alex, Tess, Buck, Ally, Angie, Jacob, Frankie) weren´t native Corinithians. Though I could see why the writers wanted a grander reason for this, but even in that case, that isn´t a thread that is followed into the City. The characters are shocked by the dead body in the carpet, but it doesn´t lead to any deeper conversations about how they cannot run from their problems or how safety and security are things you create not things you find. 

With all that said, Steffi should have stayed in Corinth. Even ignoring the fact that the chance of Heinle renewing her contract was unrealistic, Heinle´s pregnancy would have created a need for Steffi to be off the canvas for at least a month fairly early in the show´s run. They would have been better off trying to convince Heinle to go on an extended maternity leave (which she might not have agreed to) and had her make up the time later in the spring after her child was born and brought Steffi in as a brief spoiler for Tony/Ally before wrapping up her story for good. The pregnancy was a necessity because there was no way to hide Heinle´s pregnancy. Though, given the fact that Steffi had a recurring bouts of binging and purging, Steffi´s pregnancy should have been a bigger complication in her story than simply a road to eventually reunite Cooper and Steffi.  

Destroying the ties to Cooper´s family while Cooper was still alive is a bit of a stretch. If that was the case, Cooper should have been killed off. He had hurt Steffi as much, if not more, than Tess had.  While I appreciate a lot of the passion for this plot, I think we also need to recognize some of the inherent flaws here. None of the people murdered were young. The victims were expendable because production wanted a younger image for their aging product. Older contract cast members were offed in a ploy to shock the audience and present a revamped version of the show that focused on ¨the families you create¨ because they didn´t want a lot of older cast members.

The fact that Steffi and Ally had children was reflective of a bigger problem the show had: the characters´ stories were rarely reflective of their lived experiences. From a revamp standpoint, you don´t want the baggage, but even the stories themselves are often ageless. Angie and Jacob´s desire to have a child isn´t complicated by the fact that this need was already met for Angie (she had her son) or even by the possibility that Jacob was looking to replace the child he had lost in the shooting years earlier. It was mostly a tale for a newlywed couple in order to insert an old interloper (Lorraine) into the story as a catalyst for conflict. The age difference between Jocelyn and Alex (which was most likely not as bad in story because I think LLC is playing a character significantly older than herself) should have spurred a period of separation after it came out that Jocelyn had been pimped out to older men by her father and she was now involved with DILF Alex Masters. 

Your emphasis on the disrupted culture makes me consider what the actual result of Corinth would be post-Gwyn´s reign of terror. Does Alden University continue to be a thing? If so, is it renamed? And were the Aldens endowing significant amounts of money to the university? How would this change with the Corinth based Aldens being massacred? 

I also wonder if the physical construction of ¨The City¨ (i.e. sets) played any role in the killings. With most of the Aldens dead by August, the show no longer has to feature the mansion and they can start to repurpose it for Sydney´s loft. 

[Khan]

Did Morgan Fairchild ever appear on LOVING as a way to help launch THE CITY?  If she didn't, then perhaps she should've, thereby planting SOME story seeds that the team could have developed further once the new show had been launched.

[j swift]

No, but the promo of her exiting a helicopter in her Tom Ford Premiere Collection for Gucci white boots was played extensively on the network prior to the first episode.

However, there were "seeds" dropped while they all live in Corinth. Richard mentions Sydney when Tess is looking for spaces in Soho to move the agency.  IIRC, Tess and Buck also go to New York to find a place to rent.  However, the gag was that the audience was led to believe that the building was owned by a man named Sydney.  Because at that time in history, who would've assumed that a lady could own a whole building!

GH kind of answered those questions when they visited Corinth, and it was a virtual ghost town that never recovered from the negative events of the murders

Edited November 14, 2023 by j swift

[Vee]

There was so much goofy and gratuitous about GH at that time, but I did like that. It reminded me of the end of Stephen King's 'salem's Lot. Of course if I had control of an ABC soap you'd see some of the kids visit the 'ghost town' on Halloween on a dare and run into the ghost of Gwyneth Alden, so I'm one to talk about gratuity and fan service.

[j swift]

@Vee Do you know the urban myth in Port Charles? If you say Gwyneth Alden in the mirror three times, you wind up with a bad wig on your head (very spooky).

[Khan]

Which wouldn't be a bad story, especially if it led somewhere intriguing, like proving Gwyn wasn't the only one responsible for those murders.

Realistically, a LOVING revival would never happen, for a ton of reasons.  But I think a series about a town struggling to rebuild itself decades after a series of grisly murders caused citizens to flee and the local economy to evaporate would be something I'd like to watch.

Edited November 14, 2023 by Khan

[Soaplovers]

For me, TPTB created the Loving murders in order to do away with Loving and be reborn as The City... but I was more interested in seeing a post serial killer Corinth and how everyone would deal with the aftermaths of this serial killer.

And if I recall, Corinth's main economic hub was the university so I imagine with the serial killer at large, people were opting to drop out of the school and opt not to go back for future semesters.

And if enrollment drops, that affects the # of employees working at the University and affects all of the businesses that depend on students for business, etc.  

To me.. trying to rebuild/reinvent Corinth after the deaths of most of the Aldens would have been fascinating to see.

[j swift]

Hindsight is 20/20, but I can also appreciate the appeal of Morgan Fairchild, Catherine Hickland, and Debbie Morgan being filmed on location in New York at a time of cultural renaissance for downtown culture.  To me, the regret is that they lost the connection to that scene and began telling typical soap stories that could've been set in any small town in America. 

I think they overestimated the interest of that specific geographical area for a daytime audience. To be a bit of a coastal elite snob, you can't sell toilet paper to women in the Midwest with stories about the lifestyles of people below 14th Street.  Although in many ways it was a prototype for what Sex and the City became three years later (in terms of the interstitials, the music, and the city as a character), the plot of that show, as well as those characters, would've never worked in daytime.

Edited November 15, 2023 by j swift

[SFK]

Looking back on this idea, it feels akin to any number of teen shows we've seen on the CW or streaming in the last 15 years.

Loving as source material is hardly a big draw, the connection might resonate with the show's loyal audience (aging, international even) but it's really no different than any other potentially good film or series inspired by another obscure, widely forgotten one.

While Corinth got more than a passing mention on GH, a development on TC that was omitted from the revisit was that Deborah Brewster won the lottery and bought the Alden mansion. While this irked me at the time because GH's writer was always pulling sloppy stunts, to be fair, I don't remember more being said on TC about Deborah moving in and living happily ever after or anything. I suppose it could be easily established that the sale fell through or whatever.