Bill Bell's DOOL: 1966-1973

[Sylph]

If someone has storylines of this period, year by year, I would be extremely grateful if you posted it!

[Cat]

For some reason, I was thinking about this thread yesterday.

While having never seen Bill Bell's Days, it occurred to me that he had never been very good at portraying romance on Y&R (80s GH and NBC soaps having ruined me forever, of course). Y&R, by contrast, was rather stilted and formal in its approach to romantic relationships.

Which is why reading about Days here -- with its emphasis on affairs of the heart -- is so interesting.

Bell must have been a genius at portraying angst. It wasn't the romance itself, it was the pain of separation or forbidden love that most likely drove his writing (and therefore the success of early Days).

This is no surprise, given that Bell was an ad-man during the golden age of advertising (40s and 50s). Advertising at that time was hugely influenced by advanced theories of psychoanalysis which were brought to the US from emigrés fleeing warring Europe. Psychoanalysis gave backstory to people's deepest fears and strongest desires. This in turn gave advertisers the vocabulary to target those same fears and desires.

That's maybe why Bell was also so good at seeing what worked and jettisoning what didn't. "Listen to your customer -- they are always right!"

[SteveFrame]

You are right.

All of Bell's stories were about the forbidden.

Bill & Laura loved one another when they shouldn't have.

Eric loved Susan even though he was married to her brother Greg.

Julie and Doug loved one another even though she was married; and then he reversed it by having Julie free and Doug married.

It was always about the longing to be together.

Fans of today's Days would not have been happy with Bell's Days at all. They want their couples together. Bell's couples were hardly ever together. They always were longing to be together.

Out of the 14 years that Bill & Laura were a couple, they were only happily married for about 2 years of it. It took them forever to get together and then once they were together Bill had the affair with Kate and they separated.

Same with Doug & Julie. It took them 6 years to marry and after that they were attacked on every corner. Julie's rape. Julie getting burned and pushing Doug away. Julie marrying Lee.

It is stuff that was a ratings grabber back then, but today the fans would be so up in arms over it and calling for the writer's heads.

[Sylph]

Did you like how he told these stories? Was it painful to wait 14 years for them to get together?

[SteveFrame]

I don't have an exact list of storylines but to me the Bell years can basically be summed up in a few couples:

Marie & Tommy/Mark - Marie falls for her brother Tommy who has had plastic surgery. Can't deal with it and runs off to join the monastery.

Bill/Laura/Mickey - brother rapes his brother's wife and teh fallout from it. It all leads to Mickey finally learning the truth even after Bill and Laura have fought to keep him from finding out that Bill is Mike's father and not Mickey. Mickey gets amnesia and believes he is Marty Hansen and meets and falls in love with Maggie. Sidenote story Mike has a hard time dealign with everything and even fears he might be homosexual and sleeps with Mickey's secretary Linda to prove his manhood.

Julie/Susan/David/Doug/Addie - Julie & Susan were rivals. Julie wanted David but he was only in love with Julie. Julie seduces him and gets pregnant. She gives the child up for adoption and eventually marries the adoptive father, Scott Banning, to get close to the child. Julie meets Doug who Susan has hired to swindle Julie. Julie falls in love with Doug but can't be with him because she is married to Scott Banning. By the time Julie is free, Doug has fallen in love with Addie, Julie's mother and married her. Julie wants to fight her mother for Doug but can't because Addie is diagnosed with leukemia. Somewhere in the process of all this Susan killed David while temporarily insane and goes on trial for it.

Susan/Greg/Eric - Susan after she is cleared of murder charges by Mickey with Bill and Tom's help, falls in love with Greg Peters. But Greg's brother Eric also falls in love with Susan and just like Bill did with Laura, he raped her and she got pregnant with his child.

Everybody else on the show durring these times pretty much supported these basic stories. These were the basic storylines that went on for years. they each had subplots here and there such as Maggie's surgery to cure her paralysis; David's (Julie's son not the father) return to town; and so on - but they all were part of the bigger storyline.

[SteveFrame]

It wasn't for me. Soaps of that day all generally followed the same formula. It was the angst that drew you in everyday and made the little payoffs when they came so much more enjoyable and blissful.

You waited with baited breath for the first time your couple kissed, the first time they held hands was a big deal, and the first time they made love was so special. And the weddings were spectacular events. I mean promos were made out of a couple finally kissing.

And you weren't spoiled by it either in the mags or by day ahead previews. It was a surprise for you and you couldn't wait to tune in each day to see if today was the day it was going to finally happen. You escaped into the program, and all the aspects of why they couldn't be together now were discussed and their actions were examined along with their motives. You knew why they did the things they did.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

And thank God for that. I'm glad Y&R doesn't have the problems in as grand of a scale that DAYS has with fanbases dictating storylines and boycotting the show because their favourite couple isn't getting the storyline they want.

DAYS can almost single-handedly trace their current problems back to those couple fanbases they created.

[Toups]

I love that stuff!! I hated when things are rushed. I like it when things are slow and you make a big deal of the key moments. It's one of the things I love about Reilly and I sense that he learned that from Bill Bell. I wish I could've seen Bill Bell's stuff.

[Cat]

Same here. I miss the almost-kisses, the longing, the delayed gratification. LOL, the extended foreplay!

JER took it to a whole other level (and I hated when they had long flashbacks to the previous day's episode). But the essence of soaps -- building something up, taking your time, attention to detail, juggling other stories at the same time -- that's what attracted me to Daytime in the first place.

[Sylph]

But that is just never going to happen again. I have yet to study marceline's thesis that nostalgia has killed the soaps, but even right now — I completely agree with her.

If you wanted to tell such a story today, the audience would go crazy, it just wouldn't be possible. I mean, nowadays primetime has a lot of (bad) influence of soaps: how on Earth are you going to tell a slow, angst storyline developing over 2 years or more when you have a show like Heroes having 5 A stories and God will know how many B and C stories.

Maybe I am wrong, but I have this feeling that people want high adrenaline, fast paced storytelling from daytime, too. With 250 episodes a year that just isn't possible without burning the show from top to bottom. And everywhere around daytime - ashes. Ashes, ashes everywhere.

[JackPeyton]

I agree. And just look back over the past 3 decades at all those sitcoms that had the male and the female that the fans wanted together but the show made youiw ait. they would teas,e almost go there, then pull back for seasons after seasons. now its BAM! together.

[Sylph]

I guess they want them "BAM! together" also because they have already seen the never-ending circling around. It's just getting old, sadly. Everyone has done it. We know how it's going to end and we don't want to watch it.

I also forgot an important thing about act breaks: nowadays most shows are transitioning from four-act structure into five-act (some even flirt with six acts!). That is just insane, it means that six times during a show there has to be a mini-cliffhanger! Networks want more commercial breaks and, I forgot which writer said it, they want longer opening sequences to hook viewers. And those openings have become another act. Go figure.

[Cat]

Not to diss Marceline's thesis (which I would love to hear more about). But nostalgia is everywhere, too -- some prefer the term retro -- and IMO it actually powers shows all over Primetime. What is Desperate Housewives if not a deceptively slow-burning retroesque soap that visually cites the 50s and 60s at every turn?

Ugly Betty gives off the impression that SLs are moving at a lightening pace -- when in fact they are treading water in arguably the most delightful telenovela-esque manner.

The Hills -- uber (un)reality soap that GL and B&B seem bent on copying? Nothing happens. Lauren plays with her hair, fits in the pretence of work around sunbathing and incessant talking about her boyfriend. The choice of background music clues you in to her mood since she can barely, like, verbalize it herself.

The audience "not allowing" a soap to tell a certain story? I don't buy this. Fanbases have attempted to bring down shows and dominate proceedings, but few -- if any -- have ever succeeded. And the idea that TPTB listen to their audience in order to do their bidding is hilarious! TPTB do what they want, they may use "the fans" as an excuse to turf out somebody behind-the-scenes for political reasons, but if they want to push a story, they WILL do it and spin it their way. Guza's GH being a massive case in point.

I think people are definitely more used to fast-paced shows (and movies. And X-box etc) and have shorter attention spans. But not all.

The diversity of shows -- and networks -- available to the general public is astounding, though. Not all are fast-paced, flashy, CSI-franchised music videos. There is a balanced televisual diet out there: different genres, different approaches, drama, comedy, dramedy, documentary, reality shows, talk shows, political discussion, movies, sports, etc., etc. People dip in and out depending on their mood. They can't have hyper-pace all of the time. TV is used for winding down and touching base as well as immediate thrill and recharge.

Honestly, I don't think soaps would be able to drag out a love story without a kiss for, say, two years. But they are canny at drawing stuff out and filling the waiting space with other details, stories, distractions. Audiences ate it up then; I still think they could now. Especially if the soaps decided to return to a half-hour format. Less pressure on the writers, cast and audience to deliver immediate action and immediate (diminished) pay-off.

[Sylph]

One thing is to hint at retro, quite different to tell stories at a lethargic pace. Even though you may have an impression that a show is copying something from the 50s or 60s, all you have to do is to sit down, count the acts, the A and B stories, number of scenes etc. Pay close attention to all those all-important details. At the same time, I know that audiences actually hate shows like Lost because the whole mammoth edifice of mystery is built in front of them and they have no patience and motive to get into it all. Even J. J. Abrams who invented the show and invented the hatch doesn't know what's going on on that show. He said it himself when talking about his new TV project Fringe.

I don't watch The Hills regularly, occasionally I check it for the decor or something, but I hate it. Reality shows, even though they are scripted, are a different animal from soaps.

And Betty is just a show that could be and in my eyes only saved by the divine America. It suffers from catastrophic cast malfunctions, starting with Vanessa and Eric, that just clog the screen when a much better actors could be in those roles. It also suffers from the fact that Silvio Jake 2.0 Horta developed it.

I am not saying they wouldn't allow it — I'm saying they would be extremely unsatisfied with the lethargic pace, the ratings would drop and everybody would scream "We want a new HW!" Fans have never had a direct influence on the show, but just take a look at DOOL and its infamous fanbases: hey haven't destroyed it by not allowing a HW to write, they destroyed it by wanting too many different things at the same time, giving the honchos a wrong idea of what that show is supposed to be etc.

I wish you were right! But I think you're not.

[SteveFrame]

I think the biggest reason soap fans get impatient is because they already know what is going to happen so they are really wanting to get through what they know is going to happen to something they don't know.

I mean with all the previews and the spoilers and stuff - everything is just that spoiled. So they want that to happen and get over with. They want there to be more to the actual show than what they read or saw in previews was going to happen. They just don't realize it.

Cat makes some excellent points in her last post about some of the primetime shows. Shows like Big Brother wouldn't be successful if people didn't still want some kind of angst and surprise. There is no way that a show like Big Brother can spoil everything. I mean people pay for the live feeds so they can sit there and watch 24 hours a day - just waiting and hoping something will happen.

Look at a show like Lost. If that is not proof that a daytime show with the right kind of writing and lack of spoilers can pull off the old type of show then nothing is.

Lost still gets decent ratings after what 3 or 4 seasons now. They are still on that damn island and we are still waiting to find out all the secrets and know if they will ever get off that damn island.

I just did an editorial about this very subject for my SoapsWEB site.

THere has got to be yearning and angst on the screen for viewers to build yearning and angst for the show. That is just not there anymore - both in front of the camera and for the viewers off screen too.

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REad more about it:

Check out my latest editorial - finally got around to doing another:

Where Did the Yearning & Angst Go?