Wisner Washam interview

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Ian Buchanan had this to say about McTavish in his We Love Soaps interview:

http://www.welovesoaps.net/2010/03/ian-buchanan-wls-interview-part-four.html#more

[Sylph]

[YRBB]

My God, that story is horrible. For many reasons.

[DRW50]

I think a lot of this is true (although I did enjoy Stuart/Marian and Adrian's intro story with Opal, and I enjoyed Dixie's illness until it became about Braden). McTavish was good at couples, at least early on. I liked Gillian and Ryan a lot...until McTavish had Gillian have sex with David for Ryan's bail money.

I do blame McTavish for the tone but I also blame Francesca James. The show was extremely dark even in Broderick's last year.

[LoyaltoAMC]

I never found the show that dark under James. Yeah, there was some dark stuff, but there was also a lot of light stuff like the Kinder/Erica/Skye/Janet/Marian shenanigans and, for good or for bad, the Myrtle/Santa stuff to balance out the dark. Overall I wasn't a huge fan of James' reign just because I found it lacking in vision, but I never found it that dark. She saw AMC as the Peyton Place of daytime, but I'm not sure the writing ever gelled to meet that vision. When I think of PP, I think of small-town gossip and intergenerational conflict, and I never really saw any of that in James's AMC. There was definitely some of that during JDB's era when Agnes was headwriting, but not so much under James.

[DRW50]

The Kinder stuff was a lot of fun but that, like Santa Claus, only lasted about a month. 1996 was more balanced but there was a limited amount of humor. 1997 I barely remember any humor. Marian had some good one-liners and then Edmund and Tad dressing in drag to get Maddie back was fun, but otherwise, it was heavy, sometimes suffocating drama. Hayley/Tanner, Erica taking the baby, Maria dying soon after she got the baby back, Dimitri getting custody of the baby by depicting Edmund as unbalanced, Bianca's eating disorder, Jake beating down Liza until she agreed to give up everything in her life to go live on his boat, Jake dumping Liza because she slept with Adam, Liza getting pregnant and losing her baby because of turbulence, Jim Thomasen the kiddie pornographer, Kevin's parents trying to get him to turn straight.

Some of this was fine but everything together I think was too much. I'm not saying this was always bad -- I think after a very rough start, the last 3-4 months of 1997 were strong. But when the most lighthearted story in an episode is Tim locking Janet in the deep freeze, then I think there was a tonal problem.

[Adam]

Yeah, 1997 was a VERY dark year.... but I didn't really find it offensive like I did with most of McTavish's disastrous 1998, arguably one of the worst years in the show's existence, maybe the worst ever. Right up there with 2005/2006.

Definitely, Lorraine took a dip towards the end of 1996, but relatively it wasn't that bad. I know MANY still to this day do not agree with Erica taking Maddie, but IMO that saga was one of AMC's last GREAT stories....... yes it didn't maybe do anything for Erica's character, but it made sense at the time. Erica never really recovered from what that drug addiction did to her life/marriage, then to get it back briefly.... have a miscarriage and find out Maria is potentially carrying Dimitri;s baby, coupled with Erica's long rivalry with Maria.... I really was engrossed in that story from start to finish.

[LoyaltoAMC]

OK, that's fair. I didn't watch consistently during James. I f-loved the show under FMB and Lorraine from 95-96. I had a few issues, especially with the Tad/Liza stuff, but overall it was remarkably intelligent soap opera and I wouldn't miss an episode. Sort of stopped watching every day especially when Millee Taggart joined the writing team. Nader, Callahan, Lucci and LaRue had some issues with the whole Dmitri sleeping with Maria thing, then the illegitimate baby, and the Maddie kidnapping. Nader and Callahan gave a joint interview at time, and one of the, don't recall which, pretty much said that no one involved with the story was thrilled with the turn of events and displeasure was voiced to TPTB (I'm guessing James) whose response was that they needed to create conflict between the brothers.

[Khan]

Why, he asks? Why did there need to be conflict between Dimitri and Edmund? Was it a network mandate? Did the focus groups say they couldn't stand the two peacefully co-existing?

See, that's also why I'm pissed @ ABCD and AMC for making Erica regress psychologically after all the progress she'd made back in the late '80's/early '90's after Bianca's birth. Instead of listening to the characters and allowing them to evolve naturally, some idiot - either @ the network, or @ the show - arbitrarily decides to crap all over that progress, thereby forcing the writers to create some cockamamie storyline that makes the character(s) utterly ridic, b/c, God forbid, characters on soaps actually show growth!

[DRW50]

I had mixed feelings on 1997. I actually was extremely offended by the Tanner story, because I thought, and still do, that it was pointless, degrading trash, with a weird sadistic undertone. I was offended by what they did to Liza, that her passion, her wicked sense of humor, her willingness to embrace her nasty side, was all removed so she could be pure enough for Jake, so she could have the honor of living on his boat. Then when that mercifully ended and she was with Adam, I thought we would see Liza's edge again, but instead there was the miscarriage (which was, naturally, blamed on Adam, in a half-hearted story which seemed to amount to Mateo finger pointing) and lots of Liza crying and angst and I had this awful feeling because I sensed that the character had died, and for me, she basically did die, and the next 4-5 years were like a very lingering goodbye.

I wasn't offended by the Erica story once I saw it play out. I thought the construction of the story was a mess, not so much Erica's part as the "grief sex" and how Dimitri became so horrible. But I did believe Erica's side of the story and I think they did a good job in managing to make viewers feel sorry for Erica while also feeling sorry for Maria and wanting Maria to be reunited with her daughter.

There were other things I enjoyed. I was one of those who didn't have a problem with Janet/Trevor getting together. I liked Stuart and Esther. I thought the Kevin reparative therapy story was generally quite good. Erica's trial and Bianca's eating disorder were good, although I was never quite sure if they were planning to end the story with that Thanksgiving scene where Erica got Bianca to eat, and McTavish decided to bring the story back, or if that was just a false ending for a happy holiday.

There was just so much else going on which I think took too much of a toll, with the last straw perhaps being Jim Thomasen tormenting Laura. I don't think AMC is a show which can sustain that type of darkness, and some of the darkness that year, while not as collectively dark as McTavish's years of hell, I thought were much more...I don't know how to say it...invasive, and harrowing, and hard to get out of your head, than McTavish's psychos and overdone crap.

That was one of the reasons I was somewhat relieved when McTavish returned and why I enjoyed enough of the show to keep being entertained up to somewhere around Kit Fisher, which is when I thought the show really started going south.

[DRW50]

I think it's just an easier cliche, to have brothers in conflict.

I always preferred Dimitri and Edmund as friends. I never thought the rivalry between them worked -- it was OK for those few months after Maria died but I hated it when Edmund went nuts over losing Alex.

The stuff with the viaduct and ghost Maria filing her nails was dumb but Edmund and Dimitri mending fences and letting all their baggage air out was one of the better set of scenes I remember in 1998.

[Angela]

As a teenager (barely), what I ended up finding strange (and disappointing) back then was the fact that they suddenly stopped having story together. I was enjoying their story and then poof until the exit, lol. Through Michael Logan fanning the flames in TV Guide, I realized their was some sort of fued going on there. Years later, I remember Sydney Penny regretfully owning up the the clique crap with the new girls in SOW, discussing how immature it all was.

I don't like my soap too serious or too campy, I like it in the middle. I think Megan McTavish can be and has been a decent AMC writer at times, but she needs to be controlled by a Broderick, Behr and/or Nixon. I don't buy that she's anybodys "Yes" woman, she's a writer that likes being in control. If you give her that control and let her free, she's basically what this guy described, a bitch with too much power and mouth that will do some insane stuff on screen and maybe off screen too. Maybe not immediately so, but eventually. I loved the show until 1994-1995. 1993 was a magnificent year, campy but good, IMO (Tad's return, Kendall's introduction). Pre-dating 1993 there was Will's murder, Natalie in the well, Dimitri - I enjoyed it. The show was brilliant in a less campy way before her stint, as well. I enjoyed the show for the first 1-2 years McTavish was back in the 2000s. For those reasons, I probably could never look at McTavish as the worse writer in AMC history despite the unabortion and Dixie and the pancakes and Tad burying a man alive - as insane and awful as those things were. She did some horrible, unforgivable stuff, but she also provided some of the years this viewer found most enjoyable on this soap.

I was turned off to AMC between McTavish's exit and Broderick's return, it was a mix off too many new faces, all the soaps trying to copy JER, and becoming a DAYS fan despite despising JER's tactics being used on other soaps.

[EricMontreal22]

Hadn't DePriest moved on to OLTL within a year? I think she has talent (I know some on here hate her, but I had fun with her run on Sunset Beach, and she did co create one of my old soaps I'm most obsessed with, Where the Heart Is), but she seems a weird fit for the New York ABC soaps, as her style is much more campy (and/or dark like the DAYS/AW serial killer storylines--of course now the ABC soaps all do serial killer stories anyway...) But at the time it seemed ABC had her hired to sorta clean up the shows--she did her work at AMC, then moved on to OLTL whose ratings had suddenly started plumetting. Of course, unlike her mixed but I think ratings wise successful era at AMC, her time at OLTL under Rauch seemed to be a ridiculous mistake (social storylines like the drug dealers taking over and the rap storyline, etc, etc).

(Wiki lists the OLTL writers of that time:

August 1991 to January 1992 Michael Malone

May 1991 to August 1991 Craig Carlson

September 1990 to May 1991 Craig Carlson and Leah Laiman

July 1990 to September 1990 Margaret DePriest (interim)

July 1987 to July 1990 S. Michael Schnessel

But I swear I have more episodes from 1990 than just those 3 months with DePriest's name in the credits...)

[EricMontreal22]

She did, but I do wonder if in some twisted way we were lucky to get stuck with her as long as we did--I think if we had had 4 years of Passanante, or some of the writers who made OLTL an unwatchable mess for years on end (leah Laiman, etc) AMC might be in an even worse state. But, yeah I know that's a dumb argument.

I do feel largely like you though, with your thoughts on McT's eras. McTavish's AMC, as I've said ad nauseum, is what got me into soaps (OK the tail end of Nixon's earlier period I guess, technically--cuz I became hooked with Janet in the Well in late 1991). Lots of that stuff I loved was Nixon--the whole Marrick/Jane Eyre mystery (Helga wheeling Angelique in, etc) but a lot of it was continued, and continued well, by McTavish--i thought the whole Edmund/Dimitri/Hugo Marriack story was really well done, the Budapest location shot is still my fave location shot of all time, etc... But I admit some of my love is nostalgic (and even then I did realize she was losing her touch in 1995 shortly ebfore she was replaced). Still, I do think a lof of her stuff did have great feel for Pine Valley, balancing the family stuff with more outrageous plot turns, etc. And it's a good point that, partly her own doing but at least as much do to good casting and FMB's great EPing, she did very well with great couples (and, for the most part, good new characters as well) in that run, something the show's had difficulty with ever since.

I agree her late 90s return was a mess--I liked Marian and Stuart, I liked the all too brief Aiden/Opal story, I even liked seeing Palmer more even if he was carting around Nazi art or whatever.

But I agree that the first year and a half or so of her 2000s return was largely pleasing to me. Of course part of that is AMC had fallen further in the time before her return, if that makes sense, but she did make AMC feel like Pine Valley--at least for a while, to me. Without any proper guidance from a talented EP though she ran out of steam pretty fast (her last year or so, it almost seemed like even Megan's twiste dlittle heart was no longer in it, everythign was autopilot).

[EricMontreal22]

She has said both the Peyton Place of daytime,a nd a modern version of the great Doug Sirk melodramas. Which in theory seems ideal for AMC, but I agree her vision wasn't quite strong enough to carry it off. Still, compared with who we got after James, I'd take James back, and her half hearted vision, in a heartbeat over Bruke and JHC and their utter lack of vision....

(And you're right we did get the small town gossip, etc, thing back under Nixon in '99-2000 (and I loved it) but I give Nixon credit for that, not Burke )