Lorraine Broderick not headwriter of AMC

[EricMontreal22]

Herskovitz/Zwick are my all time fave creators/writers of domestic drama (they helped create MSCL too of course) but Im not sure if they'd work for a daily soap--and their work might almost be too low key. Hrmmm. Holzman of course is now a very very rich lady indeed cuz of the royalties she gets for having done the book/libretto for Wicked but is an interesting idea.

[DRW50]

LML and Lechowick were good at adding a certain kind of slightly risque humor and business flair to KL. Stuff like Sumner and Paige strip croquet and the party at the Fairage/Mackenzie house where Karen saw Mac holding a blowup doll. I loved Lotus Point but I didn't mind the shift towards Sumner's more soulless company, complete with all the young execs feuding. The Greg/Claudia relationship, toxic brother and sister, also worked well. I think LML did fine with Paige, Sumner, and other new characters like Anne and Claudia, and Linda Fairgate, who never got enough credit as a bitch. She also did OK with Karen. And while Kate bored me to tears, I did think the show needed a new young heroine and she was passable, although Stacy Galina seemed much better as Mary Kate. I will give them credit for those scenes where Greg was dying in the hospital and Kate read "rage against the dying of the light" and when he looked at her he saw Mary Kate. That always got to me.

I don't think she did any favors to Mac, Valene, or Gary. Gary was Gary, unchanging, stalwart, looked good in tight jeans, but some of the stuff he had did sort of baffle me (wasn't there some story where he played phone tag with so and so's friend? I can't remember how that story ended. Was she abused?). She also seemed to have no real idea of how to write for Abby, her Abby was very cold and generic. Olivia became a pathetic spoiled brat who was never happy, whether rich or poor, whether single or with her hot husband. Mac became the constantly blustering father who spent an entire season yelling DIRTY COP. Valene was treated as a joke. I loved the early stages of the Jill Bennett "poor Val" story but that story was also all about pointing out what a pathetic loser Val was. And the Danny Woleska stuff was really not necessary. Joan Van Ark made her feelings pretty clear when she was interviewed by a KL fan site. Someone wrote in to the chat and said they loved the story where she had a head injury and went nuts, and she basically said, "Oh good, I'm glad someone did." Then she proceeded to rant about LML and Lechowick not understanding Valene as a character.

The main thing which bothered me about LML and Lechowick is when they left KL at the end of season 12, which, for the most part, was a great season, they left nothing but bad resolutions and bad stories. Having Claudia responsible for her son's murder, BAD BAD BAD writing and the character never recovered. Having Karen chase vigilantes who had shot a paintball at her, and this ended with them in a serious car crash? WTF? What were they smoking during these scenes?

Between this and the incompetent people who took the show over during season 13, the show was badly damaged and never really recovered.

[Khan]

Actually, I was talking about Winnie Holzman (and not Herskovitz or Zwick) being the ideal candidate, lol, but I get your point.

[Khan]

"She" was, in fact, Danny Waleska's ex-wife, Amanda (?); and yeah, Danny raped her. Because it was her word against his, though, he was never prosecuted. Amanda came very close to committing suicide, too, but was stopped by a pair of Girl Scouts selling cookies. I can't recall, either, how Amanda was written out (although, this was typical of the Lechowicks - they never knew how to give ANY character a proper exit), but I do believe this was the turning point as far as Danny's relationship w/ the viewers was concerned.

Nor was Val's head injury, if you ask me (Joan Van Ark was/is right to call them out on that). Frankly, that arc - Gary and Val's reconciliation - went on about 2 seasons too long. Once Jill was dead and out of the way, and Gary cleared of all charges stemming from her murder, they either should've reunited the two or allowed them to move on "for good". Instead, we got Danny Waleska, which, in some ways, was just a rehash of Jill (but w/ Val playing the idiot this time around); and the head injury, which practically telegraphed the writer's intentions (to stall 'til the 300th episode, when Gary and Val finally remarried) from the get-go.

In the Lechowicks' defense, however, they have said, on-record, they were busy developing HOMEFRONT on ABC; and that much of the heavy lifting, story-wise, was left to their second-in-commands, Jim and Dianne Messina Stanley.

Tell me about it! All of a sudden, the Brian Johnstone story, which was just about some douchebag who liked to videotape his sexcapades, became something...else in S13 that was completely "off" in tone and continuity. I mean, suddenly, he's hiding out from authorities, and only Linda knows his whereabouts, and he KILLS her in the end? WHY?!

[DRW50]

Thanks for filling in the blanks for me.

So Messina and Stanley did season 13? I thought they were praised elsewhere. Either way, their writing seemed so jarringly wrong for KL from the start. Remember when that boy Karen chased in her car was killed, and they had his parents, who seemed to be from the hills, show up and give a lecture about "you people"? I thought Ma Joad was going to drop in to join the tirade. And then, like you said, Linda being killed, which was a horrible waste (no pun intended) of her character. The death scene was also inappropriate for KL -- KL was a classy show, generally, and having it where you could tell he'd cut her throat and you could see the blood dripping on her shoes was just crass. The ending to that story, the hostage situation in the Mackenzie house, was also wrong. Then I was disappointed they so quickly wrote out the teenage boy Mac had adopted, as that was one of the few Mac stories I'd liked in years, and also because they'd done a decent job of setting characters like he and Julie up as being a future element of the show. And of course the "tidal energy" stuff. And Anne with that buffoonish sidekick who annoys me whenever I see him on anything.

The only story I thought worked was Valene teaching the waitress how to read.

[Chris B]

John Romano was the show runner for the first half of season 13. I believe Ann Marcus took over after they pulled the show off air and retooled it. I do love how Joan Van Ark says she thought they were making fun of her, lol. You can tell the woman doesn't have the highest self confidence and I can only imagine how she felt, She also said they didn't want you to speak to t hem so you had no way to understand what they were doing either.

[DRW50]

Thanks, Chris, sorry for the mixup. So they gave a major job to someone whose biggest credit up to then was Cop Rock??

I remember John Pleshette having some very negative words about LML and Lechowick as well.

[EricMontreal22]

I randomly foudn this clip--with Pierce number 1, Jonathan Kinder, etc--would this be just neart the start of Broderick's 90s run?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh8nFn2He-s

A bit later--with Daisy back too (I know she was back off and on in 95)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brC6cBBUBAI&NR=1

[Khan]

No, just Jim - Dianne had joined Lynn and Bernie at HOMEFRONT by KNOTS S13 - and he was just there for awhile (as Co-Producer) as a sort of transition until mid-season. For S13, the first w/o Co-EP Lawrence Kasha, John Romano was effectively the show-runner - and you could tell, too. ;-)

Oh, Lord, yes. That was in the season premiere, "The Gun Also Rises." IIRC, too, that was also when, out of the blue, Paige suddenly had a new boyfriend, Pierce Lawton (Bruce Greenwood), she was absolutely NUTS over - even though, before that point, we hadn't seen or heard the s.o.b. Granted, Pierce turned out to be one of the better psychos from KNOTS' later years (although, the less said about the noodle-limp story where Greg and Mac had to rescue her from his yacht, the better), but, God, was his introduction (and original nice-guy routine) a mess! (I'll always hate TPTB, too, for not doing more w/ Marcia Cross, who played his mysterious ex, Victoria, when they had her. If ANYONE could have filled Abby's shoes, it was she.)

True that. KNOTS never had anyone to "die pretty," if you know what I'm saying. I mean, Peter Hollister gets impaled on a spindle and Chip Roberts fall onto a pitchfork; Jill Bennett o.d.'s on pills and locks herself in the trunk of Gary's car; Danny Waleska drowns, Joshua Rush falls off a building and Rick Hawkins from the Murakame storyline gets electrocuted in the bathtub; and - of course - Ciji in the ocean. Yet, something about Linda's death just seemed a bit nasty even for their standards.

Actually, I thought THAT episode, "House of Cards," was probably the best damn thing to come out of that whole year. Philip Brown became one of my favorite actors from that episode. It's just shameful, though, they never bothered to explain what made Brian go from "Never mind the camera, Paige, let's just have a lil' fun" to "You can't tell 'em where I am, Linda, or they'll kill me!" (AFAIK, it had something to do w/ Greg Sumner, but unless I missed something, that's as best an explanation as we ever got.)

LOL! That was arguably the low point of S13. How Gary could lose his ENTIRE FORTUNE on a project that involved turning ocean water into nuclear energy (or some crap) was beyond both the audience and even the actors on the show. At the very least, it made Abby look smarter than ever: she knew that if he had had complete access to his inheritance, w/ no one or nothing around to distract him like the ranch she'd convinced him to buy, he'd blow it all on some stupid scheme (which, he did).

[Khan]

Yep. According to Ann Marcus' memoirs, too, when Romano and his team of writers wrote an episode devoted to the "joys of carpooling," David Jacobs and Michael Filerman knew the time had come to take back control of the show. Although Jacobs was not personally fond of Marcus, too, they convinced her to come back, primarily b/c, she was the one chiefly responsible for the Ciji Dunne story (acc. to Filerman).

Personally, I think AM and her team did the best they could, but after 12-13 years, you could tell there was nowhere else for KNOTS to go. The only way it could've survived, I think, is if they had undergone a complete overhaul, both in its' cast and in the kinds of stories they told. That would've meant getting rid of either Gary and/or Val (remember, Joan Van Ark left at the end of S13, and w/o her, Gary was pretty much rudderless) or Mack and Karen; as well as Greg Sumner in place of a new go-to Victor Newman-esque anti-hero. Unfortunately, they had neither the time nor the budget to do this.

Poor Joan Van Ark. Between the plastic surgeries and the flaky demeanor and such, she gets slammed an awful lot. The truth is, though, I don't think anyone behind-the-scenes at KNOTS had much regard for Valene as a character, and that includes even Jacobs and Filerman. Even before the Lechowicks' time there, in fact, some of the things they put "poor Val" through.... I simply don't know how any actor could put up with it for as many years as she did, paycheck or not. If Val had any integrity at all, though, I think it was due to her efforts to keep her as "grounded" as possible. Just as I think Gloria on Y&R has suffered terribly since she left that role.

[DRW50]

I did think the hostage episode was good, I was just tired of the violence and the forced melodrama by then. Knots was a show which had melodrama from very early on but after the somewhat hysterical early years (ZOMG a strange hitchiker accuses Sid of rape!) they managed to make absurd stories seem relatively natural and every day. They had already slipped in this department during the late 80s but it really blew up around late season 12 and season 13.

I also hated the stuff where Claudia attempted suicide and this made Kate forgive her. They had to do this because Kate and Claudia needed each other, their relationships with other characters weren't strong enough to survive on their own, but I still wish they'd never done any of that in the first place with Claudia having her son killed.

You're right about KL probably not being able to continue on. A part of me has always thought they could have because season 12, which brought in a number of new characters, was strong, for a while, and they could have done more with Karen's son Michael, Julie, the son Mac and Karen adopted, Linda, but perhaps the ending was for the best.

I wish they could have just said to hell with continuity and done a series which would have focused on JR's kids, Bobby's kids, Val and Gary's twins, with some of the vets returning for appearances. They had an opportunity for this when they made the TV-movies in the late 90s. Now that they are revamping Dallas entirely I guess it will never happen.

What was the carpooling episode? I don't remember that.

I think the smartest thing Ann Marcus did was bring Laura and her history back to the forefront. How sad Laura only got a story about her past when she was dead. To me Laura was the heart of the show, very real and genuine in a way which the somewhat contrived women around her weren't (Laura had touches of Valene, Karen, and Abby in her, she could go in various directions), and killing her off was something which I wish they had avoided.

[Toups]

Why the hell is this a Knots Landing thread? Couldn't one of you go create a KL thread in the primetime forum? I immediately call for a cease and desist.

[Khan]

Fine, Toups, we'll go back to raining on AMC fans' parade post-haste. :-D

[EricMontreal22]

:cry:

[Jonathan]

Ha ha you got caught!