HOW TO SURVIVE A MARRIAGE

[danfling]

Lin Bolan, the creator and producer of this soap opera, has passed away.

[amybrickwallace]

Armand Assante has shown up now in Retro TV's rerun cycle of The Doctors. Lauren White should be showing up any day now.

[Paul Raven]

[Paul Raven]

Different angle of the shot on Pg 3

 

Julie (Rosemary Prinz) and Alexander (Brad Davis)

 

 

Edited March 23, 2019 by Paul Raven

[amybrickwallace]

 

Nope. In fact, their characters barely interacted for the year and a half or so that both were on TD at the same time.

[Paul Raven]

[Paul Raven]

'NBC should drop 'Marriage' TV serial Dec 1974

Allan Miller is Smarter than NBC. Miller, who played David Bachman in "How to Survive a Marriage," realized the series was getting nowhere in developing an audience, so he decided to use his desire to go to Los Angeles as an excuse to get out of the show.

Instead of recognizing that this would be a good time to close down the entire amateurish operation, producers thought they could use Miller's departure to help their ratings. In daytime serials, there is nothing more powerful than agonizing over death, so they let Bachman have a heart attack and let his wife (played by Fran Brill) cry and moan and almost pull her hair out over the death.

Result? Ratings did not climb a single point, "How to Survive a Marriage" remaining the second lowest rated serial on TV (second only to 'Somerset" which is, relatively speaking, a test pattern). NBC is now trying one last desperation move with "How to Survive a Marriage." They are dropping the show into a different time period. Too bad they can't be as smart as Allan was and drop it altogether.

 

[Chris B]

Didn't they cancel Peyton Place for this? That move seems so short sighted. I feel like had they given Return To Peyton Place another year it could've picked up.

[amybrickwallace]

I think so. RTPP aired its finale on Friday, January 4, 1974, and HTSAM premiered three days later on Monday, January 7.

[vetsoapfan]

After being plagued by terrible writing and casting chaos upon its debut, it looked like RTPP was doomed. Miraculously, however, in its later run, the show stabilized and the writing improved dramatically. It actually took a huge leap in the ratings in the months before its cancellation, but by then NBC was dedicated to HTSAM, and cancelled RTPP anyway.

Like RTPP upon its debut, HTSAM was dreadfully written and went through some casting problems. This show stabilized as well, and the writing reigns switched from the atrocious Anne Howard Bailey to the excellent Rick Edelstein. It was thrilling to see the surge in quality, but the impatient (and incompetent, IMHO) PTB at NBC struck again. Instead of learning from their mistakes with RTPP, they moved the fledging-but-blossoming  HTSAM into direct competition with the powerhouse ATWT, and then cancelled it altogether when the ratings (predictably) did  not impress them.

Viewers ended up losing two soaps which had become very watchable and viable. It was a frustrating waste

 

Edited July 19, 2021 by vetsoapfan

[te.]

To be fair, wasn't How to Survive a Marriage kind of doomed from the beginning with the impending expansions of both Another World and Days of Our Lives? Seems more like they let it air with little support to prepare for those shows going to the hour.

[Paul Raven]

HTSAM was the baby of Lin Bolen, head of NBC daytime so I think there would have been a lot of support for it.

It got a 90 min premiere and they paid Rosemary Prinz a record salary to participate.

Was Lin around when the timeslot was changed and the show subsequently cancelled?

[vetsoapfan]

No, even with the expansion of other soaps, there still would have been room on the schedule for HTSAM. Lin Bolin and NBC clearly had high hopes for the show. Bolin boasted about how she had spent a fortune just on scenery for the show. They gave it a 90-minute premiere and lured daytime legend Rosemary Prinz to the show at a high salary, and then promoted the heck out of it with reams of publicity. The problem was...everyone involved forgot about CHARACTERS and STORIES that the audience could become invested in. Anne Howard Bailey relied heavily on didactic, preachy speeches about women's lib and the need for independence. Characters were not much more than caricatures with little depth or nuance. Originally, the show was both abrasive and BORING. It must have been humiliating for Lin Bolin, who championed HTSAM as her pet project.

I have many vintage articles about this show, since I adored its fine "middle period," when Rick Edelstein was writing it. When the series initially failed to attract an audience (I knew it wouldn't, considering the dreck Anne Howard Bailey was putting out), certain actors commented that Lin Bolin just stopped coming around and turned her back on the production. I do think that the decision to move HTSAM against ATWT was NBC's way of acknowledging that they had given up on the show and were feeding it to the wolves. Under Rick Edelstein's sensitive writing, the show might have succeeded, given time to rebound and sandwiched between Days and Another World, but in the mid-1970s, no fledging show (particularly one which had initially turned off potential viewers) was going to survive against ATWT.

[robbwolff]

Which writer handled David Bachman's fatal heart attack? That scene is my only memory of HTSAM. It's good to hear that Edelstein did such a solid job as I wasn't impressed with his short stint as head writer of The Doctors in 1969. 

[vetsoapfan]

Some writers just "get" certain shows better than others. Harding Lemay's work on Strange Paradise really sucked, yet he soared at Another World. Douglas Marland's The Doctors and Loving were tepid at best, yet his General Hospital was miraculous. Claire Labine was excellent on Where the Heart Is and Love of Life, but her stint at The Guiding Light was painful. Rick Edelstein was (IMHO) okay at The Doctors (in comparison to many other writers who worked on that series), but his HTSAM was wonderful. He was the one in charge during the memorable storyline about David Bachman's death.