Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[Contessa Donatella]

Okay. To be clear, I didn't mean to jump down your throat.

[P.J.]

What a stupid idea. It's one thing to reboot Star Trek, etc, that are years removed from the original series. How would you expect viewers to just "forget" the history. *sigh*

[Mona Kane Croft]

Okay, I appreciate that clarification. So that more or less goes along with my earlier post.  But I do believe Zimmer was either incorrect or exaggerating when she used the term "everything that came before would have been erased."  I do not believe it was Wheeler's intent to literally erase the history of the show, or recast the actors as different characters.  She was just hoping to promote the new production model as a new version of GL. To some degree she did that, and she did attract a good deal of media attention.  Unfortunately that media attention did not result in higher ratings.    

[Vee]

I don't think she was exaggerating. She was very explicit about those details in the book, and that Wheeler had to be talked round about it.

[chrisml]

Others on the cast have pretty much confirmed Zimmer's accounts, and they all seem to have blamed Wheeler for the show's cancellation. I would have thought they would have blamed P&G and their decisions or lack of decisions as the case may be. I still think it's hilarious that the one part of her book that had to be verified was that Wheeler was constantly crying on set. 

In looking for information about Zimmer and Wheeler, I came across information about Soap Opera Weekly and a letter to the editor about GL and the fallout from Maureen's death. It once again belies JFP's assertion that she did not know that people were outraged by her decision to kill off Maureen:

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From the April 5, 1954 edition of Life Magazine: 

[Alan]

LOL! I had the same thought watching those episodes. All these women throwing themselves at Dr. Werner when Don Stewart's Mike is right there!?

[Khan]

At the risk of sounding crass, Joe Werner must've had what Tamar Braxton would call a "dingaling of gold."

Ellen Wheeler's idea for a "reset" might've sounded far-fetched.  In a way, though, it also might've been the best way to handle all the changes that had come in the wake of moving to Peapack.

[Alan]

I went to my kindle on found the relevant excerpts. I also included KZ's hilarious description of the "find your light open" which I refer to as the "teletubbies open".

 

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So in summary, Wheeler wanted to rebrand the show as the "New Guiding Light" AND renumber the episodes AND wipe the show's history.

Maybe Wheeler got the idea for renumbering the show's episodes from GL's collaboration with Marvel, since comic books will often renumber their issues when they reboot, especially DC Comics. Tellingly, even after rebooting a comic, the publishers usually end up going back to the established character history that fans expect. Around this time Marvel enraged fans by erasing Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane. Maybe Wheeler took all the wrong lessons from the comics?

KZ's take on Wheeler is WITHERING. Wheeler is always crying and seems to be totally in over her head. Trying to erase GL's past hints at a streak of narcissism too.

 

[kalbir]

 

It's unfortunate that so little of the Potter/Dobsons era has surfaced. I've accepted we'll probably never see 1976-1978.

All in all, the two bright spots in GL's final 35 years would be 1976-1982 Potter/Dobsons/Marland and 1989-1991 Calhoun/Long/Curlee.

 

[Contessa Donatella]

One thing Kim did not reveal is that she also spent a fair amount of time most days in tears. Also she presents a clearly biased view of Wheeler, who as a woman was not eligible for KZ's admiration. That was reserved for males. She preferred them as bosses. 1st example Kim's high opinion of Pail Rauch.

[prefab1]

Right!? Mike is looking like a snack, while also being a good listener (which is equally sexy in its way). 

The other thing that strikes me as really stupid about this storyline is that it ends up killing off two of the only long-term characters who might organically cause conflict. You want to keep at least some schemers and your psychologically unbalanced characters on the canvas. And if I'm not mistaken, they killed Charlotte off in August 1973 and Kit in February 1974, making these both sweeps stunts. And it reminds me of the sweeps stunts General Hospital did in the 2000s, where they got some momentary thrills from killing off important characters, but then were left with long-term holes on the canvas they couldn't repair. 

[Paul Raven]

The Soderbergs time as headwriters in the early 70's seems fairly well received. They introduced the Norris family. They were switched over to ATWT in late 73 and GL seemed to suffer after that until the Dobsons arrived.

[Vee]

It is wild that they made up Tony Call to look old and staid when he was a freshfaced young officer on Star Trek not too many years prior. And of course he was charismatic and suave on OLTL almost a decade later.

Ironically, while the main line Spidey books still sell fairly well (for the current market) due to brand recognition and the MCU, allowing Marvel editorial to keep circling the wagons against the marriage they undid (though they allegedly have to keep rehiring only old writers who were involved when that choice was made, as apparently no new creatives want to abide by it), it's now another Spidey book that is currently outselling all of them - Ultimate Spider-Man, set in another universe, written by an A-list creator. Its premise: Peter Parker is thirtysomething and happily married to Mary Jane with two kids.

But back to GL -

In fairness, Zimmer makes it clear she was no picnic to work with at that time herself and takes some pains to try to give Wheeler the benefit of the doubt in the text re: the pressures she was under with the network and the parent company. I think Ellen Wheeler is a talented actress, and that she meant well. But the impression you still get - not just from that book but from virtually every anecdote from the cast/crew and every media appearance Wheeler did in that period - was that she was unstable and totally unfit for the job.

I still remember Maureen Garrett's absolutely scathing remarks about her brief appearance in the last week. She was horrified by the conditions.

[DRW50]

Charlotte had been scheming for about 5-6 years up to that point. They may have felt there was nothing left for her, given that she had no long-term love interest and no child. Melinda O'Fee also seems limited as a presence to me. 

I agree that they caused conflict, but I think the mistake was not bringing in anyone else who could cause believable conflict. 

Don Stewart was a very handsome man, but I've always found Mike a little dreary. As others have said, I'd probably go with Mart Hulswit's Ed of the guys in that era. 

I had the same thought about comics. It's even worse in comics.

Given Kim's hostility toward Pam Long and alleged feuds with a number of her female co-stars, it's difficult for me to have full weight in her opinion. 

I also rolled my eyes a bit when she was talking about all the new actors who were just happy to have new apartments and didn't understand the history of the show, given her also coming into GL and being thrust into the central role in a way that helped throw away much of the show's history. Much more than any new hires did in Kim's last years at GL.

The irony is for all her disdain for Wheeler, Wheeler was probably the only producer in Kim's second run who gave her material that tapped into her best as an actress.

I wish I knew what others said about this whole idea of wiping out all history. It's a crazy idea and would have been doomed to failure, but then, GL was ending anyway, no matter what. It could never be as narcissistic to me as the likes of JFP who made horrible decisions, hired all her friends, then spent decades going "lil ol me?" to all her soap journo pals. I wouldn't have seen a complete clean slate as an atrocity any more than I saw Dark Shadows choosing to end on 1841 Parallel Time as an atrocity. Still, I don't know just how far the plans would have gone.

The Soap Opera Weekly letter reminds me of how intelligent many of their letters were, and the good quality of the magazine up to the mid '90s. I also agree that Maureen's death had no real followthrough or purpose, which was the biggest failure. 

Thanks for the photo @chrisml

Edited February 15 by DRW50

[Vee]

That may be true, but I think ZImmer is right about what she says in the book: I do feel some of the material in the Wheeler/Kreizman was intended to demean her or run down Reva, and put her in her place (and I was not exactly a Reva fan going in, lol). But for me it did the opposite. The worse she looked and the more overweight she was (and not in a good place emotionally or physically by her own admission), the rawer and more spellbinding her performances became. Many of us have made the comparison to late 2000s Reva and the British soap divas. The more minimalist the storylines and frankly also the scripts got, the more naturalistic a lot of her interplay with others became. A lot of scenes felt at least 50% improvised in Peapack. Kim, Jordan Clarke, Robert Newman, etc. could sell it. Much of the rest of that era's cast could not.

I find the incredibly razor-sharp, arrogant Robert Gentry Ed in the '60s eps very compelling, but so different from Peter Simon's or Hulswit's, both of whom I liked (especially Simon, but I'm biased). It was wild and very bizarre seeing Gentry return in the Rauch(?) era where they were trying to put him over as the same family man Ed.

Don Stewart - I've said it before, I'll say it again, he's good on GL but I will never get over his starring role as the skeezy, barechested middle-aged circus lothario with a talking chimp in the modern Mystery Science Theater 3000 classic "Carnival Magic" (now featured in Season 11 on Netflix). I think that was made right around the time Marland came in.

I commented on the comics a bit upthread.

Edited February 15 by Vee