Would Farrah have considered doing a soap at that point? Her career was faltering but I think it would have been a comedown, even if she was offered $$$.

Morgan was perfect in the sense that she was a name associated with soaps and never really progressed beyond that, but still had that primetime cachet.

I'm trying to think of anyone from that era who might be a possibility.

I'd be curious what the demographics were for LOVING. It never struck me as a show for the younger viewers so it always seemed odd to me they would try to facelift it into a "hip" show. I am curious if Linda Gottlieb would have been a better producer for the City. She tried to modernize OLTL, and I thought she did a first rate job in most instances. For most of her reign on OLTL, I thought it was must watch television which is something THE CITY was not. She might have done a better job at getting the writers to work on the plots. I also wonder if not having Lisa Peluso on the show was another negative because I remember a lot of people were upset she was not making the leap to the new show. 

 

39 minutes ago, chrisml said:

I am curious if Linda Gottlieb would have been a better producer for the City. She tried to modernize OLTL, and I thought she did a first rate job in most instances. For most of her reign on OLTL, I thought it was must watch television which is something THE CITY was not. 

She was apparently involved in consulting on the Loving Murders. It showed in some of the production elements, promotion and bravura setpieces, IMO (the vignette with Danny and Ally's son stuck in a pit or whatever, with people's conversations being broadcast over radio in a very cinematic setup was straight out of her OLTL work). I don't know if she was involved in crafting The City.

I do think losing Ava was a blow.

Edited December 19, 20231 yr by Vee

Did Lisa Peluso leave LOVING while the murders were still happening, like when she left SFT, or did she stay all the way to the end?

4 hours ago, Khan said:

Did Lisa Peluso leave LOVING while the murders were still happening, like when she left SFT, or did she stay all the way to the end?

She left in mid-October '95 maybe 2-3 weeks before the end tops, IIRC, not long before Gwyneth was outed. It was moving to the climax by the time Ava couldn't take anymore and headed to Florida(?), pleading for Alex to come with her. There was a nice scene and montage I talked about in here back in 2020 when a lot of us rewatched. I believe after the killings ended Alex made it clear he intended to go down to Florida and try to patch it up with Ava, and bade farewell to folks including Jocelyn (Lisa Lo Cicero) who he'd become tight with. I know he then turned up on TC at some point early in its first weeks having revealed that he and Ava couldn't fix it, which left him open to fulfill the flirtation with Jocelyn they'd set up during LOV. I don't know when he turned back up though; he's not in the pilot.

Edited December 19, 20231 yr by Vee

48 minutes ago, Vee said:

She left in mid-October '95 maybe 2-3 weeks before the end tops, IIRC, not long before Gwyneth was outed.

So, IOW, she did exactly what she did at SFT: she left at or near the climax of a serial killer plot.  I guess she's not the type to stick around and find out whodunit, lol.

32 minutes ago, Khan said:

So, IOW, she did exactly what she did at SFT: she left at or near the climax of a serial killer plot.  I guess she's not the type to stick around and find out whodunit, lol.

She was at AW at the bitter end. 

I was recently reflecting on the mentions of Sydney Chase on Loving.

They tried to write a misdirection by having Tess assume Sydney was a man.  However, Richard was Sydney's stepson, and Tess knew Richard, so it seems implausible that Richard wouldn't have mentioned her at some point when Tess talked about moving to New York.

BTW Richard and Tony are good examples of one of my problems with The City.  They were both good characters, and both were very NYC coded.  But, in order to facilitate the story, they ran into each much more frequently than one would expect IRL Manhattan.  In a small soap town like Pine Valley, it is easy to explain how everyone winds up at the same wedding or social event.  But in a huge city, it is very unlikely that Richard and Tony would have continued to socialize or happen to live in the same building.  Similarly, even with the emergence of Soho, I don't think Sydney Chase would live downtown, unless there was an economic downturn that forced her to live in the building that she leased out to others.

In other words, the refusal to open up the story to various parts of the city, is something that annoyed me about the soap as an experiment in urban storytelling.  Just like when soaps set in Los Angeles inexplicably have people from mid-Wilshire casually head to Malibu for drinks, even though that's more than an hour away in traffic, so nobody would actually make plans like that.

On 12/17/2023 at 8:37 PM, Vee said:

The youth set on TC was more than enough for the show's demographics, I think. That was the focus in those days, hot young twentysomethings.

Found family was not the draw of MP, but it was a common thing you saw in dramas or sitcoms at the time (Friends, etc.). It's true the popularity of MP evolved later in its more high-octane, super-soapy storytelling that began near the end of its first season, but I don't think TC's setup was at all uncommon for ensemble TV.

Oh no, not uncommon for the era at all.  I was just surprised to see MP's name invoked as an example here, given what it's most remembered for.  Was Amanda really friends with anyone?  I think MP was able to get by with the most OTT/campy elements of soaps without the emotional investment in characters or relationships for a few years during its heyday because it was only on once a week - every episode was the Friday cliffhanger, basically.

On 12/17/2023 at 10:07 PM, Paul Raven said:

The desired demo is Women 18-34. That's who advertisers want to catch. The belief is that they are most prepared to spend money and try out different things.

Teen demo was secondary. Were there ads aimed at teens? NBC tried to push that the teens would grow into the desired demo but what appeals to a teen -campy Passions type writing has lesser appeal as viewers mature. And do you want to be watching what your kid sister is into?

That's a good point, and again I was not suggesting that TC should have had a teen story.  Like I said, the concept for TC was more my fantasy than the heteronormative, milquetoast teen stories other most other soaps were grafting on.

Although didn't Reilly's first run at DOOL supposedly dominate 12-17 as well as 18-34?  Isn't that why Passions was greenlit?

21 hours ago, Khan said:

ICAM, @chrisml.  James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten should have introduced Sydney Chase on LOVING in preparation for the spinoff.  Doing so might have helped give TC more of a "push" in terms of building suspense around her, and around the new show in general. 

I don't necessarily agree that the LOVING Murders needed to continue on TC, but I do think they needed to plant story seeds other than, "Hey, everyone, Corinth's been a real drag since Gwyneth Alden killed everybody, so let's all move to SoHo!".  (In retrospect, maybe they would have been better off just moving some of those actors over to AMC or OLTL.)

I wonder what would have happened if all the Loving characters who moved over to TC (plus maybe Jeremy or one of the other victims as a red herring) had moved to NY a few weeks early—for the same reason Ava left Corinth, to get away from the serial killer—and begun their new stories, only to be lured back home for the murderer reveal?  It would have been an interesting cinematography experiment, if nothing else: the transitions from scenes taped in traditional soap opera style to what TC was going for.

17 hours ago, chrisml said:

I'd be curious what the demographics were for LOVING. It never struck me as a show for the younger viewers so it always seemed odd to me they would try to facelift it into a "hip" show. I am curious if Linda Gottlieb would have been a better producer for the City. She tried to modernize OLTL, and I thought she did a first rate job in most instances. For most of her reign on OLTL, I thought it was must watch television which is something THE CITY was not. She might have done a better job at getting the writers to work on the plots. I also wonder if not having Lisa Peluso on the show was another negative because I remember a lot of people were upset she was not making the leap to the new show. 

 

Bringing on Linda Gottlieb in whatever capacity for the end of Loving, as opposed to TC, was such a bizarre move.  Unless the ABC brass recalled she had once pitched a story in which Viki's alters killed off all the Lords and Buchanans, and wanted to get their money's worth while ensuring she couldn't sue them...  Anyway, didn't even Gottlieb's first few months at OLTL have actual stories?  They were just sped-up and didn't involve characters the audience cared about, right?

2 hours ago, j swift said:

Similarly, even with the emergence of Soho, I don't think Sydney Chase would live downtown, unless there was an economic downturn that forced her to live in the building that she leased out to others.

I think SoHo had already emerged by then.  I don't doubt Fairchild's character or even Tracy Q might have lived there, but I agree the others wouldn't have been able to afford to live in their building.  To bring it back to MP, it seemed like they were trying to set her up as a Heather Locklear clone.

By that point, Fort Greene or maybe DUMBO still might have been accessible for middle class young professionals moving from Pennsylvania, which would have been close enough to downtown Manhattan by subway that you could maybe imagine at least some of them hanging out there.  There could have been an interesting dynamic where Angie and Jacob were friends/acquaintances and still neighbors with the other Corinth transplants, but tended to hang out in Brooklyn more.

Edited December 20, 20231 yr by DeliaIrisFan

On 12/17/2023 at 9:04 PM, Khan said:

I wonder if TC took that approach deliberately in order to avoid looking like another hoary old soap opera and instead look hip and contemporary.

Most likely. 

At times, I feel like episodes of ¨The City" come off as an American attempt at a British style soap opera, which has, to me at least, always felt like it has a looser story style than the American soaps or at least incorporates more interaction that isn´t always at the heart of the show´s plot. I don´t always get the appeal of British soaps so I can sometimes give ¨The City"  a pass, but it mostly just feels disjointed and attempting to mimick the trashy talk shows of the era rather than soap opera. 

On 12/18/2023 at 11:44 AM, Khan said:

In the end, I wonder if it was worth spinning off LOVING into TC at all, just because LOVING always had been a low-rated show with not much of a following outside of its' core audience.  Maybe Agnes Nixon, James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten would have been better off developing a brand-new soap that had no ties to LOVING whatsoever.

The thing is though it basically is a continuation rather than a spinoff, right? Like ¨Loving¨ didn´t keep going while ¨The City¨ was on the air. The actors contracts with the show weren´t renegotiated, as far as I know, when ¨The City¨ began. 

I think less people should have moved to ¨The City." Having everyone move at once was silly and limited the story potential. 

On 12/18/2023 at 6:49 PM, chrisml said:

I think a lot of The City's problems go back to what a lot of people pointed out. There was no compelling reason to tune in if you were a viewer of LOVING. I don't know why they didn't carry the murders story over to The City. That way viewers have the ability to get invested in the new characters at the same the writers are finishing the Loving murders. When the new storylines didn't work, they resorted to another murder storyline anyway. 

I hear what people are saying, but I also think back to the conversations about how ¨Texas¨ struggled because so much of the story started on ¨Another World.¨ There is so little story in the opening episodes of ¨The City" and the characters aren´t developed enough to be compelling to have conversations carry the episodes. 

On 12/18/2023 at 9:22 PM, chrisml said:

I think she is an underrated actress, but I think they miscalculated in thinking Morgan Fairchild was a big draw for soap viewers (new or old). If she had been integrated into the last months of LOVING, it might have been ok, but the writers didn't seem to know what to do with her. And they resorted to the old sexist chestnut of rape to give a strong female character a storyline. IT feels like they got excited about hiring her and penned her entrance into the show, but didn't have any longterm plans for her after the big entrance. That's the biggest problem with the CITY. It felt like a collection of scenes that rarely came together into a cohesive unit. The sets and the direction were wonderful, but if the story isn't there, what difference does it make? Except for the one murder plot, I have no memory of any longterm story on the show.

I´d be curious to know when it was decided to have Jared rape Sydney. Joel Fabani is SOOO cringey. It seems like it is just another reason to have Jared killed off a month or so later. That story also comes at a point where the show is just dropping things left and right. The build of stories is so bad. April is mostly the Jocelyn is a hooker because her father took her to get raped by his friends and Richard and Zoey falling in love while Zoey learns that Nick is her dad. The May stories are mostly the rape (to a lesser extent), Jared´s deisre to take over the building to get the gold, and the Azure C. revelation. Things just seem to come and go without the necessary build.  

On 12/18/2023 at 11:27 PM, Khan said:

Furthermore, as I've said before, I think TC made a concerted effort in the beginning to steer away from telling the sort of big, melodramatic stories that we had become accustomed to seeing on soaps - to be "anti-story," in a sense.  I think that makes a sense if you want your show to be seen as a cutting-edge soap for a new generation.  But even if you don't want the kinds of stories that you could watch on your grandmother's old soap opera, you still need something that will keep people glued to their screens other than jaw-dropping sets and fantastic camera work and editing.  You also need strong characters with strong relationships that, in turn, will generate strong stories.

I also agree, @chrisml, that they might have miscalculated Morgan Fairchild's appeal in getting her to agree to star on TC.  Obviously, if you lived through the '80's, or if you watched SFT BITD, or even if you saw her play Sandra Bernhard's lesbian lover on "Roseanne," then you know who she is.  But I don't know whether that appeal carried over at all into the next decade.  If TPTB wanted a "name" to headline TC's cast, then they either should have swung a bit higher - maybe gone for someone like Jaclyn Smith*? - or, as I suggested eons ago, they should have (done the unthinkable and) spun off Erica Kane/Susan Lucci (with the provision, of course, that she still could appear on AMC occasionally, and that she could return full-time to AMC should TC ever be cancelled...which it was).

I will remain adamant that Sydney/Morgan Fairchild wasn´t the issue lol This isn´t a case of Beverly McKinsey being asked to play a watered down version of her bitch character to carry off a new show. Sydney as the landlord was suppose to be the Amanda Woodard of ¨The City,¨ but owning the building wasn´t enough. Sydney wasn´t developed enough for any actress to make her work. There was enough scraps that a decent writer could have made it work, but I think Tracy ended up being a better fit because the character was pre-fab and didn´t need to be developed. 

On 12/19/2023 at 12:55 AM, Khan said:

It's been so long that, unfortunately, I can't recall the exact chain of events anymore, but was TC developed and announced and MF hired before LOVING actually went off the air?  If so, then I think they had ample opportunities to have MF/Sydney appear on the former show.  For example, they could have had pop in briefly as a former dalliance of Clay's from way back, who runs into him again while on business in Corinth and has another romp in the sheets with him before his untimely demise.  Maybe Alex would have considered her a prime suspect until the next murder occurs, which lets Sydney off the hook, but establishes animosity between them.  I mean, anything that could have made the audience sit up, take notice and say, "Hey, I gotta start watchin' the new show when this is over, just so I could see what else this chick might be up to!".

The cancellation of ¨Loving¨ coincided with the announcement of the rebranding. I think Fairchild´s hiring may have been slightly later. 

I don´t think Harmon Brown and Essensten had the capacity to develop the new version of the show and end the old one at the same time. 

On 12/19/2023 at 7:20 PM, DeliaIrisFan said:

Anyway, didn't even Gottlieb's first few months at OLTL have actual stories?  They were just sped-up and didn't involve characters the audience cared about, right?

Yes.  Sometime after the beginning of her run as EP at OLTL, Linda Gottlieb, along with newly installed HW Michael Malone, featured several, limited-run storylines with characters who were connected but only tangentially to the vets.  The one example I can think of off the top of my head was a story about Viki's previously unseen maid, played by some actress who was later convicted IRL either of murder or attempted murder, who was being abused by her husband, played by Craig Wasson ("Ghost Story").  These stories were but one way Gottlieb was going to "reinvent the wheel," as she had told the press.  The experiments did not take, however, and they were abandoned in due course, for the simple reason that they were about characters whom no one had heard of before and knew nothing about.

3 hours ago, dc11786 said:

The thing is though it basically is a continuation rather than a spinoff, right? Like ¨Loving¨ didn´t keep going while ¨The City¨ was on the air.

I think less people should have moved to ¨The City." Having everyone move at once was silly and limited the story potential.

Good point, @dc11786!

And I agree that less people should have moved to TC.  The new show could have made do just with Debbi and Darnell and whoever was playing Frankie at that point, since viewers were bound to remember them from AMC.

3 hours ago, dc11786 said:

This isn´t a case of Beverly McKinsey being asked to play a watered down version of her bitch character to carry off a new show. Sydney as the landlord was suppose to be the Amanda Woodard of ¨The City,¨ but owning the building wasn´t enough. Sydney wasn´t developed enough for any actress to make her work.

I agree!

Edited December 26, 20231 yr by Khan

Maybe fewer characters from Loving should have crossed over at first. 4 at most.Then we could see "The City' from their point of view-they being the newbies along with the viewers.

And for all the talk of 'found family' things would have been more cohesive and relatable if there had have been a new wealthy family full of secrets that the Loving characters became enmeshed with.

9 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

And for all the talk of 'found family' things would have been more cohesive and relatable if there had have been a new wealthy family full of secrets that the Loving characters became enmeshed with.

I agree 100%, @Paul Raven!

TC could have featured descendants from one of NYC's oldest and wealthiest families, along with a brash billionaire (...yes, like whatshisname...) who represents "new money" that the other family looks down their noses at.  And then there also could have been an ethnic, blue-collar family - with ties both to law enforcement, like the Reagans on "Blue Bloods," and to organized crime in the city - who, along with the other family, becomes involved in various ways with the LOVING transplants at the Greene Street building.

TC could have had a traditional set-up for a soap, just with a twist on its' execution that would have made it feel fresh and different at the same time.

12 hours ago, Khan said:

I agree 100%, @Paul Raven!

TC could have featured descendants from one of NYC's oldest and wealthiest families, along with a brash billionaire (...yes, like whatshisname...) who represents "new money" that the other family looks down their noses at.  And then there also could have been an ethnic, blue-collar family - with ties both to law enforcement, like the Reagans on "Blue Bloods," and to organized crime in the city - who, along with the other family, becomes involved in various ways with the LOVING transplants at the Greene Street building.

TC could have had a traditional set-up for a soap, just with a twist on its' execution that would have made it feel fresh and different at the same time.

I don't disagree and, the worst part is, those elements had already been embedded into the show. The Soleitos had Tony the cop and then Gino, Carla, and Joey with the mob connections. While the Chase family may have been new money than old money, the class of the media giants verse celebrity musician Nick Rivers could have easily been shaped up. I easily would have given Jared two children from a previous marriage (a son and a daughter) which would have added a bit more conflict to the story. I also think I stated before that I felt that some of the initial conflict should have come from the longtime tenants having to deal with the transplants because they had pushed others out. 

I would have beefed up what was there. While I'm no fan of Danny Roberts and think the approach to the Jocelyn story was salacious at best, I think exploring the Roberts clan a bit more would have been worthwhile. Jocelyn and Danny's father seemed much more white collar middle class than I expected. I think they could have had him owning a construction company, which would have given him some possibilities for business with Sydney bedding Danny and Jocelyn handling the legal stuff for the ad agency. 

I'll never stop holding out hope that there was an actual bible written for Manhattan Lives (the proposed Deidre Hall-led, New York-set spinoff to Days of Our Lives, on the chance that there's anyone here who has never heard of it), because it would be a lot of fun to compare and contrast that with how things played out on The City.