Edge of Night (EON) (No spoilers please)

[Broderick]

Once you get to the discovery of the Corpse (or almost Corpse), if you feel the Primary Suspect wasn't responsible, please tell us how you believe those Other People managed to do the deed & escape unnoticed 

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(A significant portion of the storyline depends on who came & went from the Deceased Person's condo, where everyone was at the time, and whom they were with.  The only person who ultimately is stuck "holding the bag" is the Primary Suspect.  Everyone else appears to be accounted for.)   

[Maxim]

Now you've made me have doubts and be even more interested! I will tell you as soon as I get to that part. I have been managing to watch just 2 episodes a day, in a normal healthy tempo, haha. Mostly because I have too much work and can't afford to binge many episodes at once. 

[Broderick]

lol.  I don't want to influence the conclusions you draw.  

All I want to say is this particular "mystery storyline" (Margo Huntington's exit) and the mystery later in 1980 that involves a child's toy were VERY perplexing to me when I was watching at the time, and I'd read a zillion murder mysteries.  Nowadays, I already know who the perpetrators were and can catch all the clues (and the red herrings), but at the time, I was completely bewildered how the deaths had  been accomplished and by whom.     

[Maxim]

I am pretty good at these things. Father is a crime solver himself as a profession, so I am used to it from childhood. But I adore HS's style of building the suspense and mystery. He does it in a classic, but somehow peculiar way. Some aspects of the mysteries so far have been little caricaturish, but... that good amount of little that it makes the whole show seem artistic and eccentric. I find myself thinking - how close he is to getting over the top and camp... and he is not doing it... The man knows what he is doing. 

Thank you for these little intellectual hints! I am loving them.

[Broderick]

I'm glad you're having fun with the show.  It brings back so many memories. 

In 1980, there was obviously no such thing as a "spoiler".  I was a teenager at the time.  My siblings and I watched the show most evenings, and several of my classmates were watching as well.  It wasn't at all unusual for us to sit around & speculate as to where Henry Slesar was going with the storylines.  "It HAD to be Eliot Dorn.  But how did he get out of there without the doorman seeing him?"  "It must have been Nola Madison!  But didn't a reliable witness see her somewhere else at the time?"  No explanation appeared to make sense, but suddenly EVERYTHING makes perfect sense.  It's really a masterclass in mystery storytelling, in my opinion.

Without spoilers, it was VERY HARD to figure it out.  And that theme remained true throughout 1980.      

[Maxim]

Now I'm sure Nola isn't the one... Or IS SHE... Was she in her Ms. Cory disguise... I'm just joking. Don't tell me! I am getting so hyped up for 1980 reading your take! Is Raven going to rock the city once she is back? I am already counting the episodes to her return.

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[Broderick]

Let's just say Raven will play a significant role in the denouement of Margo's mystery and will also be a central character in the mysteries that occur in the summer and autumn of 1980, and in each event the groundwork is all CAREFULLY laid without us really even being aware of it.  

[Maxim]

I am soo excited.  Thank you! 

[Broderick]

For those of us who didn't know Sharon Gabet was coming back (and in 1980, that was every single viewer, lol), Raven's reappearance at an opportune moment for one of the suspects came as a complete, unexpected shock, which blew one of our "study hall theories" of "who done it" to hell.  

[Maxim]

OMG... Is it RAVEN... No... Don't tell me. 

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[Broderick]

I ain't telling you.  I want you to be as surprised as possible about who did it, and how the Perpetrator managed to accomplish it.  lol.

It's all been laid-out for us, but we're bad about *assuming* everything is the way it initially appears.  And nothing really is.  

[Maxim]

How beautifully said.

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[Paul Raven]

Interrupting this 80's edge discussion to go further back to Slesar's beginnings at the show. 

Millette was a popular 60's soap star. She returned to ATWT after her initial run, the went to EON for 2 gigs before GL snapped her up for her long run as Sara.

The Record Hackensack New Jersey 16 May 1968

Edge Of Night' Star Shines All Day By JAY RAE OFFEN Staff Writer

PIERMONT - - Soap opera queen Millette Alexander makes housewives feel better when she plays Julie Jamison on TV's "Edge of Night." No matter what a woman's problems, she can tell herself, "At least my life's not as bad as Julie Jamison's. No one's blackmailing me. I'm not a murderess. I'm not going to jail." Julie Jamison's soap bubble troubles runneth over on screen. Offscreen, the most striking quality of the actress who portrays her is her happiness.

That's the way it is with the real life of Millette Alexander. With a husband she calls the doll of the world, four children, a 19-room house, a job she loves and the world's most adoring audience, her woes won't match Julie's. But Millette would never call her life placid.

"With four children of our own and five children who belong to the couple who live with us and work for us? Then there are seven dogs, and four cats, one pregnant. It's not placid but there aren't any murders." In contrast, TV Julie's life is nothing but toil and trouble.

Divorced from a guitarplaying no-goodnik, she comes to "Edge of Night" as the new nightclub singer at the Riverboat, a gambling den. Good-guy Orrin Hillyer sees her and falls in instant love because she looks just like his dead wife. Former husband shows up to make trouble. Julie passes out from one drink (she's allergic to alcohol). While she's unconscious, former husband is killed in a fight.

When she wakes up, real killer persuades Julie she did it, then blackmails her. Orrin lends her money, marries her secretly, and the plot thickens.

Back In Script

That's one plot. There are at least four more that make up TV's cops and robbers soap, "The Edge of Night." Only the daily watcher can keep track of all the problems. Even the writers get confused sometimes and add things that can't happen yet.

But the most amazing thing that's ever happened I during this soap opera's 13 years is an act of reincarnation that wrote Millette back into the script after killing her off. Audiences liked her so well as Laura Hillyer, first wife of Orrin, that she's been revived as Julie, Orrin's second wife. Millette first became Orrin's wife, Laura Hillyer, two years ago. Laura had troubles too. She was a faithless wife who chased a disc jockey who loved her money but not her.

So she killed him, then died, herself, in a car crash. The TV ratings hit an all time high. Nine months later, Millette was back in town as Julie with a Southern accent and long yaller hair. The dialogue ran, "Have you seen that new nightclub singer? She's a dead ringer for Laura Hillyer." Indeed. Trying on a new, ash blonde wig for the secret wedding last week, (Julie tones down her yaller hair for love), actress Millette said she was not bride-nervous.

She'd done it all before. At Laura's wedding. Millette received pot holders and hankies from believing fans. Anticipating more wedding gifts for Julie, she said. "It's weird in a kind of wonderful way." The world's most devoted audience, soap opera fans are all kinds of people.

Tallulah Bankhead watches. So do teenagers and retired men. They love soap operas. So do the actors, who adopt each other as family and sometimes act together for years.

For Millette, her working life in "Edge of Night" is strenuous. She commutes from her Piermont home to a CBS studio two, three or four days a week, depending on the script. She's in her dressing room by 8 a.m.,rehearses all morning, dons makeup and costume, does the show from 3:30 to 4. then has a pre-rehearsal from 4 to 5:30 if she's acting next day. Evenings, she memorizes 20 or 30 pages of dialogue. An actor with a poor memory doesn't do soaps.

It's gruelling, but actors love it. Millette has never really had a vacation from her career since she graduated from drama school at Northerwestern University. She admits her four children slowed her down a bit. But she did head and shoulders TV commercials and radio commercials throughout each of her pregnancies. Time Out For Baby The day that Will, her third child, was born, she taped a radio commerical.

"I kept teasing them to hurry up, that I was in labor. When we finished the taping, I said, 'Now can I go home and have my baby?' and I did!" As with any woman, all days are not all smiles. Millette copes by crying, woman's first right. And she relies heavily on husband James Hammerstein. "When I'm most upset, that's when he's most calm," she says.

Hammerstein is director of off-Broadway's "The Indian Wants the Bronx." Because he understands that the show must go on, he understood why Millette went on with a temperature of 105 recently. The last stronghold of live acting, soap opera doesn't allow for sickness. "They were wonderful to' me though," Millette says. "They got a doctor and set up a cot next to the set so I could rest.

Millette Alexander is a pretty woman with a girl-next-door look. What keeps her from being the girl next door is her whole life style and a high energy level.To relax, she gardens and translates modern paintings into needlepoint canvases. "I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning one night and thought, 'Wow, wouldn't Picasso look great in petit point?' What girl next door would do a thing like that?.

[Maxim]

You can interrupt every day any time my friend, this is a fascinating read. Thank you.

[Marco Dane]

Wish AOL didnt stop uploading episodes when the Clown Puppet Murders was beginning.