Loving/The City Discussion Thread

[Vee]

I wondered a bit about it at the time. But I couldn't really be bothered with it, as I could see Deborah moving on out of that mausoleum (maybe with the hunky blue-collar Clay lookalike she meets in the finale) over the course of close to 20 years.

Nonetheless, yes, I would absolutely do a one-off Halloween episode in Corinth with some GH or whoever teens to honor the show - and maybe see if Randolph Mantooth and Lisa Peluso as a reunited Alex and Ava, or Noelle Beck or whoever would be willing to appear at the end as a contrast to spooky Gwyneth.

I do think TC was ahead of its time slightly in terms of the handheld filming, the setting of young or upwardly mobile people in NYC starting over, the found family concept, etc. I think it was modern and I think there are real things to be learned from it still - I liked a lot of things about it. But I think the quality stories often just weren't there.

[te.]

I think the biggest issue with The City was that it was aired at 12:30, yet obviously aimed at the Gen X crowd. Same thing with Sunset Beach - even if the intended audience would've been interested, they wouldn't have been at the television to watch it.

[SFK]

ITA, and I disagreed with Lemay's criticism, particularly of the found family concept. I do think he was right in that the show could have used a little more generational representation. Say, a Myrtle Fargate-like grandma figure in the building. I'm specifically thinking of the older Latina woman Jesse and Jenny befriended during their summer in New York whose name I'm frustratingly forgetting at the moment. I don't know if the actress was still around at the time, but that would have been a lovely throwback to have her in the mix, she could have been Bernardo's abuela.

I seem to remember talk of ABC toying with the idea of airing same day repeats late at night. I may be confusing/combining memories with 13 Bourbon Street on FOX. At any rate, I would have loved that given the fact that I was always missing the show because of school and inconsistent VCR taping.

[Vee]

I know that had they continued they'd apparently intended to reintroduce Ava/Alex's kids (presumably SORASed) for conflict with Alex and Jocelyn, among others. I think they'd hoped to become more conventional in their family/story structure to retool. I can understand that impulse given their dire situation, but I think it would have been a creative mistake to go too far.

Someday the Bourbon Street pilot will leak. RIP Michael Malone.

[DRW50]

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[j swift]

There was an issue immediately when she bought the mansion because Lennox the Butler was deeded lifetime employment, regardless of the owner (another example of only-in-the-soaps probate).  When she argued that she didn't want him there, he countered that she couldn't sue because most of her winnings were tied up in the purchase of the mansion.  So, it stands to reason that if the town fell apart, and Deborah's liquid assets were limited, she probably couldn't hold on to it for twenty years, regardless of the Clay look-alike that she met in the final episode.

Scheduling was a variable that was blamed for the failures of Loving, The City, Generations, and Ryan's Hope.  It seems reasonable, but hasn't The View survived in that timeslot for decades?  I never know the east coast schedule and may have confused The View taking the timeslot vs just using The City's set.

Edited November 15, 2023 by j swift

[te.]

With The City and Sunset Beach it's more the fact that they're so aggressively targeted towards Generation X (ie at the time 18-35 year olds), who just wouldn't be likely to be at home to watch television when they were on, hence they missed the boat entirely. Generations and Ryan's Hope weren't specifically target towards that group; who knows who Loving was targeted towards (and of course, The View is targeted towards stay-at-home moms, which fits the time slot like a glove). If there's one good thing to say about The City, it's that it had a very strong presentation about who their audience was; if they managed to convey that in the writing can be discussed.

 

(Incidentally, I'd argue that moving what was perceived as an old-fashioned soap like Love of Life to 4:00 PM was also a bizarre move as the hausfraus who've followed that likely would've been busy with afternoon activities)

Edited November 15, 2023 by te.

[Soaplovers]

Timeslot is key to a soap.

EON, Dark Shadows, and to a lesser extent Somerset benefited from the 3 or 3:30 timeslot since the demo targets were home from school, etc.

Had affiliates not had so much power, Loving/The City should have been a late afternoon soap 

[SFK]

@j swift Thank you for that info re: Deborah and Lennox, missed that!

As for East Coast scheduling, in D.C. and New York at least, The View aired at 11am after The City's cancellation. Loving/The City aired at 12:30 after the news and before All My Children at 1pm.   

[dc11786]

To be frank, i don´t take too much seriously from the man who made Ava Jerome the daughter of Delia. I also don´t think AU would have closed overnight. Enrollment may have dropped (most likely temporarily as no one cared when the co-ed prostitutes were murdered in the 1980s), but I would be hard pressed to see the decline from the murders alone. Maybe if AE also relocated because there wasn´t a single Alden in Corinth than that might make some of the decline make sense. With that said, I'd play a variation of that in the revival.  

It was never going to happen, but the perfect time for a ¨Loving¨ revival would have been 2020-2021 when COVID was driving people out of New York City into the less crowded suburban areas where some ambitious property developer saw Corinth as an opportunity to provide an oasis from the chaos going on in the world around them. The old AU factory could be turned into lofts or some other repurposed hipster attracting spot like a microbrewery. 

I believe some affiliates started airing in a late night time slot before the cancellation and that ABC may have been monitoring the situation to see if it was successful. 

I don´t think the found family concept alone was feasible. To highlight my point, I´ve seen bits of both ¨Tribes¨ and ¨Swan´s Crossing.¨ Both geared to a much younger audience than ¨The City,¨ but both operating in a sense outside the lines of the traditional soap format by shifting the show completely onto the lives of characters under 18 years old. SC only featured the young characters in contract roles and emphasised on the romantic complications of the characters with some action and adventure thrown in. TRIBES on the other hand offered up a tight, found family group of young leads with their fully developed parents in a supporting role. I find TRIBES more effective of the two as a result. Even ¨Edge of Night¨ had traditional family structures mixed amid the created family of law enforcement. 

The created family could have been central, but peripheral families should have been weaved in and out. The Roberts family drama comes off as mostly exploitation because of the underdeveloped parents. Azure C.´s brother and mother were featured in her story, but her story would have been deeper if the two characters had been developed beyond a short term dayplayer. The Soleitos appeared on occasion, but it might have been worth exploring that a little further. 

[j swift]

Culturally (an adverb that I overuse in this thread) - the "found family" idea seems to have also been a huge part of the PR for Melrose Place.  And I think you can easily see the influences of MP of TC.

[SFK]

I don't want to veer too far off topic, but our conversation leads me the question: Is family (blood, legal, or found) essential to a soap? I loved teen dramas like Degrassi and Fifteen which certainly satisfied my soapy leanings. There were a few instances of characters who were siblings and plot points that involved unseen relatives, but the platonic and romantic relationships are what carried these shows.

[Paul Raven]

I guess because soaps with a family structure were successful, that set the template for daytime.

SFT and LOL began with a family structure. GH and TD veered from that a bit but had a solid setting with the hospital, which sort of represented the family home I guess.

Never Too Young tried a youth focussed story and flopped. Even Dark Shadows had the Collins family at the core.

Irna, Bill Bell and Agnes all believed in the family structure.

Degrassi, Melrose etc weren't daily daytime so acceptable not to follow the format.

[Franko]

Would it be too much if the Loving resolution on General Hospital also included psychiatrist Dr. Heather Forbes and her fiance, Sandy Masters?

(Credit where it's due, I'm expanding on an idea Kane had. "What a shame the show didn’t last long enough for (a new) teen scene to come to fruition and the inevitable fireworks of Stacey’s daughter dating Ava’s son.")

[Khan]

I believe it is. 

At the end of the day, a soap opera is about, and should be about, family.  No matter who you are, or where you live, or how much money you happen to have in your bank account, your family - or, in many cases, lack thereof - has tremendous impact on every other facet of your life.  For many, their entire self-definition and self-worth is determined by the kind of family environment they were raised in; and in a genre that gobbles up story at lightning speed, I don't think there's any ground for dramatic possibilities more fertile than what goes on behind closed doors with one's family.

Exactly.  THE DOCTORS and GH appealed to fans, because their characters often looked after each other as if they were family, even if they might not have been related biologically.

I think it was Sheldon Bull ("Newhart," "Mom") who said it best: "every show is a family show."  He was talking specifically about sitcoms, but I think it could apply to every genre on television.