As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[soapfan770]

Thanks @DRW50 for the tag!!

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I know a some people didn’t care for Angel but I enjoyed her time in Oakdale and always thought Haining did a good job so I’m glad to see this here, even though this is the start of Marland’s dark era during his final two years before he passed. 

[Soapsuds]

For all who didn't like the dark era or who mentioned it

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[DRW50]

I know Angel was more of a conduit  for talk about abuse and therapy than a proper character, but I always liked her back then and I thought Alice Haining was wonderful in the role - believable  as a frail figure slowly finding strength. She's still more compelling to me than a lot of the new characters of that timeframe. 

[Soapsuds]

From June 26 1989

YR, BB and partial ATWT episode

https://archive.org/details/vts-01-0_202112

[Mitch64]

For better (for most of his run) or worse (this part of his run) ATWT was the show and material which really represented Marland's..well, I guess psyche...the wasp Hughes family and their immediate circle being oh, so polite and well, waspy (Marland's aspiration) ..the farm family (Marland's past) the constant stream of hunky muscle boys in tight jeans falling in love with the good girl and becoming part of the waspy enviornment (Marland's young sexual yearnings? Marland's aspirations.) The constant reliance on "therapy" the sexual stiffness of his characters...(Marland's repressed sexuality???) The lack of warmth even in family scenes. During the dark period maybe Marland was "going through something," All this is a bit pretentious I know and just surmising but I really do think the material reflected the man more then I have seen any other show and its writers.

[DramatistDreamer]

I agree. You don’t always need a major character being centered to drive a story, especially if it’s such a tragic story.

Something that often annoys me about today’s soaps is that idea that one character has to endure an avalanche of awful events that happen to them, especially when it’s in a short period of time. You can have one single character be raped twice, kidnapped lose a spouse and be in a car accident or crash of some sort. It becomes ridiculous. Why not have that marginal character become embedded in the canvas for a year or so and let the horrendous tragedy unfold. If that character is written fairly well, most viewers will come to care.

[DRW50]

I think Marland was going through  health problems, and I sometimes wonder  how  much was his testing the boundaries, after his first few years at ATWT had been more traditional soap opera. Some stories  he'd wanted had probably not  been as fully realized as he would have wanted (like the Hank Elliot story), and after that the show starts to do more things that would  have been verboten for many years. Add in a producer he worked more  successfully with leaving and being replaced by seemingly more of a company  man, and Marland's plans to sell a soap elsewhere (didn't he stay on as long as he did because the soap hadn't been sold elsewhere as of yet  - I can't remember), and I think there's a lot to bleed over into a more downbeat atmosphere. 

I feel like you can most chart the changes in atmosphere through his run by watching how  Iva and Lucinda change - more and more  suffering, introspection, and an air of sorrow, just expressed in two very distinct ways. And both tied to increasingly hangdog John. 

A part of me truly prefers the bleaker run to the earlier years as the attempts at levity never feel entirely natural to me in that time period, but I do think there are two stories in '92 that are just too much of obvious retreads (Tess as Meg/Emily, Rosanna as Lily, Hutch as Holden) and too obviously written on the fly and unnecessary (having Frannie get involved with yet another psycho dreamboat, and rewriting the story to save Darryl  when he was clearly NOT a long-term character). Those two stories are a bit like leaks springing. 1993 would have been a fresh start, of course, with so much tied up and winding down at the end of '92, but realistically Marland's time with ATWT was on the way out no matter what. It's just the way he ended up departing the show was so heartbreaking and badly timed (through no fault of his own!) that  they never got the proper transition period they would have if he'd been able to leave alive. 

I think another added sorrow in watching those last few years is knowing now they are the dying breaths of most of what made ATWT special, with the final breath coming in 1995. And I do wonder if Marland knew, on some level, that the soap genre he was so integral to and had shaped so much of his life and career, was dying, and dying quickly.

On paper, you could look at Angel's story, with incest, abortion, and being with each Snyder brother, and say it was lurid - indeed that is how it would be if a hack like Ron Carlivati was at the helm. But as you say, we saw Angel slowly grow, we felt that maturation in her, through every beat. I think that's one of the reasons the material holds up much better than so many grimy stories of the last few decades.

Edited June 16, 2022 by DRW50

[soapfan770]

Great summarization @DRW50!!!

I am wondering if Marland sensed on some level that his time was ending soon and left him in a dark place for much of 1992. Margo’s rape, prejudiced and haunted Lisa, Holden’s amnesia, Ellie’s abortion and leaving town being on bad terms with everyone, Hal’s death, Frannie leaving town with being on bad terms with everyone, and mousy mild-mannered Vicki Harper being the one to order Carolyn Crawford’s murder? Yikes! It was a lot in succession all at one time.

On the flip side it was well acclaimed, well acted and for the most part well written, except for the part where Rosanna  couldn’t choose between Evan and Hutch while did we need Tonio back from the dead…? I got sick of Montega plots lol. But figured if Marland had lived he definitely would have been gone from ATWT at least by 1994 at the earliest and definitely gone by the end of 1995 as P&G soaps just all unraveled at once. 
 

I figured Marland would have retired after that unless some soap lured him lol. I can see the headlines now “Plan to save DAYS: Marland in as HW!” or “Good News! Marland back to ATWT!”. 

[Paul Raven]

Perhaps it was also Marland running out of ideas after 7 or so years. We see it often with writers coming to a show with fresh ideas, interesting new characters . But once those initial stories have been told and actors leave etc, it gets harder to come up with compelling new stories for those remaining.

Having characters like Tess, Hutch,Rosanna driving stories seemed wrong to me.

Where were the Hughes and the Snyders who had been established as the core characters who had involvement in every story?

 

[DRW50]

I suppose with the Snyders and Hughes part was down to many of those actors leaving or being in the process of leaving, but that's why bringing in Hutch as a big Snyder clone just draws attention to the decline. If Marland had lived I do wonder if he would have just had the Kasnoffs replace them, as Valente also tried, but if he would have been much more nuanced in the transition.

I do think, as shown with Lemay as well, being headwriter that long will sap you. Slesar is something of an exception.

Yes, the whole show permeates with a very solemn atmosphere - it's almost inescapable. 

I have a feeling Marland would have retired from daytime in the mid '90s, maybe with an attempted comeback around '97 somewhere like AW, culminating in a tell-all interview with Michael Logan.

The idea of him being one of the "plan to save DAYS' writers makes me smile though.

Edited June 17, 2022 by DRW50

[lilyredd]

I think Douglass Marland was an incredible storyteller and a writer who cared about the audience, the show, and sought to tell compelling stories. I remember reading an article where when he came aboard the show he went to lunch with Hubbard  and asked about her character motivations and that he had planned as early as 1985 to pair Lucinda and John.

That type of planning, execution demonstrates his meticulousness. He knew all the players on his chess board and where he wanted them to go years into the future. More soap writers like that would help the genre. But at the same time, with Marland this lead to a rigidity with him where he seemed unable or couldn’t imagine characters with different stories or having different experiences. For example,  Lucinda did not need to be so obsessed with Lily - Lily supporting the people who took her company should have been a wake-up call (stop giving her stocks) and how many times even before she knew the truth was Lily whining about wanting Iva as her mom? Allow the character to distance herself from Lily- not stop loving her, but go do whatever she wants because she will never be enough for Lily nor will she ever truly be on her side. Be a full on bitch, Miranda Priestly style.

I, also, agree the show seemed to really reflect his experiences and desires and he ran out of ideas. Thus, the Lily/Holden retreads. I like a good dark tale, but when you have joyful characters like Lisa and Lucinda all depressed, that’s a problem.

[soapfan770]

The Synder exodus of 1994 was sad but was a sign of changing times for ATWT for sure. I think I recall there was a planned Frannie recast but it was dropped along the way who knows why. I always forget the Kasnoffs were Marland’s creation in his long term story Bible although I don’t know if they were supposed to turn out like the way they did, especially Sarah lol. I do recall reading the Kasnoffs were supposed to be victims of abuse as kids, but that idea seems like overkill to me after following all the stuff involving Angel and then Debbie Simon. Marland must have really gone through something. 
 

I could easily  him trying to write for AW 1997 or something like OLTL at the time and getting the same shaft Claire Labine got around the same time period. But hey, maybe Marland could have ended his career on a high note as the celebrated writer who fixed/saved Days in the aftermath of the Tom Langan era

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[Mitch64]

Agreed...but we all have to admit..as good as Marland was...he was a bit..one note..good God if anyone on the show talked about "therapy" and "honesty is the key to every relationship"( I always wanted Lisa to fly in then and say, "And money and a big d*ck doesnt hurt either!!!") or ANOTHER psycho started fondling a letter opener...I do think if talented younger writers came on and Marland spent a year with them, and then was a consultant for a year or two that would have worked but unfortunatley he didnt get the chance.) His best time was the first two to three years of his work on ATWT..then after that...no sorry, Oakdale started to be full of gloom...Even Duncan and Shannon before her "death" became bores.

But damn, were those three years great! I wonder how, if he lived, moving over to GL again would have worked..how would Marland and Jilly get along???

[DramatistDreamer]

Years ago, I floated the theory that Marland’s work illustrated a lot of mortality, particularly in the last two to three years of his work and heard crickets.

It was obvious that he was preoccupied with mortality. A writer’s life is sedentary, often requires late nights, requires some solitude, not exactly the healthiest lifestyle. Combine this aspect with the fact that Marland was a chain smoker— it is likely that he had developed some underlying health issues, even if nobody else knew. If you compare a fifty year old man back then with a fifty year old man today…most are not even in the same age group physically, probably not psychologically or psychically either.

Writers today are also very different from writers back then. I remember while in grad school, one of my screenwriting instructors (a man who had written an award winning screenplay and has since unfortunately died after a fatal heart attack) lamented that the lifestyle of writers had changed. Observing that some of us had apparently healthy lifestyles (some of us worked out, a few were vegetarians or abstained from red meat, didn’t smoke) quipped “What has happened today…where’s the drinking…the smoking?!”

Marland probably knew something was wrong with his health. He was an intuitive man, you can’t have such sharp insight into human personality, especially the neuroses and pathological side of human behavior, while lacking intuition. Even if he didn’t know that the end was emerging soon, at the pace he was working, the aspect of him working himself into an early grave more than likely entered his thoughts. It doesn’t take a huge leap for one’s preoccupations to trickle, even bleed into one’s creative work. Like I said before, what someone considered to be  the age of decline was a lot earlier back then.

 

[Contessa Donatella]

I did not know that he was a chain smoker. AW's Doug Watson was also a chain smoker.