Guiding Light Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

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[DRW50]

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[Mitch]

Sad to watch...now I of course, can notice Zaz speech and the the onset of that horrible disease...if only they had written this a Roger's "temp" exit...Alex and Alan have the goods on him for faking Amanda's paternity test and the will (dumb, but the whole thing was dumb) and Rog skips town and says goodbye to Holly and for her to look out for Blake and Amanda on the war path...but with a "Ill be back." eventually they could have made it a big mystery why Roger, who got his way out of bigger things, has disappeared off the face of the earth.

 

Other things, this is before E & B took over I think...its too bad GL threw off some good stuff to be the Josh/Reva hour..Rick and Abby are one of the few couples to be cute as hell without being annoying, its nice to see Nola..(lol at Brown doing some business with the pasta...I can't believe they didn have a closeup of Nola blatantly eavesdropping on the conversation.) and I think she could have worked in the capacity Lisa did on ATWT, former bad girl who helps the bad youth, while nosing into everyone's business...MG is being sexy as hell in this episode..she and Zas HAD it...and I actually always liked Poser's Amanda..yes, she was too young and too vampy then Cullen's dull as dishwater version but she was fun and Poser had a great start quailty to her. Nice to see Rusty not looking as douchey as he usually did and I forgot all about Annie and her crying...how long before the pregnancy and the baby thing , I thought it was in the Sping but this says April.

[Skylover]

 

 

Thank you. Am I right in thinking from reading online that not much from the 30s/40s lasted into the 50s/60s/70s/80s incarnation of the show?

 

I was intrigued to read that an actor called Sam Wanamaker was on the show, who is the father of a very famous UK actress called Zoe Wanamaker.

[victoria foxton]

https://t.co/eNy0Eue9JG   Remembering Guiding Light On the 82nd Anniversary of Its Debut!

[Skylover]

 

That's crazy.

 

What was Bert Bauer like as a character?

[All My Shadows]

For the most part, yes. When the Bauers became the central focus in 1948, a few odd characters from before still existed, but they mostly gave way to the Bauers and their acquaintances. When they moved to TV, all things pre-Bauer were gone.
 

Yikes, that article is hideous! I always laugh when people say the 80s was the best decade of any long-running soap that obviously had its highest levels of popularity way before the 80s.

[Skylover]

 

Thanks. I'm intrigued by this soap. I think it's amazing that it was going from 1937 to 2009. Such an incredibly long time. A complete travesty that they decided to cancel it. I really like the matriarch Bert from what I've seen. It does seem weird that they'd almost erase everything from existence pre-1948, but I suppose history and nostalgia weren't such prominent things for soaps in those days like they are now, I'm surprised they didn't eventually try and hark back to the past though.

 

How did GL change over the years @All My Shadows? And how does it compare to ATWT and Days?

[vetsoapfan]

 

I see that All My Shadows has already answered this, very well. :)

 

The television incarnation of the 1950s and onward felt like a completely separate entity from the radio version of the 1930s and 1940s, but the show was quite solid in its continuity and history from the 1950s to about 1983-4. Then, with the arrival of producer Gail Kobe and writer Pamela K. Long, the bottom fell out and most of what had made The Guiding Light feel like The Guiding Light for 30+ years was gutted. It was a very painful, unnecessary, and destructive transition. To me, in its final few decades, the show felt like it had debuted in the 1980s, with only a few bits of its history from before that time being acknowledged or woven into the fabric of the narrative. Ed Bauer, born on-screen in the 1950s, came and went, recast several times, but with revolving door of actors playing him and with writers not investing in his character, he became a minor, supporting player who no longer held a leading role in Springfield. We were very lucky to have Holly Norris and Roger Thorpe for so long, but the show ultimately failed those characters too. It took DECADES for TPTB to drive TGL into the grave, but they kept hacking away at the show until they succeeded. 

[vetsoapfan]

 

Claiming that the 1980s represented TGL at its best is like saying Life with Lucy was Lucille Ball's best-loved television series ever. Or that Trog was Joan Crawford's most lauded motion picture. Or that Manimal and Supertrain helped revitalize NBC and helped the network soar to the top of the ratings.

 

Um...no. Just no.

 

And what a dreadful article! OMG! I am always happy to acknowledge and celebrate this beloved, iconic soap, but the article did not do it justice. 

 

The writer needs to be schooled on how to use an apostrophe. I know this makes me sound anal, LOL, but I loooooooathe when people throw in apostrophes everywhere they type the letter S: "The Bauer's were an important family on the show...." or, "There were many day's when I was bored out of my mind." 

 

And you do not use an apostrophe to denote plural years within a decade, although almost everyone makes this error: 1980's, 1940's, 1990's...yikes. It should be: 1980s, 1940s, 1990s. UGH. Pluralization does not require an apostrophe. Nobody would, or should write, "I have three brother's and three sister's, and when we were kid's, we had to share bedroom's with each other."

 

Sorry, I had to vent!

 

Anyway, with the glorious decades that preceded the 1980s still fresh in my memory, I cannot agree that the 1980s (as a whole) saw the light shine its brightest.

[vetsoapfan]

 

No one loved TGL more than I did, and because it had been so consistent, well-written, and dedicated to using history for so long, the amputation of the earlier decades, which this show endured under Kobe and Long in 1983-4, was devastating to watch. The show changed from an adult, character-driven, complex drama with nuanced and familiar characters, to a cartoonish mess with low-brow, far-fetched campy stories. It not only trashed history, but foisted loud-mouthed and/or abrasive strangers onto us. It was not a pretty sight!

 

In the series' later years, Josh Lewis met a young minister with the family name Ruthledge, and remarked, "Your grandfather is a legend around these parts." This was supposed to harken back to the show's original guiding light from its radio days, Rev. John Ruthledge, but it was awkward and showed that the lazy writers had not done any homework or studied the Ruthledge family history. Rev. Ruthledge had only had a daughter, and after she married, her children's surnames would not have been Ruthledge. We might surmise that he had sired a son after he left the USA and gone to war, however, and that that son could have then sired a son of his own, leading to the existence of this Ruthledge grandchild. But Josh's comment about the original Rev. Ruthledge being a legend around Springfield was improbable. The character had lived in Five Points, not Springfield, and none of the characters on TGL at that time had ever met or been ministered to by Dr. Ruthledge, so Josh's comment was just bizarre. Had Reva already travelled back in time and been awed by meeting John Ruthledge, LOL?

 

During Mary Stuart's run on the show as Aunt Meta Bauer (the show had reintroduced the character of Meta after an absence of 23 years, but never addressed what had happened to her husband, Dr. Bruce Banning, who went unmentioned), she also referred to the Reverend John Ruthledge. During a Christmas toast, she said that he had been one of the greatest people to turn to in times of trouble, and she recited his signature poem:

 

There is a destiny that makes us brothers

None goes his way alone

All that we send into the lives of others

Comes back into our own

 

It was sweet and nostalgic and I loved it.

[Skylover]

Thanks @vetsoapfan.

 

 

Do you know what led to the decision to ultimately change the storyline for the TV version and distance itself from its roots? While keeping the same name etc? Did this not annoy people at the time? Probably too far back to know!

 

 

What was the best era of Guiding Light? Who are the best characters and what are the most renowned storylines? Sorry for all the questions. I imagine you're not old enough to know about the 50s era!

Edited January 27, 2019 by Edward Skylover

[vetsoapfan]

 

The Bauer family was first introduced in 1948, and co-existed with other characters of the day. Some very popular radio-era characters left the series because the actors chose to quit, and one (Rose Kransky) was spun off into her own series. I think that as the Bauer family and their stories grew in popularity, some other characters faded into the background because the show was only 15 minutes long at the time, and there was limited room to showcase a multitude of characters. But not only the Bauers made the transition from the radio version to the TV incarnation. Dr. Paul Keeler, the Roberts family (Joe, Kathy, and Joey), the Grants (Dick and Laura), Nurse Janet Johnson, etc., also appeared on both formats. Various characters came and went over a period of years, and the writing was great, so it was not a sudden or unpleasant shock watching the Bauers GRADUALLY became the headliners. I cannot say the same about the 1983-4 season, when 2/3 of the existing characters were suddenly slaughtered, one after the other, while the screaming Shaynes and the bellowing Lewises (and a horde of other newbies) were instantaneously rammed down our throats.

 

To me personally, TGL was at its best from 1950 to 1982. (It perked up again in 1988-9 under the pen of Pamela Long (whose writing had vastly improved over her first stint on the show), and then had some very good years under writer Nancy Curlee and her associates.

 

The show basically limped along from 1994 to 2002, with some years being slightly more tolerable than others. Its last period of quality writing was under Millie Taggart and Carolyn Culliton from 2002 to 2003. After they left, TGL's writing fell into in the toilet and remained there until its cancellation in 2009. The el-cheapo Peapack era production model only hastened its demise. 

 

Most memorable storylines? There are many!

 

--Meta Bauer White's murder trial

--Bill and Bert Bauer's ongoing marital woes

--The Kathy Roberts saga

--The Robin Lang/Paul Fletcher romance and marriage (and her problems with his son)

--The Roger/Holly Thorpe nightmare (the marriage, the rape, the kidnapping, his return from the dead)

--The Mike/Leslie/Ed Bauer triangle

--Maureen Bauer's death (riveting episodes but ultimately a short-sighted, damaging decision)

 

Viewers were blessed to have had so many brilliant writers working their magic on this show: Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon, Robert Soderberg and Edith Somner, the Dobsons, Douglas Marland, Pat Falken Smith (whose stint was disappointingly cut short), Nancy Curlee. Those were the days.

 

 

Edited January 27, 2019 by vetsoapfan

[Skylover]

Thanks @vetsoapfan! Sorry one last question. Are there any episode guides with air dates etc? I was listening to some old radio episodes but couldn't find any episode guides online.

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Edited January 27, 2019 by Edward Skylover

[vetsoapfan]

 

I have never seen an episode guide for TGL. Only a few soaps (like dark Shadows) have full guides like that readily available. You can, however, listen to a long string of radio eps from 1950 (which I have linked in an earlier post, a few pages ago) which has the air-dates and brief synopses included. And many of the avail;able episodes on youtube have synopses and airdates included too.