Search For Tomorrow Discussion Thread

[VanessaReardon]

Joanna Lee was great for SFT and she wanted to do more than the SFT budget allowed so she left, of her own accord. 

[Paul Raven]

Another report on the infamous live episode.

 

Live for a day

It looked like a real live soap opera and that's because it was. There was Search For Tomorrow, the granddaddy of daytime TV theatrics, searching not the fictional streets of Henderson but the Big Apple sidewalks for a taped segment, reported stolen from the production's editing room over the July 22 weekend. There were Executive Producer Joanne Lee and crew charging ahead anyhow, with plans to replace the lost segment by going live last Thursday afternoon.

 

And then just before the last fadeout around 1 p.m., Aug. 4, there was the press in attendance at Reeves Teletape's upper East Side studio for the live media event. You get the drift. This was no ordinary week for the 32-yearold series. We suspect that there are a few people in the broadcast community who think the theft brought more fortune than misfortune for Search. And there are others who suspect that the whole thing was just a publicity stunt.

 

If ever there was a time for this veteran series to be injected with a little hype, last week was not bad timing. For the first few weeks of the third quarter, Search came up last in its period, losing out to Ryan's Hope and The Young and The Restless. For the week of 7/ 25- 7/31 Search posted an anemic 3.4 rating and 12 share. One live episode won't make those numbers go away. But at least for a week, we had more to say about the soap opera than "did John tell Mary?. . "

[RavenWhitney]

Please register in order to view this content

[Paul Raven]

Great pic, thanks for posting.

 

Sad to think that a short while later Melba would be gone.

 

Ellis/Hunt were around daytime for many years and were quite successful on a number of shows, yet never seem to get much recognition or credit.

Edited March 29, 2020 by Paul Raven

[victoria foxton]

A bunch of episodes have surfaced.  

Please register in order to view this content

 

[DRW50]

Please register in order to view this content

 

[Paul Raven]

Carl Low (Dr Bob Rogers from  the mid 60's and till the end of the 70's) lamented to SOD in 1980 that he wished SFT would write him out rather than use him occasionally as he wanted to land another soap gig but felt he was too identified with his Search role.

[OzFrog]

Those of you wondering what Lisa Peluso is doing nowadays...

 

Please register in order to view this content

 

[DRW50]

These look 'new' to me for YT? Are they? I don't remember ever seeing Travis' last moments. @amybrickwallace

 

Please register in order to view this content

 

Edited April 15, 2020 by DRW50

[victoria foxton]

Oh wow! what an awesome find. This looks new to me. I'm so glad so much SFT has been popping up. For a soap on it's last legs. I find 1983 -85 to be pretty good.

[OzFrog]

We’ve been talking about Morgan Fairchild on the Loving/City thread, and this scene of her from SFT was mentioned. There was also a mention of a scene where she apparently crashes through a glass door (?)...

 

Please register in order to view this content

 

[BetterForgotten]

I’d so love to see more of Jennifer’s descent into madness. There is a real authentic quality to Morgan’s performances in the SFT clips available, and it’s  not overly consumed by camp or glamor like her other roles.

[Khan]

 

Yeah, that was the beginning of the end for Jennifer Pace's sanity.  I wasn't even born when the scene in question happened, but, from what I've gathered, Jennifer and her then-husband, Scott Phillips, were arguing when she fell backward into the glass door.  (The whole sequence was done in slow-motion, right, @vetsoapfan?).

 

Jennifer survived the fall; however, her face was disfigured for a time.  Suffering from low self-esteem, Jennifer had an affair with John Wyatt, who was on the outs with wife Eunice.  I'm not sure about the rest, but...at some point, when John tried to end the affair, Jennifer attempted suicide with an overdose of pills; again, she survived, but was left with severe brain damage that induced the psychosis you see depicted in the above clip (hearing John's voice, convincing her that he still loved her and wanted her to kill Eunice, etc.); Jennifer (with help from her "friend," Stephanie, Jo's nemesis, who would later fall in love with and marry John herself -- but that's another story) concocted some story about a serial rapist to keep John from leaving her; and when that no longer worked, she decided (with "John"'s coaxing) to finish off Eunice, once and for all.

 

For awhile, John was accused of plotting Eunice's murder with Jennifer.  However, he was eventually cleared of all charges, and Jennifer was deemed criminally insane, shipped off to a mental institution, never to be seen or heard from again.

[DRW50]

I've wondered how viewers at the time felt about this saga. SFT had never been immune to tragedy (Jo's various husbands, and of course, poor Marge), but this was the first highly sensationalized death, especially of a core character, wasn't it? I think there was a guy killed off during a writers' strike a few years earlier but nothing is available of those moments. 

[Paul Raven]

I think that was Doug Martin, another of Eunice's husbands.

 

I wonder how Mary Stuart felt about the changes.

Her last husband had been killed off, her daughter written out and her sister murdered.

Jo was losing her place on the canvas and it was only going to get worse...