Another World Discussion Thread

[Khan]

You know, maybe I wasn't watching those scant, few clips of Steve and Rachel that were available for awhile on YT as closely as I should have, because, to me, Jacquie just seemed so DULL.

[DRW50]

It's the scenes of Rachel and Alice talking, after Rachel's near-death experience. The whole thing with Rachel seeing Steve and Janice is very cheesy (albeit satisfying), but the scenes where Rachel talks to Alice about Sally, and mourning, and then says Steve was at peace, and "I thought you'd want to know," with that teardrop in her voice, and Alice, equally moved, says something like, "I did,"...that scene truly got to me. Then they say they can see the sun coming up. It's what I watched soap operas for.

[Paul Raven]

7th Anniversary photo> L-R Phil Sterling,Hugh Marlowe,Virginia Dwyer,Nancy Wickwire,Michael Ryan and Lyle Hill (producer)

Edited April 7, 2012 by Paul Raven

[DRW50]

I forgot Philip Sterling was on the show.

[Paul Raven]

NBC press release highlighting Eric Roberts as Ted Bancroft and Pamela Brook as Corinne Seton

[DRW50]

When I've seen photos of her she seems like very odd casting - I guess she didn't last on the show very long. She reminds me of Julie Goodyear.

[Khan]

I guess someone forgot to tell Pamela that her wig was on backwards.

[AMCHistory]

Eric Roberts was so gorgeous.

[teplin]

But such a horrible actor ... at least in his AW days.

[AMCHistory]

Depending on who you ask, this assertion may still be true.

[SFK]

I thought he was awesome in Pope of Greenwich Village and Star 80.

[DRW50]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ukGD7wr2Uo

[DRW50]

It's great to see Marcia McCabe again. She's great in that clip.

Robin Christopher seems so bland to me in this role. I really think that was the show's biggest issue at this time.

Here's another episode, thanks to AddieCate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab06iaK6XGo

[DRW50]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=616cprjN9no

[DeliaIrisFan]

Did viewers at the time really derive that kind of comfort from Mary Matthews, though? It's hard to say, because so few clips exist. I know the ratings were abysmal when AW premiered, but then Lipton downplayed the Matthewses which didn't work out at all either. When Nixon came in, did she focus that heavily on the Matthews family as a unit, or just on the younger members of the family and their romantic exploits? Was the comfort that Alice was able to take from her parents when Rachel was making her life hell really a huge draw for viewers at the time?

This is probably blasphemy, but I sometimes think the real reason NBC and/or P&G named the show "Another World" - lofty poems about "we do not live in this world alone" aside - was because ATWT was such a phenomenon and advertisers at the time would have been salivating at the chance to buy ad time during "another World," (aka a clone of ATWT). Weren't the Matthewses extremely reminiscent of the Hugheses? Although Lipton didn't dare do anything as radical as killing off any major Matthewses, and the show eventually thrived during Agnes Nixon's Alice/Steve, Bill/Missy era, my sense was that viewers weren't as invested in that family's tentpoles as they were in their counterparts on the CBS Phillips shows, or even DAYS.

Whereas, for better or worse, I think that under Lemay, the Another World/another World title took on a more interesting, albeit darker, meaning: as in, it became a bold declaration that this show was very different than what was airing opposite it on CBS at the time. I remember when ATWT was going off the air, someone posted that Reid getting killed off was something Irna Phillips might have done - because he wasn't from the core family and he was expendable, if his dying meant a resolution for the Hughes family that would lead to them having a happy ending. I'm not sure I completely agree that the idea for that particular story, let alone the execution, was true to Irna's legacy, but I think that was a really interesting take on what classic ATWT was about...and what post-Lemay AW was often not about. In its last 25 years, AW tended to show the outsiders triumphing and finding their own families/support networks and actually evolving into the good people that they might not have been when they were first introduced. You could say that AW was more realist, in a sense, because it showed that sometimes, even good parents died before their time and left a void that couldn't be filled, and many people didn't much like their birth families. But it still had an element of escapism in its own right...in a lot of ways, I'd have rather been friends with Cass and Felicia and Wallingford than a blood relative of the Matthewses or even the Bauers or Hugheses.

Unfortunately, lesser writers over the years had an even harder time identifying and staying true to that thread of AW's history than they did with the more traditional shows, where the obvious core families were more in tact. I do think AW might have been better if, over the years, the tensions of Rachel evolving into the matriarch by default had been played up - with Aunt Liz being more of a presence, subtly taking umbrage with Rachel's place in Bay City society (while currying favor with her so she herself would still get invites to the parties), and with the next generation(s) of outsiders being more consistently posited as kindred spirits for Rachel. (I loved that one, rare scene in the early '90s when Rachel was planning a "tasteful" party to welcome Paulina into the family and Carmen Duncan's Iris snapped, "What does Rachel Davis know about taste?" and proceeded to have a fit because Rachel was siding with Paulina over her because they were both climbers from the wrong side of the tracks.) Of course, racial diversity would have also attracted more people who didn't necessarily identify with the Matthews family, and been a good thing for the show in general.

Also, I suspect Lemay/Rauch didn't get to go as far as they wanted with phasing out the Matthews family. Did they really want to keep Alice around played by a new actress, or did NBC/P&G balk at writing out Alice at the same time as Steve and Mary and they came to a compromise? Was there anyone on the inside who's said publicly in the past 40 years that they thought the Alice recast was an improvement over Courtney? From what little I saw, she seemed like even more of a generic, cookie-cutter soap ingenue than JC. At very least, I would have thought they would have hired some celebrated avant garde character actress of the stage at the time to play Alice as more and more of a supporting character, watching - a bit bitterly - from the sidelines as her archrival who had treated her so badly seemingly got everything she wanted while Alice had to rebuild her life as a young widow. (Or at least, I could see Lemay wanting that. Rauch would have probably wanted a more generic blonde bimbo with cleavage.)

I do have to say that I doubt, even if the Matthewses had survived the mid-'70s, that their presence would have changed what happened to AW when AMC and GH surpassed the P&G stable. If ATWT could be dethroned so badly with Nancy Hughes, et al still around, then would AW have fared any better imitating that? Of course, anything could have been possible with strong writing and acting. And DAYS came on the scene after AW premiered and the Hortons certainly followed the formula of the Irna Phillips core family, and that family probably had a lot to do with stabilizing the show during a lot of radical changes over the years.