5 hours ago, DRW50 said:

With that said, I think they may have also felt that similar to what they did with the Hughes on ATWT around the same period, that newer, younger viewers didn't want to see the old guard. They wanted hot half-naked bodies in glamorous locations.

Which is odd. Just as GL was going in this direction, ATWT was rebuilding and recentering the show around the Hughes. Its weird that PG would just let both shows flip flop when ATWT had higher ratings with a strong core they would naturally want GL the sister show to follow that?

16 minutes ago, DeeVee said:

Now I'm intrigued. Do you know which character that was? I'm trying to guess but I can't figure it out.

 

I have no idea.

My point is that life is not a soap opera. And it makes more sense pragmatically to reassign a story. The logic that a writer would think it somehow cathartic to project their frustrations onto a character’s exit all seems to come from a story that’s more legend than fact. The “fell up the stairs” tale about Irna Phillips was never actually written or filmed.  It circulated as a bit of inside-industry folklore to describe her temperament, not her plotting.

In reality, there’s no evidence anyone ever died that way on As the World Turns or any of her shows. It’s a metaphor that endured because it feels true about the kind of power she wielded, but it’s not literal. So, while it’s a great piece of soap history gossip, it’s not how professional writing decisions actually work.

So in 2025 to persist in thinking that exits are penned out of spite feels as fictional as believing the earth is flat, or men can be changed by love alone.

 

Edited October 9Oct 9 by j swift

10 minutes ago, j swift said:

So in 2025 to persist in thinking that exits are penned out of spite feels as fictional as believing the earth is flat, or men can be changed by love alone.

Just this year Megan McTavish's memoir, where she talked about how much she enjoyed killing off a character due to her dislike of the actor, was a topic of discussion on here. It may not be common, but it does happen.

3 minutes ago, DRW50 said:

Just this year Megan McTavish's memoir, where she talked about how much she enjoyed killing off a character due to her dislike of the actor, was a topic of discussion on here. It may not be common, but it does happen.

Again, those kinds of anecdotes definitely get attention. But I also think we have to separate memoir storytelling from actual production mechanics. Soap writing, especially at the network level, is a multi-layered process. No single person, even a head writer, can unilaterally decide to kill off a character without buy-in from producers, network execs, and often casting and scheduling teams.

I trust you, @DRW50, to recognize the difference between a juicy behind-the-scenes quote and how decisions actually get made. Writers can pitch ideas, even emotionally charged ones, but they still go through a whole system of approvals and rewrites. So while personal bias might influence a pitch, it’s rarely the sole driver of what ends up on screen.

 

Literally half of Megan's memoir is about how she killed people off due to spite.

And, I think it is silly to quote that as the complete truth, when you know better.

When a terrible actor says that they were fired for being too cute, do you believe them?  

Edited October 9Oct 9 by j swift

5 minutes ago, j swift said:

And, I think it is silly to quote that as the complete truth, when you know better.

When a terrible actor says that they were fired for being too cute, do you believe them?  

I get what you're saying, but the specific deaths she spoke about were written in ways that do seem spiteful (and Cady McClain may have implied as much).

Bringing this back to GL, McTavish also said she did this to Nadine.

Anyway, I will stop now as this wasn't even my post to reply to in the first place so I shouldn't be talking all over the place.

Your problem is that this is a thesis in search of background. You are putting forward the idea that many of the stories of spiteful firings are actually much more nuanced decisions re: BTS mechanics, money, etc. The latter is certainly true for many firings and hirings on daytime, and it's likely that some of the stories based around personal beef are untrue. But there's also a wealth of stories in soaps - from writers, from actors, from various people who would know, not all of them purely self-serving - about this stuff just coming down to personality conflicts or who rubbed the wrong exec or writer or whoever the wrong way, and yes, spite. Which, let's face it, happens all the time historically in daytime. And not just daytime.

Both of these motives and outcomes coexist in this industry. Acting like we're all too provincial and gullible to see the truth is ignoring a mountain of other evidence. And the stories about Irna didn't start with the old story of falling up the stairs, either.

I just want to reiterate that I trust both @DRW50 and @Vee to apply their usual sharp critical thinking when it comes to separating hyperbole from fact. If we backward-engineer a narrative—like “McTavish hated an actress, so she wrote a violent pier death”—that doesn’t automatically make it true.

• It assumes the actress somehow knew the writer’s intent and was emotionally wounded by the exit.  
• It assumes producers were willing to humiliate an actress just to satisfy a writer’s grudge.  
• It assumes the entire production team shared the opposite opinion of the character as the audience did.

None of that really reflects how these shows are made, or how people work. What we’re reacting to is a single person’s account, shaped by hindsight and personal emotion after leaving a job. That’s not a reliable source—and I’d expect both of you to question it, as you often do.

Yet, as we interact for now and forever, you should know that anytime I read a tale about actors being fired for spite, I will think that is fanciful.  Just as anytime I disagree with Vee he feels the need to generalize my concerns to the entire population soap fans. Just setting the ground rules.

 

 

Edited October 10Oct 10 by j swift

9 minutes ago, j swift said:

I just want to reiterate that I trust both @DRW50 and @Vee to apply their usual sharp critical thinking when it comes to separating hyperbole from fact. If we backward-engineer a narrative—like “McTavish hated an actress, so she wrote a violent pier death”—that doesn’t automatically make it true.

I'm perfectly capable of applying critical thinking without noted encouragement. I'm not reverse-engineering (that's the term you're looking for here) anything. I'm quoting Megan's own unpublished memoir. I can pull it up verbatim if you like.

Now you can say 'well, McTavish is lying/exaggerating' if you wish. And that's fine. It may even theoretically be true. But as I said in my above post, that single instance wouldn't account for the many, many other cases of stories like these in the industry - and they're not just being pushed by unemployed actors or former HWs with personality disorders.

There are many firings that are nuanced BTS decisions involving either personal enmity, purely professional business calculations or some mix of both. And then there are some that are, yes, purely arbitrary and based on spite. All we are saying is that it's not an either/or binary. As ever, you are not the first person on this forum whose keen intellect has seized on this nuanced concept.

Edited October 10Oct 10 by Vee

Again, life is not a soap opera, we can disagree on what I think is silly, but that doesn't change the fact I (and five others from my DMs) think the idea is foolish.  It doesn't imply anything about anyone's intellect who disagrees, nor am I going to comment on whether Vee has served me burnt champagne (again).

 

Edited October 10Oct 10 by j swift

It is possible that McTavish is taking credit for a firing she had nothing to do with. At the time Jean Carol was not happy with her storyline, she had been on the backburner for 18 months. And she missed LA. Being backburner that long, I think the show felt there was nowhere to go with the character. 

While it was a mistake to kill off Nadine, I don't think it was McTavish who fired Jean Carol. Her leaving was a long time coming, and I think it was the higher-ups that decided to write out the character. 

McTavish’s run at Guiding Light was short and came in the middle of the Brent Lawrence arc, a storyline that was already developing before she took over. Nadine’s death fit the structure of that villain arc—it was not arbitrary, and it wasn’t about the actress. If people think the scene was too violent, that’s a question of how it was directed and produced, not something the head writer controlled line by line.

Personally, I wouldn't blame Elvera if she was disappointed in the way the story of Hope's alcoholism developed. Much like Vanessa's pill addiction, it seemed to blow up out of nowhere and immediately result in her becoming a falling-down drunk. 

Soaplovers said:

"and I have a feeling that had Hope not been written off, Alexandra would have been an ally of Hope considering the fact that she blamed Alan for her losing her own child"

What a fantastic thought!  Not only for the obvious friction via Hope/Alan/Alex/Mike, but also, what about Alan-Michael in all that?  Hope gets custody, slaps a restraining order on Alan via Mike.  And Alex approves, provided she gets visitation access to A-M.  Or, conversely, perhaps Hope and Mike ban all contact between the Spauldings (including Alex) and A-M.  Holy bonanza!

I'd still have Amanda (she and Hope were friends) marry Ed Bauer a decade later.