Edge of Night (EON) (No spoilers please)

[Broderick]

During Lee Sheldon's reign, there were a pair of (dull) sisters, both of whom were evidently named "Elizabeth Correll".  One of the girls went by "Beth Correll" and the other by "Liz Correll". 

My mother called them "Big Sis Lizbeth" and "Lil Sis Lizbeth".  My mother was a huge fan of Agatha Christie (and Henry Slesar).  She was 100% convinced there was gonna be a gigantic bloodbath that wiped BOTH Elizabeth Corrells off the face of the earth.  She thought the clue to their demise would be found in the old Mother Goose Rhyme: 

"Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess; They all went together to seek a bird's nest.  They found a bird's nest with five eggs in; they all took one, which left four in."  

I was like, "Momma, there ain't gonna be a bloodbath.  This writer doesn't have enough sense to come up with something like that.  He was simply brain-dead when he named both of these sisters Elizabeth.  There's no mystery; you're just witnessing an inept writer at work."  

But whenever Beth & Liz would appear on the screen, Mama would start singing, "Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess; they all went together to seek a bird's nest."  

lol. 

[DRW50]

The strange part about Slesar not being asked to adapt with the times is I think he did try to adapt with the times. His EON became markedly more youth-oriented, which he made work as best he could; even when P&G went to the extreme of dumping their beloved police chief and replacing him with a sweet piece of ass (which is  something a lot of the other soaps did not do for quite a while, if ever), he  managed to make that work.  He even tried to go along with the "adventure in a foreign land" trend of early '80s soaps, even if  that didn't really work out. 

[danfling]

I felt that writer Lee Sheldon did a good job with the Isis storyline, and I especially enjoyed the conclusion of the Isis storyline because I felt that it was very suspensive.  I was really encouraged that Mr. Sheldon was getting better and had learned more about writing for a serial.   However, the follow-up storylines (Jody attending college, Jody and Jeremy, Standing Elk and Derek, etc.) were dismal.   He really had not learned very much, and he was a very poor headwriter for the show!

[Soaplovers]

He did come up with the Wonderland theme in the final episode so I'm wondering if there was a bigger plan for Beth/Liz having the same name, but the show was canceled before they really delved fully into their backstory.

I think Sheldon had a decent start with Isis.. and the 6 week haunted mansion story had a payoff (Sky and Raven getting their money back)... but December 1983 till July 1984 seemed to be a lot of scenes with little plot or movement.

I think once the show came back from the 2 week break, it started to kind of resemble Edge with the Logan Swift murder case and resolution, plus the Liz Corral story that led to the return of Laurie Karr.   

However, I think the biggest issue was focusing the show around couples that weren't in the detective/police/attorney/reporter fields.  Sky/Raven lasted too long and probably should have been written out by 1982 or 1983... while Jody/Preacher also were over-rated.

 

[j swift]

I think the ISIS story is a near-perfect melding of sci-fi and soap.  While GH was always on the run for some mcguffin that was adapted to whatever the plot required,  and was usually only used as a backdrop to romance,  ISIS played on the societal fears about the cultural obsession with media and privacy.  It came about just as the term "couch potato" was coined and people were worried about TV manipulating images in order to increase consumer sales.  Like most good sci-fi it took a common concern and heightened it into a melodrama of middle-aged men being consumed by cable TV, a villain with a weird limp, a literal mustached twirling creep, and bizarre incestual undertones.  I was completely captivated.

As for the shift in writers, as always, I think it is a bit reductive.  We have to consider other factors.  Jody was recast, and due to the actor's pregnancy, Raven could not drive story the way the audience was used to.  These were the female leads of the show and a huge blow to the momentum of storytelling.  Coupled with shifting casts, lost revenue, local stations wanting to expand local news to the early afternoon, and the ascendance of Oprah that's a lot for a 30 minute soap to contend with.

Lastly, I think @Broderick's Liz/Beth insight is so smart, and the kind of thing I look forward to on these boards.  I can't recall any of the soap magazines picking up on the name issue, and I've never considered it until I read it here.  How much fun would it be if the concept was a unique take on a multiple personality story and we later find out in a Sixth-Sense-type reveal that nobody in Monticello ever interacted with both sisters at once because they were actually the same person!  They just looked different to the audience as a dramatic indication of their DID.  I mean it makes a million times more sense than OLTL Viki/Niki and the mystery of which one of them bought that very unattractive wig.

Edited May 30, 2022 by j swift

[Broderick]

No question -- the ISIS storyline was the very best of Lee Sheldon's work.  But for some unknown reason, the production staff seemed determined to sabotage the story almost before it started.  

The 1983-1984 timing of it was PERFECT, as it was clearly a celebration of George Orwell's old novel 1984, which, in 1983, was being heavily re-read and promoted in literary circles.  Sheldon realized 1984 was about to be in the news regularly, so he had the foresight to "borrow" the concept of mass surveillance directly from the novel and incorporate it into his storyline, along with a liberal borrowing from the 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch (in which children were encouraged to gather around their TV sets for the mind-controlling Silver Shamrock commercials), plus a few copped elements of Tennessee Williams's late 1970s novella and play The Red Devil Battery Sign, in which the flashing sign reminded the Woman Downtown to keep her mouth shut about the dangerous things she'd learned.

All of that being said, what better logo could you choose for your show than a big city skyline?  For 27 years, that's exactly what "Edge" had featured -- a cluster of lighted towers rising into the gloomy twilight sky, the perfect setting for an "ISIS-type"  storyline.  So what did the show do as soon as Sheldon proposed the story?  They ditched the skyline entirely, replacing it with a placid beach scene that appeared to be the Long Island Sound.  They completely neutered Sheldon's storyline almost before it began, sending viewers the "subliminal message" that Sheldon's urban tale of surveillance was occurring in some quiet, peaceful beach resort town instead of a large, creepy, crime-ridden Midwestern metropolis. 

But the producers weren't finished with sabotaging him just yet.  They had one more nail to drive in his coffin.  Beginning in the late 1970s, the "premiere set" on Edge had been a high-rise penthouse apartment set, with a balcony, that featured an extensive cityscape backdrop.  The production staff had perfected the management of the backdrop over the years:  they learned to light the backdrop with yellows and pinks to represent morning scenes, a gauzy, deep blue with flecks of pink to represent twilight scenes, and a dark murky blue to represent late night.  They'd learned to create the appearance of lightning on the backdrop when scripts called for a thunderstorm.  And most amazing of all, they'd learned to put little red lights on the backdrop (representing TV towers on buildings) that would brighten and dim as characters stood on the balcony.    All of this was 100% conducive to the ISIS storyline, whose first and most unfortunate victim was Nichole Cavanaugh, who actually LIVED in this high-rise penthouse that theoretically overlooked the ISIS building.  So what did the production staff do?  They pulled the heavy drapes and almost never displayed the cityscape backdrop during the entire ISIS storyline.  Miles Cavanaugh and Jody Travis could've just as easily been living in the sleepy resort town the brand new opening and closing credits subliminally represented to us.   

The ISIS storyline potentially could've been a timely and interesting tale to pull "Edge" out of the ratings cellar, but the headwriter's lack of experience in the medium, the show's low budget, and the production staff's determination to strip away the serial's longtime "metro image" gave Sheldon pretty insurmountable obstacles to overcome.       

[RavenWhitney]

The entire production staff was unemployed after 18 months. It seems odd to me that they would sabotage a head writer's work. Sheldon hadn't a clue how to write a soap, let alone EON.  His pacing was off. Dialogue was terrible.  Characterizations and backstory completely lacking.  I will agree that the casting during his brief reign of error was completely off (with respect to the new contract actors). Sandy Faison and Jennifer Taylor were terrible performers among the old guard actors who put their thin skills to shame.  The actress who played Shelly had potential and Sheldon could have easily made her Raven's half younger sister and planted her in the middle of many stories.  Instead, she was suicidal and cut after 6 months.  Chris Weatherhead was great as Alicia but her story sucked and she wasn't given a contract.

[Soaplovers]

 

I actually thought Shelly and Raven were connected... they sized one another up on their first meeting.. and Raven would have hints of jealousy anytime Shelly would come to see Geraldine.  There wasn't a plan for Shelley at all.. she just floated around with no backstory nor long term story plan.  The only time I thought she was used well was when she disguised herself as Millie to spy on Alicia. 

And I agree about Alicia.. she was an interesting character that interacted well with all the principals.  I thought keeping her in Sky/Raven's orbit was a waste of a good character.

[Broderick]

Oh, the dialogue is HOWLINGLY bad; there's no sugar-coating that.  The decline begins in May of 1983, and it never improves for the remainder of the show's run.  In fact, the problem seems to worsen as the months pass.  (And I don't understand it to this day.  Lois Kibbee was scriptwriting for Henry Slesar, and while she never penned the clever dialogue that Steve Lehrman had, she was adequate.  She continued writing for a while under Lee Sheldon, but it's not the same.  The dialogue becomes amateurish and childlike almost overnight.)

The production components start an INSTANT decline.  Under Slesar's tenure, scenes typically ended with a very quick "cut-to-black", with a music cue that reverberates over the blank screen.  Immediately, they start doing these "slow fades" before the commercials, which force the actors to hold terror-stricken grimaces for additional (comical) seconds.  Episodes end with non-cliffhangers, such as Jody announcing that she might move in with Preacher. 

By late summer, Sheldon had adopted the annoying practice of cycling from one story to another within each episode, in a repetitive, predictable A-B-A-B-A-B fashion.  So if you cared what was happening with Schuyler and Raven but not about Preacher and Jody (and that was about the only two stories he had for months), you could easily tell when to go to the kitchen or the bathroom.  The scenes are quick and choppy, many of them completely thrown away, with no dialogue that moves the storyline forward.  

There's a cheesy, pseudo-comical aspect that begins immediately and worsens as the show progresses through 1984.  The "humor" isn't rooted in character; it's just lousy jokes and "situation comedy" such as the Whitneys pretending there are rats in their house.   

As I said earlier, if that's what ABC or P&G visualized as their goal, I'm glad Slesar wasn't forced to prostitute his talent to achieve it. He was better off leaping (or being tossed) from the sinking ship.  At least he landed in a lifeboat.        

[danfling]

Again, I felt that the ISIS storyline was wonderful, and it should have marked the beginning to better scripts and storylines for the show.    I was really interested in Edge of Night during the time of the conclusion of the ISIS storyline.    

I do suspect that this story had probably been conceived as a part of Tucker's Witch, which as written and produced by Lee Sheldon and had aired on CBS earlier in the season.   He did have many months to perfect that storyline before it was transferred to Edge of Night.  Mr. Sheldon did not have the advantage of having months to perfect the storylines that followed.

 

 

 

 

I felt that writer Lee Sheldon did a good job with the Isis storyline, and I especially enjoyed the conclusion of the Isis storyline because I felt that it was very suspensive.  I was really encouraged that Mr. Sheldon was getting better and had learned more about writing for a serial.   However, the follow-up storylines (Jody attending college, Jody and Jeremy, Standing Elk and Derek, etc.) were dismal.   He really had not learned very much, and he was a very poor headwriter for the show!

[RavenWhitney]

Kibbee quit as a script writer in Jan or Feb 1984 I believe. I'm sure she couldn't stomach the amateur outlines and didn't want her name associated with the writing team.  P&G brought in David Snell (who had briefly scripted SFT), Marty Ross and Eric Rubinton (along with trial run for Donna Pizzi). Only Rubiton went on to write SFT and AW for a few years. 

Edited May 31, 2022 by RavenWhitney

[j swift]

This comment has lived in my head rent-free for days (as the kids say)

It is so interesting to think about how not just the pacing and characters changed under the new writer, but the town itself.  Focusing on Jody's college town, or the wilderness of Standing Elk, or even the suburban environment of the Whitney Mansion (if I were Geraldine I would stayed in my suite of rooms at the Monticello Arms, Sky's staff always seemed incompetent in comparison)) seemed to expand the universe of EON in very unnecessary ways. 

I was recently watching the Winter Austin trial and the other locations within Monticello helped define the characters.  During a lunch break, Mike, Nancy, and Draper dined in a fancy restaurant with tea cups and saucers while Logan and Cliff ate at a diner and kept commenting on the sour coffee.  The differences between mugs and tea cups told the audience so much about the hurdles Logan would need to get over in order to win his case.  Loosing the urban vibe was a huge change to the identity of the show.

Edited June 1, 2022 by j swift

[danfling]

Marty Ross went on to be cast as one of "The New Monkees."

David Snell, of course, had appeared onscreen on Edge of Night as well the early years of One Life to Live.

[DRW50]

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[Vee]

This stuff with Maeve McGuire's Nicole is a godsend.