Jill Farren Phelps interview 1996

[Paul Raven]

From SOW Jill Farren Phelps:Why she had to leave Another World,and why Frankie was killed off

Jill Farren Phelps,who resigned as executive producer of AW Aug 1^st,says she was caught in the crossfire between P&G and NBC.”It may actually be true what(P&G,which owns AW)said in the press release,to some extent. I did reach a point where I felt I'd done all for this show that I could.(In announcing her departure,P&G said,'Creative differences have reached a point where Jill feels she can no longer promise the growth that the show deserves.')There is a fundamental difference of opinion-I'm not sure that is the right way to put it-between P&G and NBC. This battle really exists between them,or existed in the end between them. There's a path I was committed to in the past year that I am very,very proud of. Look at the numbers”.

Industry buzz preceding and since Phelp's departure has been that NBC,once her staunchest supporter,wanted her out. Phelps says,”It's absolutely true that NBC wanted me to come to work on this show,and it's absolutely true that in the very early stages of it,it seemed to be a really wonderful partnership. Somewhere along the way,the goals of P&G and NBC did not coincide. I got along quite well with the people at NBC with whom I have had contact. When it has been good news,I have heard quite positive things from them.Ithink there may be a fundamental problem with being 3000 miles away,which may have,in many ways,afflicted the show for a long time. Ultimately,you need to know what you believe is right when there is a sense of' we want you to do it this way',and someone else wants you to do it that way and you are really not sure which way. So in all of this tumult and stuff going on in the background,and a lot of indecision in the atmosphere,I don't want to say I took the bull by the horns,because that is not exactly the way it went,but I absolutely decided that I need to take responsibility for what I am doing,so I am going to move forward and let them duke it out for themselves.

Phelps' final weeks on the show coincided with an outcry over the decision to kill off Frankie Frame Winthrop. Some irate fans blamed Phelps,claiming she didn't like Alice Barrett;others say the network sealed the characters fate.”None of these things are true”,Phelps says.”Nobody hated Alice or Frankie. If I learned anything at all,I did learn from what happened with Maureen Bauer on GL(whose death during Phelps stint as exec producer sparked huge fan backlash).This is seperate and apart from it being Frankie:You need to be very careful about the way you do it if they have to go. What the audience needs to understand-and this is why it doesn't matter whose decision it was-is that there is a business part to this. I am not going to claim absolutely no responsibility. The truth of the matter is the fans have to understand that Frankie did not die to make way for Robert Kelker Kelly to come in. That is not the truth. What is the truth is that up until now,AW did not enjoy the kind of financial freedom the other shows do. There are so many beans in the jar,and people do have to go to make room for other people. It is not true that I did not like Alice;it is true that I like everybody to get an A story,and I get stymied when I find myself up against something I don't quite understand”.

As for her own future,Phelps would like to stay in daytime,and acknowledges she has been talking to ABC for a while.”I think the world of the bravery they have been showing(with The City).I applaud that they did it and that's the kind of thing I would like to be able to do. I have never been a believer in going back to the old way. I feel good to leave AW in pretty good shape. But I would be lying if I didn't say it breaks my heart to say goodbye to the people I love”.

I got a little choked up by the last sentence!Liked the suckup job to ABC.

Your thoughts ....

[bellcurve]

That's Our Jill!

Anyone who detests her, well, "We're sorry you feel that way..."

[Cat]

This woman is fascinating to me. I love her work with Santa Barbara, I even love some of the stuff she did with Another World (gulp!) and GH. She is a great technician, musically astute and has a creative understanding of story which makes me wonder if she wouldn't love to be EP and HW (or co-HW) rolled into one. Sometimes I wonder if GH might be a better show creatively if she had more control.

However, she is so fallible and makes mistakes -- sometimes huge, career-killing ones. From what I heard, Maureen's death on GL was the beginning of a long, slippery slope to cancellation. Perhaps Frankie's murder sounded the death-knell for AW, too. She certainly made a lot of changes to the show which IMO, wiped out some of the show's more compelling, sophisticated qualities. She has a love for darker stories. Sometimes I do, too, but these SLs require balance. And then, because the point of the story was to draw in viewers, another dark, buzz-creating SL is drawn up, and then another and another. When they start to relentlessly dominate a show, it becomes depressing to watch. Eden's rape on SB comes to mind. Pretty much every six months Eden was tortured one way or another. No wonder she went schizo.

That 1996 interview makes me like her, though, perhaps because she sounded so human. Her line about saying goodbye to the people she loves on AW underscores the fact that, while there may be people who dislike her, there are a large number of actors and crew who love her. Some even talk about her as if she were a mentor and not just a producer. A Martinez certainly won't hear a word said against her.

[MarkH]

You know, people say this--but nothing about the ratings supports this contention. There is no evidence that the slope of decline hastened in a meaningful way after these horrific deaths. Instead, there was just a gradual linear decline that started before and continued after...and yes, I can prove this :-).

On another note, though, it is interesting that she has not shied away -- at all -- from death and darkness. One might think that after the Maureen and Frankie fallout that she might not have killed off folks like...say...Justus or Alan or Georgie or Tony, etc., on GH. I realize she's not the writer, but my point is that she might have at least been cautionary with regard to the toxic effect of killing off legacy characters. I guess not...

[DRW50]

I know that charts show GL was dying for decades and any effort they made was pointless, but I don't think it's a coincidence that within a year and a half of Maureen's death, the ratings had a significant drop and the cancellation rumors started with GL. It was one of those events which led people to lose trust in the show.

I really believe that you have to look at what actually went on with the P&G soaps from 1993-1995 in ways which don't involve statistics. All of their soaps suffered severe damage which lingered with them to their deaths.

[Vee]

Most AW fans have long recalled Frankie's murder as the beginning of the end, I believe. There was something so vivacious and vibrant about Alice Barrett (carrying over even today into her bizarre cameo in Choke as a frontally-nude airline stewardess who boffs Sam Rockwell in an airplane lavatory) and it was like having a huge spark snuffed out. Maureen Bauer was a similar tentpole. It was a signal that nothing was sacred, I think, and when those start going off, people split. Same thing happened at GL later, too, with Ross Marler and others.

[Cat]

If you take the ratings immediately after an event as evidence of where a show is going, sure, I can buy that.

But speaking for myself as a soap viewer, "letting go" of a soap is sometimes (though not always) a gradual process for me. I stick around to see what the show will be like without the presence of a beloved character that has been senselessly killed off. I may hold on out of loyalty, or a SL distracts me for a little while. But, like a marriage, little by little, the latent mistrust and resentment builds up inside until, suddenly, something quite innocuous causes me to tune out. The straw that breaks the camel's back, if you like. If I tune back in, it will be in a very detached way.

Or I will have been chased away by the over-exposure of an especially annoying character/actor.

Megan McTavish and JFP worked on GH for a time together, and it was widely seen (by the ABC highers-up) as a collosal mess. She got a lot of the blame for it. Sarah Brown left and Mo Benard must have complained or something because when Guza returned, JFP's wings were clipped to a certain extent. The decimation of the Quartermaines I lay squarely at Guza's door. He just does not like them (Billy Warlock was especially vocal about the way Guza wrote for AJ).

But Diego as Georgie's killer? That was all JFP (she essentially took over creative control during the writer's strike).

[DRW50]

You said it much better than I could, Cat. You perfectly described my relationships with ATWT and GL for most of the past 15 years. I think the soaps can easily underestimate the loss of those emotional attachments.

As for GH, I agree that Guza is probably the one who wanted to massacre the Quartermaines. He had thinly veiled contempt for them during his first stints as headwriter.

[Sylph]

The question is: Has the slope of the curve changed after the death?

[Ann_SS]

This is what I posted about Phelps on the Wendy Riche thread, it also belongs here:

I think Phelps like many of the recycled producers and writers has done her share of creative damage to the soaps that she worked on, but isn't the sole reason that the soaps have failed and are failing. While I believe that the soaps' ratings decline are primarily due to external forces such as women in the work place, etc., I think that the creative damage done by people like Phelps contribute to decision of some soap fans to change the channel.

I completely agree with this. For me with GH, I started with changing the channel when specific characters are on and watching other shows. I now catch up with characters that I like on SoapNet or YT once in awhile. It is why my conversation on the GH thread is limited to one or two stories. I can't be bothered with the rest. I decided to watch for Franco's guest stint, but I hadn't watched a whole episode in GH prior to that in forever.

Not just the Qs. Rick Hearst was hurt about how Guza wrote Ric.

Alllll, JFP. She has her share of power on GH. Emily's death was Guza and Phelps.

[DaytimeFan]

JFP is a really interesting producer. I have very mixed feelings about her. On the one hand she is a producer who actually strives to DO something on her shows. I don't think it would be fair to ever argue that JFP is a lazy producer. That said, she has made many questionable decisions, some of which are obviously just part of human nature and the creative process (ie Maureen, maybe Frankie Frame) while others seem vindictive (Anna Lee, Jackie Zeman and Stuart Damon's ousters).

She radically improved AW when she was there, the show looked miles better under her reign. I think she was quite happy at AW when she didn't have to deal with P&G and NBC...AW was a special show, tucked away in Brooklyn, without the budget every other show had. That sort of community likely softened her a bit and she seemed to find a group of actors that she loved...but then...she also had a stable of actors she didn't like either.

Sigh. That's just how our Jill rolls.

[DRW50]

The production values were good (although this bankrupted the show), but the writing and casting were not good at all. There was also such callousness in the writing, towards so many characters. Paulina turned into a constantly weeping Carlino consort. Bridget murdered and then quickly forgotten. That story where Courtney was raped (then almost immediately got over her rape thanks to hot sex) and then murdered, also quickly forgotten. Awful Kevin McClathy passed off as a leading man. Donna completely ruined and Matt sidelined. And the crass John/Sharlene/Felicia stuff where John and Felicia had cheap sex in a cold jeep after they talked about the child he killed in Vietnam, and Sharlene had to feel ashamed for going to take care of her ill mother and for wanting to work on the farm, and then the show had to even the score by having Sharlene sleep with Michael. Then John punched out Michael, even though Michael had been on his deathbed from leukemia only a few months previous.

[R Sinclair]

Interesting read.

[DeliaIrisFan]

This woman is nothing if not fascinating. I realize that my sense of who these behind-the-scenes people are has as much to do with my own imagination as any actual information I actually have about them, but usually when they say or do something new, even if it takes me somewhat by surprise, I can usually find a way to synthesize that information with the perception I've already had of them. But I really can never get a handle on JFP - every time I think I have, there is another contradiction.

I think her power is reduced now, no question. I don't think it's a conspiracy about Guza, though, aside from the fact that he is a straight, white man and therefore accorded more respect than a (straight white) woman at ABC because of the pervasive misogyny that has overtaken this industry. But it doesn't seem like Guza is empowered to tell a coherent, long-range story anymore than anyone else at these shows has been allowed to do in years. But what's more interesting about soaps these days than the actual stories in their own right is seeing what producers and writers who have worked on soaps for decades will actually still fight for. It's even more interesting when you can spot remnants of their past style in the sausage meat that is churned out of the network machine and passed off each day as the homemade confections that these shows used to be. I always wonder if these figureheads are stubbornly clinging to their past standbys in a radically different creative climate, or if there is actually a mandate to replicate their past "glories": "Jill, what is this crap you're proposing? We hired you because you produced the longest, most gruesome on-screen murder in the history of daytime tv, and we want you to beat your own record - on our show!" For all I know, JFP may be haunted by her past "glories," because she knows she made mistakes, but her notoriety for bloodlust when it comes to beloved heroines is the only thing the current regime at ABC thinks that she has to bring to the table.

I agree, and I would also add that Maureen's death might not have impacted GL's actual numbers in a way that was statistically significant, but it was around that time that its place in the pecking order among the other shows changed for good. Throughout 1991 and 1992, GL was typically # 4 or 5 out of 10-11 shows (it even reached # 3 a few times, like the week of the blackout and the week Alexandra told the Lewises that Mindy had had an affair with Roger). After that point, though, GL was pretty much always in the bottom half for the next fifteen years. Except for the mid-late 80s, that had never really happened until that point - even in the early 80s, when no non-ABC could break the top 3, GL was next in line at # 4. The overall ratings trend for all soaps may well be toward cancellation, but once GL dropped off from the rest of the pack, even by a margin that shouldn't have mattered, its timselot started getting messed with, affiliates started dropping it, and of course the budget-slashing started. All of that put it in a much different position than the other shows. Granted, Maureen's death and Beverlee McKinsey's exit happened within the same six-month period, so it's hard to say which exit hurt the show more. It was probably a cumulative effect - the writing was still better than ever for at least another year and virtually the entire cast was solid gold, but GL was such a different show without Maureen or Alex around. And, maybe it doesn't even matter in the long run; six months ago, I would have said GL was in virtually the same boat as ATWT in the early '90s, and if it had held its ground since then, its future might have been different, but I guess we know now that GL and ATWT's futures turned out to be not so different after all. That said, GL and ATWT being in the same boat for the past two decades might have still been better in the long run for both shows than ATWT drifting alone in a sea of ABC and Bell shows. For my entire adult life, there has been nothing else that even looked like ATWT airing in a decent time slot in much of the country. ATWT and GL as equally strong sister shows could have indirectly led to a different future for both shows.

What's weird is that AW by the mid-'90s was kind of a cross between JFP's two past successes: It was a classic Irna Phillips P&G show that had the potential to transcend the stereotypical definition of a "soap opera" at times, like GL. But it also survived the '80s on NBC, and in the process had to become a little kitschy and tongue-in-cheek, like Santa Barbara, to help viewers swallow the forays into larger-than-life stories that seemed to be required from time to time for any soap in a daytime lineup that had DOOL as its flagship. Yet, when JFP arrived, AW lost its sense of humor almost immediately, as well as the subtle, longstanding relationships between characters that had grounded the show.

I also have always wondered how Harding Lemay took such a shine to JFP while consulting at AW. Victoria Wyndham's Rachel was being completely ignored and Iris was rotting away in prison, foolishly written off by the previous regime, never to be mentioned again as JFP seemingly had no interest in reviving a character that had been originated by Beverlee McKinsey. You'd think that Lemay would have been chomping at the bit to delve into the Cory family dynamics with Rachel now playing the Mac role in a redemption love story - with a man who had done even worse deeds than Rachel had in her day - and Iris once again appalled at some interloper being welcomed into her family. Why wasn't Lemay completely insulted that JFP seemed to have no knowledge of his greatest achievements at AW, or any desire to know about that history? Did JFP want to do more with the Corys, but NBC/P&G wouldn't let her? I can't see how they would have gotten along unless that were at least partially true.

[DRW50]

I don't think JFP would have ever been suited to a show like AW. AW was a show about family, friendship, longstanding history and how it affects the present and the future, and the show also had a very quirky sense of humor. The female characters on the show were also very multi-faceted. There were few ingenues or bitches. The women of AW at the time JFP was producer lost this complexity (and never really got it back). I remember when Cecile returned and she was this awful creature who made fun of a little girl having a heart condition.

Her AW seemed like a very deliberate attempt to make the show as generic as possible. I imagine some of that was an NBC mandate, but it's also her production style -- make the characters generic so that you can put more focus on the production values.

I also wonder if she resented being pushed to another show when it was not her decision. A lot of the decisions made under her watch seemed like she despised the show.