Guiding Light discussion thread

[Mitch64]

But the sad thing is that should have all been done before.....Ed and Lillian should have had a discussion on Mo's death, their responsibility, their guilt and their grief, and that bad mojo hanging over GL might have lifted a bit...also, Alan used up  his usefullness years ago and was nothing more then an ineffective mustache twirling grump.  He should have died at least 5 years before (finding out Phillip and Liv were getting it on and he croaks would cause angst for the former golden boy now patriarch...)  Hell, when they had Buzzard buy Company Nola should have been there to say goodbye to the place (and give her usual sass..."It looked better when we had it," ...indeed...) Maybe with some small touches of care..the last years woudlnt seem so..BAD!

This alone was a testament to her bungling...but keeping Cole on and continuing to push him as the answer to every women in SF's dream...(and he cost a pretty penny for some reason) pushing the Coopers as the wholesome core family. I don't blame the budget on her, but the material I do.

This was the problem with their thinking, Brad Freaking Cole is too hot  a property to let go but not the patriarch?

Edited December 20, 2024 by Mitch64

[Contessa Donatella]

I suppose it's human nature to take for granted those who you should really treasure! Jerry was one who should have been the prize in the crown. Instead he was taken for granted. They thought good ole Jer he will be with us to the very end. What a shock! When he up & left. Served them right for being stupid. Unforutnately, that meant the fans paid the ultimate price.

Edited December 20, 2024 by Contessa Donatella
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[Reverend Ruthledge]

These faux Bauers never made sense to me. I think it was just the tone deafness and stupidity of the writers and producers at the time. They were probably hearing the fans say they want more Bauers so they just added a bunch of characters with the last name "Bauer" when the audience wanted the old characters back. "Look, we DID bring on more Bauers and people still weren't satisfied". LOL. 

[DRW50]

Weren't there claims someone at P&G was the big Cole fan?

They did finally write him out in the last year, but too little, too late.

[vetsoapfan]

The show was drowning in missed opportunities and incoherent decisions for a long time.

I won't say that none of TPTB in the last 15 years of TGL's existence cared about it; maybe some of them did. Unfortunately, wanting to do a good job does not equate to actually being able to do so. Having the talent, the perception, and a solid understanding of the soap genre were not in evidence among the show-runners, and that was painfully obvious on screen.

Yes, little bits and pieces here and there worked, but it was all too little, too late.

The irrational obsession with The Santos mob, San Cristocrap, Buzzard, and Reva's endless sci-fi/fantasy drivel had soiled Springfield through various regimes, and Wheeler didn't make sufficient changes to rebuild the show effectively. And ITA: the miniscule budget was not her fault. The resulting cheap and tacky look of TGL, thanks to the dearth of funds, was not her fault. But the often wretched material we witnessed during her tenure was at least her responsibility.

[Contessa Donatella]

I know that Wheeler did care about the show. Personally I did appreciate the writing during at least part of her time, although even the storylines that I loved, I had criticisms of. I thought that Otalia was a remarkable story, well-told, for the most part, although they didn't take it to the point that they should have. I don't know if that was P&G or at the show level. Of course, part of the problem with the story was complicated by Jessica Leccia's RL pregnancy & childbirth. That really caused a challenge with the timing of the story. 

And, even though Wheeler cared, and meant well, and I agree that there's no way her woeful budget was her doing, her lack of experience was another impediment, a rather large one. She, of course, was not hardly the only PTB that P&G put in place without them being as experienced as they needed to be. Ultimately, though, the fans & the show suffered because of P&G's management decisions. 

[Mitch64]

I thought he was there to the end, but maybe he was just like a fart that wouldn't dissapate and he kept stinking up the place. Having Reva, marry a guy who looked like her exkindahusband, who screwed both her sister and her daughter, and who was a rapist...was really OTT. Whatever you say about the Reva character, her being molested by Preacher, or whatever his name was..was a big thing about the character (and some of Zimmer's best underrated work, with the confrontation of molester...)

Anyway, Conboy brought him back with big money...God knows why, he was a very niche taste.

[TEdgeofNight]

Thank you soap gods that we never heard from Ellen Wheeler again! Worst EP ever. 

[Contessa Donatella]

Basically, most of the people working at GL at the end are not working in daytime at this time. That's just a bitter fact of life. It's true of most people in the New York soap scene at the end. Exceptions are Maura West, Van Hansis & Alexa Havins, I guess. 

[Sapounopera]

So many mistakes in the 00s... 

The show had six different openings in less than ten years. 

Stories with princes and kingdoms in 2000? Because it did wonders for Dynasty?

Kissing cousins? Well, at least they weren't brother and sister. 

Ruining the timeline by making Susan Lemay and Leah Bauer the same age?

Losing Ross? Because they had so many veterans? 

The obsession with random couples because some crazy people threatened to kill themselves outside the studio?

1990's Springfield was a big city. By the end of the show it was a village. 

This is sad. NY had the best talent. 

[Mitch64]

Ha..it always reminds me of the woman who got almost got hit by a car as she was crossing the street, she was so worried about Prince Richie kicking the bucket, she almost did herself. And you are creating content for THAT audience?!??  But throw in the Zimmer fans she whipped up into a frenzy whenever she was off for two minutes...LW sucking up to the writers and taking them out for drinks to suggest stories, the Manny/Mattessa/Gush fruitcakes, producers like Wheeler who may have cared but did not invest enough time to research the show's past..its amazing that anything remotely lucid got aired!

[Contessa Donatella]

So sad. The utter decimation of the NY soap scene is - and always will be - devastating to me. Edge of Night and Search for Tomorrow were already gone. Then Ryan's Hope & Loving went. Another World fell. And there were 4 giants left - ATWT & GL, AMC & OLTL & in succession, one by one, they all went. And then there were none. All of those actors, the staffs, the crews, the technicians. A bitter pill. What had once been so great, gone. 

LOL, the Manny fanbase wars that were so bad that the show took the couple completely off the air rather than try to deal with the unreasonable fans. 

[P.J.]

There are a lot of problems with the faux Bauers. IMO, the basic flaw is that Johnny himself wasn't interesting. When trying to build (or in this case add on to) a family, you've got to start with one hella interesting dynamic character. And then you've got to tie them into the family. I guess they tried to make Rick and Johnny friends, but they don't seem to click, chemistry wise.  Building a new family around Nola (and trying to do the same with Reva) made sense. But it utterly failed with Johnny and Lillian.

Annoying things around the 4th of July episode--

--that argument between Ed and Mo seems crass and out of character. As annoyed as I am (again) at Mo's attitude re: Roger (yeah, thanks for the ok to hate the guy who raped two of my ex-wives and caused Rita's miscarriage...not to mention tried to kill me.. RME) the comment from Ed about Mo keeping her skirt down was way out of line. Serial cheater Ed? GMAB.

---yet another Shayne sob story about how the Lewises inflicted childhood trauma it took them years to get over. 

---Fletcher and his nicknames. Alex was Blondie, and here Holly was Red. And I'm sure if I bothered to watch, everyone he comes in contact with got one. (well, everyone except Vanessa---no one calls her anything but Vanessa. Thank God. I did hear him once call her Blue Eyes, which I assume just wasn't snappy enough)

 

 

It still amazes me TIIC didn't trash Vanessa to keep Kurt McKinney. As much as I disliked Matt, Kurt acted rings around Bradley Cole.

[robbwolff]

I believe Cole left before the show ended but came back in the last few episodes. He appeared in the next-to-last episode in scenes where Jeffrey was chasing Edmund on a rooftop. I remember cringing when I watched those scenes.

[Alan]

Are there any other shows with couples-fans who were as unhinged as the ones who for some reason gravitated to GL in the 2000s? I remember the story about the Mannyac who presented an effigy of LW - a Big Bird doll with a noose around its neck - to Saundra Santiago at a fan event. The Rassies who intimidated an organ transplant charity into pulling a PSA from GL because their prince died. (They changed their donor status over that story!) Then the same mob letter-bombed John Conboy into thinking that Bradley Cole was the greatest actor to ever grace the small screen before he even took the reigns as EP.

For me, GL became unwatchable under Conboy/Weston. Making Alexandra Reva's stalker, Ben Reade a serial killer, the introduction of weird characters like Sandy the puppeteer and Christopher the psychic instead of the GL characters we actually wanted to see, and the coup de grace: the history-destroying Maryanne Caruthers story which was so stupid it pains me to recount the details. (BTW, was it Conboy or Weston nursing a grudge against Julie Hanan Carruthers? Why did they make the name of a roofie/murder victim so close to a peer in the industry?)

I know that some here have nostalgia for Wheeler's work on AW but we must admit that she was an abject failure as an EP. After a few months of Wheeler/Kreizman I realized that they were never going to rebuild GL. A few years ago on Alan Locher's channel DZ admitted that Jonathan was his "author surrogate", which is why he took over the show for years. He said when Tom Pelphrey left, he didn't know what to write. You are the headwriter of a show with 70 years of backstory and you can't come up anything else to write?!