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As The World Turns Discussion Thread


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Well, Casey was a little bit arrogant, in the beginning anyway.  Remember when he used to jump on Bob's last nerve with his growing list of improvements for the hospital?  Don Hastings expressive reactions were so hilarious to me.  Of course, Casey's character had room to evolve, which was great because it was character development that focused on the character alone. 

 

Someone in some other thread said that ATWT didn't seem to do super couples.  To a certain extent, I could see what they meant in that, until Lily and Holden, the stereotypical Luke and Laura "we're gonna save the world while holding hands" type of super couple wasn't really a part of ATWT's DNA. ATWT was more known for individuals who happened to come together because they eventually fell in love.  Tom and Margo certainly had their own storylines and sagas before they got together.  So did Bob and Kim for that matter.

 

To me, in terms of the big 1980s supercouple, the closest thing that came to that prototype were Betsy and Steve.  And even then, I sometimes think that the big splashy Greek wedding (as wonderful as it was and it was a fantastic spectacle!) was more of a reaction to the Luke and Laura phenomenon.

 

Then there were popular characters like Craig and Sierra and Lyla and Casey who became highly popular couples and unfortunately ended all too abruptly for various reasons (Scott and Finn just got other offers to do a great many other projects, unfortunate for the show). I really think P&G should've given their most popular actors more flexibility to do other projects and just rotate the characters and storylines in and out-- the mini-version of the way a Netflix series shoots scenes.

 

The character of Simone-

Wasn't the conflict because Cal (you're right, he was engaged to Lyla) wanted to drill for oil on her ancestral tribal land or something? The nation (I feel weird calling it a tribe) Simone was a part of was fighting the big oil company from encroaching on their land.  From what I remember.    It's too bad, they couldn't seem to integrate the character into regular life in Oakdale.  It seemed as if once the cause was fought/won, the character was finished with no effort made toward her doing much of anything else.

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God I love Bob's Thanksgiving speeches and I love the Hughes kitchen, why they would get rid of the set shows how stupid they were. I want a kitchen that HUGE...No..Snyders. I don't give a crap about your Hubbard squash and your dull kitchen, I want to hob nob with the idle upper middle class and gossip with Lisa behind everyone's back.

 

A couple of things...Casey's family is annoying as hell but only ATWT and Marland would have gone to the trouble of casting them...

Lyla has basically the same living room set she had when she first came to Oakdale with Cricket..I love the continuity and that the soaps had the budget to keep sets around that long.

I love Seth and Sabrina slinking in like they were late to mass and Father Bob called them out. I also loved the defiant slouch Sabrina had against the refrigerator. Moore could have played the hell out of a defiant outsider Hughes instead of the dull one we got.

How many times did someone say, "Investigating the Stenbeck case" over 30 years.

I loved how so many people were on a set and "moving"  around instead of the two to three people soaps show standing in place now.

 

Also..HATED Lyla and Casey, not because they were super couple but yes, as dull as watching paint dry.

 

Edited by Mitch
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The story with Simone was an example of how progressive Marland was as a writer, since this involved environmentalism and tribal rights. Things other soaps just were not covering. I think there must have been more planned for Simone, but she was axed when Marland died and the next head writers didn't know what to do with her. She could have turned into an important long-range character. But she didn't have enough time to interact with the other families or develop a substantial romance with anyone in town. I sincerely doubt Marland was only going to use her for this oil drilling stuff then forget about her. She could've turned into a good friend for Lien Hughes, two gals with highly unique cultural backgrounds who started as outsiders and found their rightful place within the Oakdale community.

 

Sometimes I wonder what Marland would've thought about Lily & Holden's son being gay. Luke's coming out would have been a story I'm sure he would like to have told. Would Marland still have been head writer in the 2000s? Fun to speculate about that.

 

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From working in theater, I can tell you without hesitation that those types of scenes require blocking and rehearsal, also an active, knowledgeable director,  things which soaps dispensed with in later decades and can't be bothered to do now.

 

I KNEW it was you who complained about Lyla and Casey.  I'll agree to disagree with you on that one but I always enjoy reading your posts. 

 

 

Luke's coming out story would've been done a helluva lot better and with more detail and sensitivity had Marland written it.  He wouldn't have been as bogged down by network standards as he was in the 1980s.  I bet he might have even convinced the actor who played Hank to drop in for a visit. 

 

I thought Marland was a top notch soap headwriter but he was not perfect and I do think that almost all daytime soaps had/have a blindspot when it came to minority characters.  Tucker's exit was not on Marland but Heather Dalton's exit, Roy's exit, both left a bad taste in my mouth.  Especially as both characters were portrayed by terrific actors whose talents seemed largely wasted on the show.

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I'm sure Marland would have treated Luke's coming out well... but I probably would have dozed off.. since I found the day to day episodes to be lacking in terms of excitement/interest... too intellectual for me (only the Iva with the pitch fork and Frannie on the tram were interesting to me).

 

I kind of wish Marland had a strong co-head writer that could have reigned in his tendency to micromanage and let the script writers write the scripts without him breathing over their neck (which I heard he did quite a lot when he head-wrote on GL).  With that said, I do think ATWT was the soap he fit in best at..imho.

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I think the ABC soaps were better at writing for African American characters in the 80s, especially AMC, which is where the actress who played Heather Dalton wound up a bit later. I liked Roy and Heather, but have to admit I enjoyed Jessica and Duncan much more. Jessica was one of my favorite Marland creations. So losing Heather didn't exactly bother me.

 

With all soaps, some scribes write certain ethnic characters better than others. I thought Marland did fine introducing Lien and assimilating her into the Hughes family. Simone, as we already mentioned, had potential but was cut short by Marland's untimely death.

 

For all his faults Hogan Sheffer brought Jessica, Bonnie and Lien back in the early 2000s. Plus he put Ben, the African American doctor, into a few storylines. What I liked about Sheffer's version of Lien was that almost no reference was made with regards to her race, or if it was ever mentioned, I don't remember it. She was just brought back mostly as Tom's now adult daughter, a woman who had a successful career. She was quite integrated, which is how it should have been.

 

I really tend to dislike talking about race on soaps, or talking about LGBT representation on soaps, since it sometimes becomes a box-ticking exercise. It becomes more about the number of these portrayals rather than the quality of them. To me, a community like Oakdale was a place where they could all find a home, maybe not blend in completely, but still fit in for the most part and be productive.

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ABC was better for awhile with their AA characters but they too tended to marginalize their characters in subtle ways.

 

What I don't understand is the notion that 'there can only be one young African American female or male character on the show at a time.  Or that all the African American characters basically have to be related.  

 

On ATWT, why couldn't Jessica and Heather both existed when we had Barbara, Margo, Betsy, Frannie, Lisa, Kim, Lucinda, etc?

 

Honestly as a Black woman and a writer, as much as I loved ATWT, I resented this.  

 

I understand that the subject matter makes some uncomfortable but I think, had people truly brought the matter out in the open, discussed it honestly, changes could've been made that might have brought these shows more in line with reflecting the real world  and might have resulted for longer runs for some of these shows by bringing in a wider pool of viewers.

 

It's no mistake that the shows that have the most longevity (Y&R used to have one of the largest AA casts in daytime, Grey's Anatomy in Primetime is still on) and the movies that do the biggest box office have the most diverse casts.  People do tend to be more engaged when they see people they can identify with in some way on screen. That's just reality.

 

I do agree that quality should take precedence over quantity but I don't particularly find a lot of the stories written for many of the minority cast members to have been complete stories.  I liked aspects of the writing for Jessica Griffin but she had a lot of unfinished stories (virtually any of her stories not connected with Duncan).  Heather and Tucker didn't even get a proper exit story.

 

Duncan could talk about curses and murders at his castle every five minutes and his Scottishness to the hilt but Roy talking about his father's anti-cop bias due to his brother Lenny's death was somehow uncomfortable for people to deal with? Oh.

Edited by DramatistDreamer
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Sheffer also created T. Marshall Travers, who I thought had a lot of potential. Shamefully, ATWT probably had more black characters simultaneously from like 96-02 than they'd probably had the rest of their run. Ben, Camille, Camille's mom, Lew, Jess (was Jess ever gone, or do people just not remember JoAnna Rhinehart?), Issac, Bonnie, Curtis, Sarah and Denise  (who gave birth to Kim's only known bio-grandkid)

 

Granted, you can argue the strength of story lacked, but Sheff really worked at integrating their characters. 

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True..as a white viewer I honestly never thought about it.  I have thought why all black characters had to fall in love with another black character..as soon as you saw an unrelated male and female black character you were like "Oh, they are going to get together."  I know on GL I always thought Gilly and AM would have made a great couple...she was always working against and sometimes with, the Spauldings and she was strong and age appropriate but GL went with a silly blondish girl with a squeeky voice who was always being victimized..boring.

 

I always liked Heather on ATWT and she was totally integrated with the Hughes and the Stewarts and it made no sense to get rid of her and bring Jessica to replace her as they were two totally different "characters"...Heather was warm and creative and more family focused (for a while she had grandmother) and Jess was colder and business minded, and kind of lone wolf at first...they didnt fit the same spot! But I never liked Jess that much, she was one cold fish...

 

But I think that goes to having more writers from different backgrounds in a writing room.

 

 

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Absolutely.  

 

Amelia Marshall as an actress was just woefully underated.  I still have difficulty understanding why she didn't get more opportunities. She and Rick Hearst should've been a no-brainer but I'm thinking there there was some resistance to that pairing from executives.  Silly, really!

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I think the best way to evaluate them, in hindsight, is to see how integral some of them became. A lot of AA characters were not integral, just like a lot of Caucasian American characters did not become integral and were written out. This applies to any ethnicity on the show, or any category.

 

Yes, some groups had more opportunities, but ultimately it came down to how the audience bonded with the character and performer, which meant in that regard, they all had an equal opportunity the minute they showed up in a scene. And of course race is much more than black and white, because Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and other groups count too.

 

Sometimes I shudder when black people AND when white people engage in a talk about race and make it all about black people and white people; it seems incredibly narcissistic, as if other races count less. I also don't like it when all blacks are lumped together when someone tries to make a point in a discussion, or all whites are lumped together. There are many variations among the sub-cultures of Caucasian Americans. Whites of British background or Australian background have different issues than whites of German background or Scandinavian background. Just as a black from the ghetto of south central L.A. would have a different background and different issues from someone descended from royalty in Ethiopia who now lives in America. So the issue is much wider than the shades of skin color.

 

If someone were to do a reboot of ATWT, they'd have to decide which characters from each group were integral to a modern version of the show. To me a character like Bonnie McKechnie would be one of the first I'd include. She'd be a new version of Lisa, running various businesses, maybe having been given one from Lisa, who was her godmother. That would build on the history of when Lisa had initially rejected Jessica's relationship with Duncan. Now the child from that union has ironically become the one to carry forward Lisa's business goals and ambitions. I would also bring on a young adult version of Andy's daughter, Hope Maynard, though I'd call her Hope Dixon to reinforce the fact she is descended from John Dixon. She would be integral, because of her family ties, and also I think her relationship with Andy was largely unexplored, since Andy wasn't on the show much in the 2000s.

 

I'd have Lien, now middle aged, basically in Tom's old job, with Tom being retired. Lien would have a husband and teenage kids with problems. But Lien's career would take priority over domestic crises, giving her added dimension. I would even bring in some Vietnamese cousins of Lien's to show that although she's now living this integrated American life, she still has ongoing ties to her Asian family and culture.

 

Of course some other people would need to be added to inject new blood on to the show. And in terms of the white characters, only the ones who were most integral would be used. Paul Ryan would be an essential Caucasian character, carrying on in the tradition of James and Barbara. Lily Snyder would be essential-- she'd have to be a new version of Lucinda, and her brother M.J. is one I'd use, because it would re-insert Iva, who would be a voice of reason when Lily gets to acting too much like Lucinda did. You get the idea. It has to be about characters that can carry the show into a new age, but also link up to its past, while at the same time demonstrating a plethora of multi-cultural (not just multi-racial) diversity.

Edited by JarrodMFiresofLove
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