CBS: Whole Network is in trouble.

[Scotty]

That explains so much, doesn't it?

[Errol]

I refuse to listen I'm in my own world

[Soapsuds]

What's your opinion on all this Errol??

[TC]

For me, GL was an amazing show from what I saw in the mid 70's up until the mid 90's, where it started to lose its way. I'm told it was even better in the 60's to the mid 70's. I just [!@#$%^&*] adored it in the late 70's to early 80's. Even loved the much hated Disco theme.

I'll never forget when they won the Emmy for best show, and showed the revolving Emmy award behind the closing credits. Earned bragging rights.

[DavidsMuse]

Did Branco the hack have anything to say about Y&R?

[Soapsuds]

That Y&R had sunk to a 3.4 rating..and that before you know it ..the show would be where OLTL is now ratings wise.

[DavidsMuse]

^ Thanks, that saves me a lot of time!

[EricMontreal22]

I love the disco theme but I love disco...

I've actually read in many soap history boosk that GL was stornger than ATWT for the 70s even tho ATWT had the more consistant ratings and some very strong eras (didn't the Dobsons go between both shows?). Of course for nearly all of the 60s--even while she was writing AW, Agnes Nixon wrote GL so I have no doubt it was great--interesting it was 15 mins till 1966 or 7 I believe

[Scotty]

I've never watched GL, but I looked it up. It went from 15 to 30 minutes in 1968, and to an hour on Nov. 7, 1977.

[Jess]

I think the City model is what a number of shows should look at.

I've never been a huge GL fan either. I do remember when Wheeler first came on, people were really singing her praises.

As far as soaps, if you think about it, they really are an outlier as far as entertainment. To some extent there is no competition and it's almost like a monopoly industry. Their entire values are that they are cheap. Yes some soaps are rated higher than others, but it's not like, OK, this soap has been on five years and run its course, it's time to end it. It's stories aren't fresh, viewers are moving on so cancel it.

These things last decades and now when they die, they go away and it's like a death in the family. There is not even discussion of how to replace them. Nobody is developing new soaps because it's time to cancel GL. That raises the question of whether any one model is the answer. I do know that I can turn the channel and watch CSI and it's better than anything on daytime and that is what soaps are competing with now.

[TC]

Testing what Sylph told us about quotes.. it works! (Where is Sylph?)

I know the LaGuardia book was very critical of ATWT's reliance on Deus Ex Machina plot interventions back in the 70's (Let's add a tornado!) Can't remember how it was compared to GL.

40 years ago... too many little touchstones going on for me. Ron Carlivati, I feel your pain!

From what I remember of GL as a child... it wasn't flashy like the others, kind of stodgy, but somehow managed to become the most interesting of all before anyone noticed, for a time. I might be reading it wrong but if I had to give it a label, I'd say the most cerebral.

[Vee]

Uh-huh, okay. This statement would only make sense if none of us had ever watched either of these programs. So let me ask you this: Have you watched GL?

Because I have. Repeatedly. Watching it is like when Malcolm McDowell's eyes are nailed open in A Clockwork Orange. It is like watching a show burn itself alive, every tape, every inch of footage, every negative, every reel, immolating itself from the inside-out. Every day, something new dies. Every day something else erodes or rots and falls off, like syphillis. Every day something means a little less. There is no continuity. There are no storylines. There is absolutely no character integrity or continuity. Everything is about random one-off events. Everything is about at least two musical montages per episode, with constant bad music playing throughout. Every ten minutes, Mallet looks at a picture. Dinah walks around. Reva looks out a window. What are they doing? What are they thinking about? Why is anything happening? You won't get an answer, because there is nothing there. Absolutely nothing.

Say what you will about Carlivati or OLTL, but he's able to tell new stories that respect history and longtime families and veterans, whereas most soaps are content to just piss on them. He's one of the only people out there left behind the camera who doesn't seem ashamed to be "stuck" in daytime. Bob Guza hates daytime. He's always wanted primetime or cable or movies, so he tries to turn his shows into sub-par, PG-13 rated versions of all the screenplays and pilots sitting rejected on his shelf. Every three months it's a new attempt for Bob Guza to exorcise the demons of Bob Guza's failed dreams of being David Chase or Stephen Bochco. And over on GL, Ellen Wheeler, an actress I used to deeply admire, has become an absolutely pathetic executive producer, and her mentor/bf(f) Chris Goutman a burnt-out husk at ATWT, and so it's no surprise to me to hear that she wants GL to be not daytime drama - one of the founding daytime dramas, for God's sake, that should be leading the path into the future while respecting its roots - but The Hills, because that's exactly what all that vaguely faux-stylish nothing most resembles. It's not even stylish, strike that; it just tries to be moody by having people look at nothing for fifteen minutes out of the show while that incredibly cheap, awful music plays over and over. They all look like they're living in an internment camp, it's that cheap and ugly. And do you know why GL has no continuity, no consistency, no stories? It's because they no longer even have any story projections. Nothing means anything day to day and there is absolutely nothing "new" or "fresh" or intelligent about it. So please, please, please don't give us the "at least they try!" merit badge speech. Because they don't try. They don't. Look at it sometime. Look at it for more than a day, more than a week. They don't.

And it's really disgusting, because you look at an episode from 1991, and you wonder, 'why?'

[EricMontreal22]

I agree with lots of your points, just to a lesser extreme. Certainly I still get things out of wtaching OLTL and even, yes AMC in its current state daily that keep me watching--and it's not JUST loyalty though that plays a huge part. I wouldn't rather watch a CSI rerun--I wouldn't get the same thing from it (and I liek CSI fine) or a primetime show. But I know I'm startign to be in more and more of a minority there

[EastMA2]

<<Everything is about random one-off events. Everything is about at least two musical montages per episode, with constant bad music playing throughout. Every ten minutes, Mallet looks at a picture. Dinah walks around. Reva looks out a window. What are they doing? What are they thinking about? Why is anything happening? You won't get an answer, because there is nothing there. Absolutely nothing.>>

Wow Vee! Excellent, excellent post. ICAM! I could accept this new look of GL IF THERE WAS STORY. But there isn't. That is the biggest problem with the show. There simply isn't any story and certainly no reason to want to tune in everyday.

[RoseVioletDaisy]

Good lord, this post is absolutely beautiful. And absolute right.

I also don't give Wheeler " points for trying" because other than trying to turn Guiding Light into something completely the opposite of Guiding Light, I can't tell what she's actually trying to do.

I think the best point made here is that most of the people in daytime right now, especially the writers and producers, hate being in daytime. They're ashamed of it and as a result, have no respect for the very things that the fans of the genre watch for. They try to make themselves feel better by pretending that they're not really doing "just a soap" if they make it Sopranos-lite, Sex and the City-lite, The Hills-lite, or even an action movie rip-off. But that's not what we want. We can get all of those things elsewhere. We tune into our soaps to see, how wierd, our soap operas. Soaps are about love, romance, friendship, loyalty, and family and how those relationships and feelings change and evolve over decades. Sadly, those concepts are being ignored, trivialized, and abused by most of these shows on a daily basis and the characters and families we know are either gone or taken out of storage 3 or 4 times a year to function as breathing furniture at someone's wedding, funeral, or Christmas party.