Lorraine Broderick as AMC head writer

[EricMontreal22]

I had a working mom (well she worked partime) and her parents never watched soaps either so I guess there was no gateway for me--in fact my mom didn't even grow up with a tv so never had the habit. Actually I was an obnoxious overly serious little kid (please no comments about some things not changing) and I rememeber thinking that soaps must be AWFUL. Then my twin sis started hanging out with a new friend who would watch AMC with HER mother, and so during a winter break it started being on when I was home and I remember (I was all of 10 or 11) mocking my sister for watching it, but when school went back in session she easily stopped watching and I started taping and watching it. LOL--eventually my mom started following it too with me, but oddly I was the one who got her into it (she still watches AMC off and on--and she admitted when she was pregnant with my older brother and was too tired to do anything but watch her new tv while feeding him she got hooked on Edge of Night which was in the late afternoon at feeding time)

I think my parents and their group of friends were kinda a group that woulda been snobby about watching soaps--although I recently found out one of my mom's wealthiest and most quasi intellectual friends (she is an English prof at a big university in Canada and has published a number of novels successfully) is and has been all her life a MASSIVE closet soap fan--the CBS shows.

[Khan]

Well, at least w/ JFP as EP, Julia Barr (Brooke) would have received a send-off. Granted, it would've been either a murder or a tragic car accident, but a send-off nonetheless.

Yeah, that's what I said about John Conboy. Before he took over GL. ;-)

[Khan]

Because, it was yet one more history rewrite for a split personality whose "origins" had already been rewritten and re-rewritten more times than I could count.

So now, the cause of Viki's personality splitting into "Viki" and "Niki" (as well as several others we didn't know existed until Michael Malone thought of them) was due to being molested as a little girl by her father, Victor. Not the fact that she saw Victor push her mother, Eugenia, down the stairs as a little girl. Or that she walked in on Victor with her best friend, Irene Manning, in bed when she was a teenager. Or that she thought she saw her lover, Roger Gordon, die in an explosion at the entrance to Eterna and couldn't handle it. But, you know what? Give 'em a moment, and OLTL will think of ANOTHER Reason Behind It All.

It's just preposterous.

[Khan]

If you ask me, Laura's about-face where her obsession w/ Leo was concerned smacked of interference. Like, as Vee intimated above, they wanted to go w/ Bianca and Laura as a lesbian couple (which, if you ask me, would've been dynamite material for Erica and Brooke), but someone - either ABCD, or someone in charge @ AMC, or even, perhaps, someone involved in the story? - nixed it.

[Khan]

I think to be referred to as "The Writer," you actually need to have written, and not just conjured up some crazy ish while ingesting questionable substances.

[Kathy Griffin]Allegedly![/Kathy Griffin]

[Khan]

I'm thirty. Thanks for asking.

I'm with you, R Sinclair. My mother was my "gateway" into soaps, too. I still remember all the ish she and I would watch everyday when I was three. That was when I first fell in love with GUIDING LIGHT, on account of the crazy, crazy Quint & Nola romance, which remains my favorite such storyline to this day.

Before Sylph gives me heck about this, though -- yes, I DO remember AMC and GL and OLTL and other shows from that far back. I also remember watching "Sesame Street", too. Don't believe me? That's your problem.

[R Sinclair]

Whew! Khan you took a bullet for me. I was dreading being the "six hundred and sixty-sixth" post in this thread! LMAO!

[R Sinclair]

I'm so cute!

[EricMontreal22]

LOL it's less preposterous than the earlier explanations though I do feel they shoulda ended it there (don't get me started about Tess--ugh I guess if AMC has a legacy of rape OLTL's is of DID?) The multiple multiples was also based on a fact that wasn't addressed before that it's very rare to just have one multiple personality. But I do get your probs with it

[Sylph]

From Wikipedia, an older version of the article:

[EricMontreal22]

That's great--I know that ATWT fans weren't all that enamoured with her (or Behr?). The thing is, while AMC and ATWT are arguably each of their networks' most old fashioned/classical soaps, the shows still have very different tones and feels (one danger of the way soap writers are shuffled around ad nauseum--and for the most part this has been an issue going all the way back to the 50s--is the more that happens the more of that tone is lost). So on paper bringing FMB and LB over to ATWT prob looked golden... Still, it doesn't sound liek their stuff was so bad.

I'd love to read an interview with Broderick where she talks as in depth as Wisner has (but she probably wouldn't till she left AMC and decided she'd never work in soaps again)--because of the AMC stuff of course, but I think I'd be even more curious to hear how SHE viewed her time at ATWT--and even more so exactly how the cowriting OLTL with camptastic Chris Whitesall under even campier producer Gary Tomlin worked for her... (she did do baby switch stories on ATWT and OLTL it should be pointed out--and I suppose at AMC too with the Erica kidnapping)

[DRW50]

The stories were not awful, but they were also impenetrable, and overwritten. There was no reason to have Carly marry so many men in one year -- the storyline was just ridiculous. They didn't seem to understand anything about her character. They seemed to need to make her so heavy in the money hungry role because they wanted to hype their big heroine, Julia, played by the weak actress Annie Parisse. There was no reason to get rid of Daniel Markel just for a dumb plastic surgery storyline, turned into a long, endless story where the new David Stenbeck, with killer abs, teen idol hair, and dead line deliveries, ran roughshod over Oakdale for a year. There was no reason to bring in so many new characters who had tenuous ties to Oakdale and shoehorn them into existing character storylines. There were too many actors who seemed to be hired because of a past association with ABC, not because of the right part (I like John Loprieno but he was an awful choice as Brad Snyder, and Ben Jorgensen was way off as Chris Hughes). There was no reason to completely trash Lyla Montgomery when they brought back her daughter Katie, rewriting Lyla as a neglectful mother who forced her daughter into child pageants. There was a real lack of proper tone in their stories. They made Denise much too unlikeable and viewers struggled to ever feel sorry for her later on. They turned Emily, who was supposed to be a complicated antiheroine, into this shrew. There were two stories going on at once about cold, controlling men under assumed identities who manipulated everyone around them. Couples in general at this time seemed to have revolving doors and it was difficult to invest in most of them.

There were some good ideas. Bringing Andy back. Maturing Lily. And they weren't hugely unpopular or anything -- they were fired because of demos.

I blame FMB, who was there without Broderick for over a year, more than Lorraine Broderick. FMB made many bad decisions, along with MADD, including not only firing a popular actress, Allyson Rice Taylor, but then Susan Batten, her replacement, basically going to the press and saying she had gotten the job because her friends from ABC had wanted to hire her. That's not getting into the whole mess of bad stories written in 1997, or, later on, the mishandling of Liz Hubbard, which caused her to quit and blast the show in the press.

For someone who was in the business for so long, FMB seemed to have no idea what to do with the press, not just here, but also with her being so hilariously frank about OLTL's poor state in that Logan interview.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

I will say this about Broderick's ATWT, though it wasn't perfect. It was the fist time in quite a few years that the show had any real semblance of long-term plotting and consistent day to day writing.

I thought ATWT was MUCH WORSE when Leah Laiman took over from Broderick.

[DRW50]

They had long term plotting in some stories but others I never quite knew what they were doing. 12 years later and I'm still waiting to find out where Kirk and Sam went.

Georgia summer 1998: I need to find out where my mother went. She's just gone!

Georgia six months later: Eddie. Eddie! Eddie? Eddie!!

[Y&RWorldTurner]

When I think of how awful the show was during Black and Stern, Jessica Kleine, Leah Laiman, most of Sheffer's run, and now, this era doesn't seem too bad in comparison. I don't think it was as damaging as those eras, even with some ridiculous mistakes.