Guiding Light discussion thread

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I was a fan who stuck with the show from the 70s all the way through to the end. I think long-time fans, and I am only speaking for myself and people I know who watched the show, continued to be loyal because of the main families. Yes the Bauers had changed, the Reardans had changed, the Spauldings had changed, the Lewises had changed-- but they were still represented on screen till the final episode and most of the actors, bar a few exceptions, were quite good.

 

I really loved the Esensten-Harmon Brown era (from 97 to 00) and I remember watching videotaped episodes when I got home from work. Then on Saturday I'd have an afternoon marathon and re-watch all 5 episodes back to back. So during that period and into the Labine and Gold eras, I watched each episode twice. Sometimes if I loved a scene I'd rewind it and watch it three or four times. There was one episode where Alan and Buzz had a brawl inside Company, with Frank pulling them off each other. I just thought the writing and acting was so great I saved that episode for a long time.

 

I also loved Vanessa shooting at Ross' brother Ben then lapsing into a coma. And how Carmen and her daughter Pilar were involved. Another highlight was Richard & Cassie's elaborate wedding. These were memorable storylines in my opinion and must-see episodes for me.

 

I didn't compare it to what I loved about GL in the 70s, 80s or early 90s. I guess because I knew the show could not be expected to stay the same. I did have problems with the Conboy-Weston era. I thought Weston misunderstood most of the characters. It surprised me when I found out she'd once been an actress on the show, in the 60s I think-- but she really didn't seem to get what the show was about or how it should be written. Then there was the Wheeler-Kreizman era, which I didn't mind at first since it seemed a step up from Conboy & Weston (or WesCon as the SoapNet message board posters used to call them). But when Wheeler switched to the new production model in early 2007 it was a real struggle to stay with it. I think I managed to keep watching, again out of loyalty-- and also because I knew the show wasn't going to last and I wanted to witness its last days.

 

From 1978 to 2009 I devoted over 30 years of my life to one show. That's an incredible thing when you think about it. Once when I was 11 (this would have been the summer of 1983), my family was vacationing in Florida. I remember at ten minutes before 2 p.m. I jumped out of the pool and told my grandmother "I need to go back to the room. My favorite show is coming on in ten minutes." She asked me which show, and I said Guiding Light. She'd listened to it back in the early 40s on radio when my grandfather was away in WWII. She said "is that show still on the air?" And I said yes.

 

After my grandmother died I would think of her when I still watched GL. To me the light was never a character, it was the town. Springfield was the place where people found the light. But I didn't over-read the symbolism of it, especially when one of the main sets was called The Beacon. It was more a philosophy and though the show went through different regimes like all soaps do, there was still a consistent tone to it, even when they tried more outlandish plots. I tuned in just like my grandmother had done decades earlier because it gave us something no other show ever gave us.

[Mitch]

Actually, as sad as it is to know this..Spaulding was funding the research, in a secret lab..that somehow everyone walkedinto all the time. This storyline made me turn on Josh, he did create a person to f*ck them, and because he couldn't be alone...pretty pervy and pathetic...I always saw Josh as a perve after that, which is too bad, Newman was the perfect soap leading man in his later years..handsome but he had a warmth and was really good with younger actors. It was the clone and screaming REEVVAAA..GRRRRRR>>.all the time that ruined him.

 

As for E & B..I found the show entertaining until the mob and San Crud ..unlike others, I think the Santos could have worked on the show, but as an outsider family with ties to the underworld...I would have had Carmen trying to cut ties to that world by trying to use the Bauers as entree to the Spauldings and Lewises but continually being rejected..setting up Carmen hating her daughter in law but needing her for social approval. There is no way in hell that a fairy tale kingdom worked on any soap (as for the "lavish wedding" it was kind of pathetic as GL had no budget for a royal wedding.) The only fun thing about San Crud was when Reva and Josh fly their to investigate various villagers are on the phone reporting..."Oh its HER...SHE's back!" with disdain...I think  E & B did well for what they were up against..Rauch, MADD and a different soap world.

[DRW50]

 

I thought San Cristobel was alright, for fairy tale fancy on a budget, for a year or two, especially with Edmund and Olivia still in the story. Once Richard and Cassie properly got together, they should have phased out of San Cristobel. Instead they recast her ex (after the first one had popped up a few times and mostly been memorable because he and Hart were the gayest thing I ever saw on GL) for some silliness with Edmund framing her for something in her past, or saying they weren't divorced, or whatever. 

 

I also enjoyed the mob stuff well enough until Ben Warren was killed. That's when Carmen became more and more irritating (especially with her overly clipped line readings) and Drew's hysteria over Ben was even more unwatchable.

[Vee]

Josh basically did create and raise a clone to fúck. I have no idea how Reva ever got over that.

 

I only initially tuned into GL to see the clone mess and later, Crystal Chappell who I'd loved on OLTL. It was just a debacle AFAIC.

[Darn]

And it's wild to me that after the debacle of the clone saga (™ Marvel) they had San Cristobel and THEN Reva jumping through time via a portrait of Olivia. It's absolute insanity to put her character through those high concept stories one after the other and then like someone else said give her realistic stories like cancer and a late in life baby. Other soap leads were given similar stories, Viki for example, but they were usually years apart. Sometimes decades. Reva was thrown into these nonsense stories one after the other.

 

How was that time travel story resolved anyway?

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

This is what I meant when I said loyal fans would stick with the show no matter what. Reva was expected to have high concept dramas. Just like we knew Ed would always perform surgery and Alan would always be scheming about the next business deal at Spaulding, Reva would always have some bigger than life drama. It became more pronounced after her return in 1995 under McTavish. We had Amish Reva, then clone Reva, then time traveler Reva, then mercy killer Reva, then psychic Reva, then menopause Reva, then cancer patient Reva, then miracle pregnancy Reva. A lot of her stories were things ripped from the headlines and then dramatized in grandiose fashion. We came to expect that with her. Zimmer managed to pull it off, mostly...any other actress, and all that would have been laughable.

[Darn]

She may have but the show never did. OLTL and Days have had similarly outlandish stories for their lead heroines and they...worked somehow, for the most part. The stories for Reva are almost universally panned.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I think your ideas about Carmen are good. She should have been trying to gain social acceptance and doing that through Michelle and Michelle's family. Her relationship with Michelle was always volatile, but her needing Michelle in that way, would have made things more tense and interesting. I always kind of saw Carmen as a dark/gothic version of Vanessa. That's why I loved the story with Ben Warren's death so much because it was a story that connected them. There was one episode where Carmen tried to tell Vanessa they were both alike, since they were both covering up their having visited Ben the night he was killed...and Vanessa said "I'm different from you." Instead of "I'm different than you." So that told me they were different but the same. Esensten & Harmon-Brown were good at putting double meanings into the dialogue.

Edited September 5, 2018 by JarrodMFiresofLove

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I think a story about a fairy tale kingdom works best if it's an exit story. Like if the plan was for someone like Cassie, after years of heartbreak, to finally get her happy ever after fairy tale ending. It could have slowly built to the engagement, a broken engagement, then a reconciliation then finally a marriage to Richard. And then we could have known she had this new life with her new husband on that island, phasing it out and writing her off the show. Of course she still could have been mentioned, and people still could have been shown going to visit her (off camera). But the way the writers after Esensten & Harmon-Brown did it, they kept the island a major setting on the show, but then had Richard lose his throne which was silly. It was entirely unbelievable that he and Cassie would spend their married life on her farm in Springfield U.S.A. The character of Richard really suffered after he lost his power. I think that's why they ultimately killed him off because they had written themselves into a corner. And the only way to go forward was to free Cassie from this marriage, by death, and make it so Cassie would always stay in Springfield. But if this had originally been Cassie's exit story then the whole fairy tale ending could have been preserved off-camera.

 

Another way out of this mess, which Lucky Gold tried, was to have San Christobel devastated by a natural disaster (he chose an earthquake). And that worked, but then why rebuild the island after that? The story was basically over at that point. Why did they still need to include Alonso and Will? It should have had a better resolution. Either with Cassie and Richard exiting the show and living in their off-screen paradise. Or with San Christobel decimated forever by a disaster and everyone rebuilding their lives back in Springfield. In that case, Richard could easily have died in the earthquake and that could have been how Cassie's fairy tale marriage ended and she went back to her former life of raising her kids on her farm again.

 

What ended up happening was Esensten & Harmon-Brown introduced everything then Labine and Gold continued things but had nowhere to go with it, so it just never really had the kind of resolution it should have had. They dragged it out then ended up killing off Richard in a Cedars hospital room, then turned it into a drama about the two sisters (since Reva had pulled the plug on Cassie's husband). If I recall correctly San Christobel might have still been mentioned, especially during the stuff with Edmond and Will at Cassie's farm, but the island was never shown again on camera.

[Mitch]

Actually, Reva pre resurrection was not expected to have high concept storylines..the big drama came out of the way Reva dealt with it, and yes, she was a diva but it was because Reva was so emotional and had heart and yes sexual...(Zimmer was sex on a stick when she first came to town...) under those big hair and shoulder pads was a woman who was part vixen, heroine, and yes, a big mess!  After resurrection they stuck Reva into high concept crap that could have starred anyone...Vanessa as a clone and Matt as Josh...Holly jumping through paintings...amnesiac Harley was a princess...before Reva's stories were only able to be told a certain way as Reva was in them.

 

I wish that Carmen was written gothic, but that was too subtle for Rauch.  I wanted the storyline (which they were headed too ) where Van takes over the Alex role of kicking Alan's ass at Spaulding...I would have killed Matt off and Van goes back to her cold steel. Carmen attempts to ingratiate herself with Van but no go.  Danny goes back to the mob as an undercover agent for Mike Bauer to end it...Chelle not knowing this leaves him but then discovers she is preggers. Bill offers to marry her and claim the kid to protect him from Danny..I would have made Bill gay and trying to cover it up from Billy and Van and himself. Van is so excited to have Mo's daughter as her dil that she goes overboard and they can't tell her. The only people who know would be Claire and Aunt Meta who would go along with the ruse to protect Chelle. Carmen suspects the truth and she and Van are at loggerheads all the time. Then Danny seeing Chelle married hooks up with that goofy Mae Mercy (I would have written her differently ) who is really Stacey Reardon undercover..

[victoria foxton]

This is way better than most of the stories from that era.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I don't see the value in bashing Rauch. Some of us liked him. But we can disagree about that and get along. We don't need to go off on a tangent and say Holly could have gone through paintings or Vanessa could have been cloned. We're talking about Reva and her high-concept storylines and how they were tailored for her. Primarily because it generated a lot of publicity to put Kim Zimmer front and center in something sensational and possibly controversial. If they had done another clone story later, probably people would be saying how great Reva's clone story was compared to the ripoff that came later.

 

In fact I don't think a show like GL should ever back away from trying something different. I think part of it was Reva felt played out and they wanted to do a Nu Reva, but instead of a twin or impostor, they decided to be a bit creative about it. Did it succeed? Not entirely but at least they tried and stretched the limits of the genre.

 

Now I do like your idea about Michelle marrying Bill. I do think that should have happened, sort of as a rebound from Danny, or in between one of Michelle's many marriages to Danny. In fact the whole thing about Michelle and Danny marrying all the time is the main gripe I have with the show from 2000 to 2007 (before the new production model becomes my main gripe). It felt too repetitive that they'd always split up, divorce, then reconcile and remarry. I think when Kreizman and Wheeler wrote them out in late 2005 they were on their fifth marriage, to each other! "Jeva" only married each other three times I think. And yet the much younger "Manny" were already on marriage #5. What's even more unrealistic is that if they had this terrible habit of divorce and remarriage, then logically, they should have had two more divorces and two more remarriages and been on marriage #7 when they reappeared in the summer of 2009. The show acted like while they were off-camera nothing happened to them, and the "Manny" we all knew and loved had constant drama wherever they went.

[Mitch]

You call that bashing??? Rauch was paint by the numbers soap..though sometimes it was entertaining..but he was basic..and he was unfortunately grafting his OLTL on GL with Reva being Vicki. And if I never see another pastel suit on a woman again...

 

Stretching the limits of the genre would be..a lot of things....Shayne is gay and its Josh who is supportive but Reva who is freaked.... or Marah is gay and Reva just doesnt get that...Shayne goes to Iraq and Reva becomes a anit-war protester while Josh supports the war..she goes through menopause and questions her attractiveness and sexuality....Reva struggles with her weight and they explore a middle aged woman who has had her worth based on her looks struggling to be recognized as a worthwhile being in a culture that worships youth...or Reva and Josh discover that they love each other but are toxic for each other and split up..for good...but stay friends (or I would have them having occassional sex behind their partners backs with no repercussions. ) That would have stretched the limits not jumping through paintings...(which has been done before on DS..at least going through time..and ATWT in the 80s with reincarnated characters effecting their current selves...)

 

Not bashing you either, just disagreeing...: )

[vetsoapfan]

 

Paul Rauch certainly decimated TGL the way he did all the other shows he worked on, and I doubt you are alone in being turned off for a long time, thanks to the garbage he foisted onto the show and the audience.

 

To me, Rauch and Phelps are two sides of the same coin: soap killers whose names I grew to dread seeing on-screen.

 

 

Right, once a show destroys the audience's suspension of disbelief with idiotic sci-fi nonsense, it's impossible to return to naturalistic storytelling, so the shows remain tainted long after the dumb shlock plots are over. 

 

I also agree that fans of erudite, adult drama would generally not feel enticed to stick around, watching their favorite soap go from Masterpiece Theatre to Beavis & Butthead. The only reason *I* continued watching was because I considered TGL to be my show, after following it for decades, and a tiny voice in the back of my mind kept telling me to hang in there because the show HAD to get better one day. Alas, it never did. It got worse and worse. The last several years were like watching a bloody train wreck play out in sloooooow motion.

 

 

There was no reason for viewers to believe, when she was FIRST created, or during her first decade on the show, that Reva was expected to have cartoonish sci-fi adventures like being cloned, running around as a mean-spirited ghost,  or jumping into paintings and travelling through time. The character was highly emotional and flamboyant, sure, but her initial stories were predicated on romance and family dynamics. Later, viewers learned to expect high-concept material being dumped on Reva, because we had to endure the ghost, the clone, the time traveller, etc., but expecting atrocious writing for the character and appreciating it are two separate things. Zimmer can be a good actress, when given good material and when her scenery chewing is reigned in, but most of her worst TGL plots did indeed come across and both laughable and painfully stupid, IMHO.

Edited September 5, 2018 by vetsoapfan

[Vee]

 

Paul Rauch had a long, storied and at times celebrated career. We criticize the lowlights of his resume because they were very bad. It's not about you. We did it long before you came along.

 

As for Reva, I fail to see how her '80s storylines translated into an obvious impulse to push her into ludicrous sci-fi storylines that were off-brand for the show - to say nothing of the relentless need to push her as an irresistible love object, which I never bought and thought was off-putting for the more earthy character. I love Kim Zimmer now, but I did not grow up with Reva the sex goddess of the 1980s and I didn't feel it remotely worked in the '90s or early 2000s. Reva as varnished royalty? No.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Vee