Loving/The City Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

Based on her AMC work, Meg could play warm, and based on her Doctors work, she could certainly play meddling. 

Dabney is the only Isabelle I ever saw until more recent years. She was the Isabelle I saw die, and it was a heartbreaker even though I barely knew of her or Cabot. A part of me thinks she didn't fit what Isabelle had become, but I wonder if many fans simply didn't care about Isabelle without her.

It's almost impossible for me to see the three ladies as the same character.

I know they did give an explanation for why Celeste's Isabelle was so different.  Holm did at least carry on the richest-of-the-rich airs of Dabney, just in a colder form.

I have a lot of respect for Pat Barry and her longevity in the business, but I don't think she had the gravitas to play what Isabelle was supposed to be - there's a reason she was cast as Miss Sally on GL. 

It would have led some viewers to say, "Why is Myra in Corinth?" but I might have considered casting Elizabeth Lawrence instead of Pat Barry.

Edited July 24, 2023 by DRW50

[j swift]

@Kane I appreciate your deep dive into the Loving Murders on your blog.  It is so much fun to read the weekly wrap up to see how you could eliminate multiple suspects from the start, given where they were shown in certain episodes.  From the first week when Gwyneth tells Clay that Curtis is not the killer, it seems like she is struggling with the internal conflict to confess. 

Will you continue into The City, or will you stay Corinth-centric?

Reading today's summary, I was struck by Richard Wilkins as both a unique and underutilized character.  The town gossip is a soap staple, but expanding the world to New York and turning the stock character into a full-fledged gossip columnist was such a smart choice.  Richard Johnson and his Page Six crew were are all young and hot in the mid-90s, so modeling the character of Richard after those folks made sense.  It feels like after his initial pairings, and once Morgan Fairchild moved on, there was less for Richard to do within the story.  I also, hadn't considered how much of a role he played in the murder storyline, but I enjoy him mixing it up with Tess.  

Speaking of underappreciated actors, it is truly a shame that Catherine Hickland never won an Emmy.  She is a natural at drama and comedy.  But, I wonder if her beauty made people underestimate her talent?  According to a Golden Derby article from 2011, she only submitted herself for an Emmy once in 2008 for OLTL for the episode when Lindsey killed Spencer in order to protect Marcie, but I can recall at least five other times when she should have at least been nominated.

https://www.goldderby.com/article/2011/daytime-emmys-flashback-catherine-hickland/

Edited July 25, 2023 by j swift

[dc11786]

Dabney is definitely more of a traditional matriarch figure. Celeste Holms is definitely more calculated under Mary Ryan Munisteri and Addie Walsh, though there are slight differences. Munisteri wrote Isabelle as having a skill set that served her well in the boardroom with her knowledge of people and using her associations to gather intel. Walsh's Isabelle has her own motivation: securing a legacy for Clay. The difference makes Isabelle less compelling, at least in its execution. This bleeds into some of Pat Barry's work. I think Taggart and Guza leaned intot he social snobbery, which Walsh started to real develop towards the end (and maybe earlier as 1992 is not my favorite year). It is hard to take Pat Barry's Isabelle as a serious threat. Nixon basically backburners Barry's Isabelle before writing her out. 

I think Mundy would have handled the transition from warm and loving to schemer much more effectively. 

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if Pat Barry's Isabelle played the final scenes with Cabot on the night of their anniversary. It's not a pretty image. Celeste Holms' Isabelle would have been fine in that, but there would be added poignancy given that Wesley Addy would be dead in about six months. 

The Clay paternity story reads like the plot Walsh cooked up for Bradley Cole and one of the French characters on "Riviera," which Walsh had written for directly before heading over to "Loving." I think it was damaging to the show's canvas, even moreso than the serial killer. It was an unnecessary move that rarely resulted in much drama. Munisteri's Isabelle became a bitch; Walsh's Isabelle had now secretly been one for years. That's probably my biggest issue with the story. Isabelle's fling wasn't a crime, but her determination to see that Clay was in the CEO seat at Alden Enterprises seemed her ultimate long goal and made her love for Cabot even less real. 

I've considered Celeste Holms as Cabot's sister-in-law, Cooper's grandmother, and Larkin Malloy as Tyler Alden. Unfortunately, I don't think the best way to beef up the family would have been by adding a new branch, but ultimately that's what happens with nuClay and nuIsabelle and Cooper. 

Elizabeth Lawrence is an interesting choice. This got me thinking about "Road of Life" and now I'm wondering if Lesley Woods could have managed to balance the warm matriarch and the meddlesome mother that Isabelle Alden becomes. 

Structurally, so much of "The City" is ineffective because the connections are very narrow. I've been watching some of "The City" sporagically starting in April, 1996, and now in early June. The Richard-Zoey story is intriguing, but it requires the knowledge of so much backstory that is being established as the story is developing. Sydney and Nick's past affair, the combative marriage of Sydney and Jared, Richard's adoption, Nick's alcoholisma and fading career, and Zoe's mother's relationship with Nick. While I applaud the layers, at times it is hard to connect because so much is told to us rather than shown. I don't think Richard is a bad character per se, but his personality can be limiting in a sense because he's not super friendly so his world is small. I think it might have helped if Frankie was more involved with Hotline or whatever Richard's show is called. Zoey has the relationship with Angie, but that doesn't seem to be used very much at least at this stage of the story. 

Richard might have worked more effectively with a New York crowd similar to the cast of "Central Park West" rather than the transplants. A bitchy ex-girlfriend who found Zoey comical and a non-threat to her on-again/off-again friends with benefits relationship with Richard. Or a professional frienemy who picked up on the connection between Zoey and Richard and wanted to utilize it to move his own career along. Or maybe an older woman, or older gay man, patron who had been supporting Richard during the times Sydney cut him off. Not necessarily contract players, but enough of a world that would make Zoey uncomfortable and feel out of place.  

[DRW50]

I can see Woods as Isabelle, if she was glammed up enough. There's a resemblance with Dabney too.

Regarding Richard - Corey Page had a boyish charm, under the petulance, but I think he, like Danny, was not suited to be a long term character. 

[Paul Raven]

Do we know why Meg Mundy played Isabelle in the TV movie only? Every other casting continued into the series.

[Kane]

My plan is to finish 1995, take a short break, and then recap the rest of the Loving episodes I have (I have the last 10-ish weeks of 1991 and most of 1992). After that I might recap what I have of The City, but to be honest I don't have very many episodes of it. Thanks for the plug, glad you're enjoying the murders discussion.

I hate that storyline so much and instead of steering out of it, Guza and Taggart doubled down by having Gwyn find evidence that made it geographically impossible for Cabot to be Clay's father. And other than Clay's attempt to destroy AE, which abruptly ends after Trisha "dies," and a couple of mentions after Cabot comes back, it never gets mentioned again and doesn't actually affect anything.

Celeste Holm hated it, too. I was leafing through an old Digest relatively recently and there was a "why they left" article featuring Holm. This is what she said about the story:

 

 

[dc11786]

Meg Mundy wanted more money than ABC was offering. 

As I think I've said before, I suspect Taggart and Guza submitted their story bible before it was public knowledge that Noelle Beck was leaving the show. As such, I believe the original plan was for a bigger takeover storyline with Curtis and Trisha vs. Clay like started onscreen but didn't go anywhere because Trisha "died." How that would have been impacted the trajectory of the paternity tale, who knows? I don't think Patrick Johnson or Michael Lord would have fared much better in those stories. Personally, I would have switched Johnson and Brown and made Johnson Buck and Phillip Brown Curtis. Brown's drawl probably wouldn't have worked for the character, but I think Brown would have handled a character like Curtis much better than the other two. 

Holm is generous. It was pretty blatant where they were going the minute Addie Walsh stepped in. The flashbacks between Cabot and Isabelle, which had been sentimental and loving, ended with Cabot's ghost reminding Isabelle "of that terrible thing you did!" The transition from Munisteri to Walsh is very clear. There is an immediate shift in tone and texture of the canvas. Walsh's Corinth is more soap by numbers where as Munisteri's Corinth took more risks even if they didn't always pay off. 

With that said, there was always something about the Tides (or "the Bogs" as Holm's Isabelle called it). Even when it was mentioned early on, Isabelle's hatred for the place was well known. I have seen times where writers have mimicked plots coincidentally (Marland writing the incestuous relationship between Emmett and Cynthia Claybourne around the same time Nixon was penning the Garth and Lily Slater story in her bible for "Loving"). Maybe Munisteri would have told the same story, but I think it was initially appeared it was heading in the direction of Cabot having a mistress tied to the Tides. It was Cabot's infidelity which kept coming up. 

Haidee Granger seemed pretty much loathed by the cast. I've seen Paul Anthony Stewart say positive things, but all the men in the "Men of Loving" reunion who had worked for Granger weren't super impressed. She was out fairly soon after Nixon returns as Nixon is back in September and Granger is out by the end of October. 

[Franko]

Exciting! I hope you'll also consider doing a recap of the introduction TV movie.

Celeste Holm may have been a pill -- at least, according to Sam Staggs, who spent a lot of All About 'All About Eve' trashing her for being dismissive or condescending -- but she was a pill with integrity.

[DRW50]

@Donna L. Bridges already posted this in the obit thread but I wanted to post here too as I think Pamela Blair's LOVING role was probably her most memorable for her soap work. Admittedly, I have barely seen it, so I'm just going off what was said here. Some of you who have seen more may have some thoughts.

Pamela Blair Dead: ‘A Chorus Line’, ‘All My Children’ Actor Was 73 – Deadline

Edited July 26, 2023 by DRW50

[j swift]

It is interesting that at the beginning of the Loving Murders, Clay, Steffi, and Jeremy were all out of town at the same time.  Looking back, I wonder if that was to absolve them as suspects, or if it was a production issue prior to firing certain actors (like making an employee take their PTO prior to a layoff)?

Also, amusing how Loving predicted future tech by having Clay use VR to imagine his past.

Thirty years later, I feel so dumb about being surprised by the identity of the murderer when the clues were so obvious all along.

Edited July 26, 2023 by j swift

[Franko]

In hindsight, it is a little odd that the show had Jeremy not around for Stacey's funeral. It took place off-camera, they couldn't just pretend that he was there?

[Kane]

I think you must be right about Taggart/Guza planning on Beck staying (and maybe exploring a darker version of Trisha, who taps into the power of manipulation that everyone else in her family has). For some time after she leaves, I feel like you can see the places where Trisha would have fit in to how things are unfolding.

I've also long felt like Buck was shoehorned into the Kuwait storyline at the last minute in order to give Trisha a reason to go racing into the night, which is why his role in her death is never really acknowledged or explored afterwards and all the characters just decide to leave the questions surrounding Trisha's death unanswered.

My dreamcasting for Curtis circa his first 1993 return is Mark Valley.

For Clay (and maybe Jeremy) I think it could be a question of pacing. If Clay is in town when Stacey dies, then he and Gwyneth have that conversation about the possibility of Curtis being the killer right away. With him being out of town, that conversation gets delayed to draw things out.

[dc11786]

I was sorry to hear about this. Blair had a pretty thankless role on "Loving." The character was originally developed to play a much larger role on the show as she was engaging in an affair with both Mike Donovan and Curtis Alden, which seemed more Rita Mae driven in the bible. The multiple affairs lead to a Mike-Curtis animosity that was going to build into Mike blaming Curtis for what Mike perceived was his role in Patrick Donovan's death (Patrick was going to have a heart attack while chasing the campus drug pushers and Mike would suspect Curtis was tied to the drug ring). Furthermore, Rita Mae's motivation for her lust was that Billy Bristow was suppose to be impotent. None of this really plays out so Rita Mae in the end appears as sort of a comic figure. 

Marland did some nice work with Rita Mae after the divorce when she hooked up with Tony Perilli. In what I've seen, Tony/Rita Mae are a B-/C-story but there is a sort of gentle simplicity to their romance with the twist that Rita Mae is the older individual with a younger guy. Marland and Blair I think left around the same time towards the show's second anniversary. 

My guess is that it was more likely outside commitments. Dennis Parlato announced prior to the serial killer story of his intentions to leave the show to focus on theatre and film commitments. Parlato was involved in the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in late June and had previously been involved in a play called "Jack's Holiday" with Nicholas Coster and Judith Blazer from February-March 1995. I don't think it was a PTO issue for him at least. 

With Heinle, I don't know. Michael Weatherly went to Florida to film a pilot for a nighttime soap "Pier 66" that didn't get picked up in March-April and their child was born about nine months later so I wonder if Heinle didn't just ask for time off to be with Michael in Florida. Though that might be a little late, so I don't know exactly when these episodes would have been filmed. 

Buck's role in Trisha's death is neither explored nor revealed, is it? I mean it's pretty clear that Taggart was laying the groundwork for Trisha's eventual return and maybe that reveal would have come then. I don't know. I think a Buck-Trisha romance would have made sense. 

I never considered that they probably shoehorned in Buck's role, but you are probably right though I think the plan was going to be Buck and Tess breaking up Trisha and Buck's marriage. I think Tess was going to get whatever story that Taggart had planned for Dinahlee in 1991 that never got used because of her departure from the show. 

Mark Valley is my dream casting for Jack Forbes at any point in time lol

[Soaplovers]

Rita Mae seemed like she would have been a perfect Nixon esque character.. and I wonder what Nixon would have done with her character vs the untapped potential when Marland was headwriting

[DRW50]

@dc11786 Never knew about the lost story plans for Rita Mae. Thanks. The atmosphere Marland wanted for the show seems very different than what it became (the more aggressive sexual content seems like it's left over from his New Day in Eden stint).