Hal spoke a bit about this. But now I won't remember the details (I did transcribe and save the interview... somewhere.) But for some reason Broderick was too busy to take over immediately after McTavish was gone--she certainly couldn't be a part of story meetings (maybe now it would be easier with Zoom :P though I guess they could have had her on a conference call) but she knew she'd be coming in in the Fall as so was already reading the scripts that he and the team were in charge with an was aware of story seeds being planted. Was Broderick maybe still contracted to GL? (I don't really know off hand when her work as one of the HW there started and ended just that it seemed to start around 91 when Nixon was back as official AMC HW.)
(Agnes Nixon WAS still constantly at story meetings too--apparently she was very excited by the whole gay stuff, which of course was a story theme she had been trying for years.) I THINK she may have still had the "executive head writer" credit she took when McTavish took over from her in 1992 too, but from what I heard when she wasn't HW she knew to not so much suggest story ideas but to try to massage the stories being told with suggestions about different perspectives to take with them, etc (he said he often would get 2am calls from her with a story detail she thought of.)
I mean as OTT as McTavish's work was starting to get, and no longer being the stuff FMB as EP wanted to produce (and ratings starting to slip) I think there's a reason that still the transition in Spring/Summer/Fall 1995 of AMC between McT, then just HC as interim HW and finally Broderick still for a day to day viewer comes off as pretty seamless (compared to other soaps and times when there's a HW change, especially when there's a period with no official HW--look at Loving in the early 90s, well Loving any time really) speaks to all of this.
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EricMontreal22 ·
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