As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[vetsoapfan]

 

Goutman said in the press that the idea of pretaping a scene for Wagner to be used in the finale had come up, but he had nixed it.

 

EVERY longtime viewer, knowing that Nancy had opened the show with "Good morning, dear" would have loved to see her close out the show with a "Good night"...but Goutman was not wont to give viewers what they wanted.

 

I was enraged. 

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

I've been thinking about when I stopped watching As the World Turns. I was born in the 70s and I remember growing up it was always on in our living room during the summertime when I was home from school. With the advent of the VCR we taped it each day starting in 1985. So from 1985 forward I seldom missed it. Even in college I happened to catch it between classes. So if you count those early years when I was in grade school and watching it in the summers and holidays, I probably viewed it consistently from 1982 up till 2008. That's a long time. So why give up on a show after it had been such a huge part of your life?

 

Well I think the show really started to fall apart in 2008. Letting key cast members go (Martha Byrne, Scott Bryce), cutting corners with the budget and putting cheap newbies front and center, poor writing, none of it helped. They also were using some of the new production model ideas that Ellen Wheeler was doing on Guiding Light. There was more filming outdoors with the younger cast, with some of the camera work seeming less professional. I could have overlooked that if the performances and stories were still strong...but they weren't.

 

The last newer couple I liked was Gwen and Will. But then Jennifer Landon won some back-to-back Emmys and she suddenly became a favorite of Goutman and Passanante and it started feeling like she was on all the time. When they had her do that silly dual role (as Cleo I think the character's name was) in 2007 it was a real test of my patience. At that point she had a double frontburner storyline. I was relieved when she announced she was quitting in 2008, because as good as she was, she didn't deserve all that screen time at the expense of the vets.

 

By then I was having trouble with the Lily recast; I didn't like how Lucinda was being written. I felt Holden had lost direction; Emily was all over the map reshaped to fit each new contrived story they threw at her; Carly and Jack were starting to feel played out; none of Passanante's new creations were very exciting. Julie PInson's character Janet was not gradually added in and overnight she was shoved down viewers' throats. It was just too much.

 

Even when I heard the show had been canceled in late December 2009, I didn't even come back to watch the last nine months of the series. I just felt alienated from it all. I didn't even feel compelled to see the last broadcast and to this day I still have not seen how it ended. I have watched episodes from the Marland years on YouTube and while his writing had problems, it was just far superior to almost everything else other writers did that I'd rather remember the show during its heyday.

 

The last episode I remember loving, and I mean really loving, was the special Doll House episode they did in December 2007. Other people might have disliked it, but I enjoyed seeing almost the entire cast being featured, with them all dressed in those spectacular clothes, and I loved how they used Nancy in the middle of it, how they used Barbara near the end of it; and how it was framed by Lucinda taking her granddaughter past a window where they saw the doll house. It felt like theater or like one of those old live anthology TV programs. The whole thing was innovative and fun. But I never felt like ATWT was ever classic again after that time and by the summer of 2008 I had finished with the show entirely.

 

I bought the Soap Classics DVD which included that episode because it's one I wanted to have.

Edited June 24, 2018 by JarrodMFiresofLove

[Paul Raven]

Goutman seemed to have very strong beliefs on what was needed for the show to survive.

 

And fair enough that he had a vision...but it seemed to be based on attitudes that prevailed even though ratings continued to fall.

 

Emphasis on younger, newer characters not neccessarily connected to core, neglect of characters who could and should be part of the canvas,focus on fast moving stories that don't deal with character motivations and reactions and often have little long lasting impact, quickie romances, marriages and divorces and lots of character comings and goings.

 

I recall an interview with Goutman who flicked through all the channels available and said for a viewer to stop and stay on ATWT there had to be an attention grabbing event within the  first few minutes so they might stay tuned.

[P.J.]

 

I'm not sure asking a 90 yr old actress to film a "final" scene while in failing health would have been the most tactful thing for ATWT to do. It probably wouldn't have taken much effort to find a scene of Nancy saying "good night" to Bob and Kim and edited it into the finale.

 

Honestly, that's just not true. Yes, Katie's stories were more comedy-based. But it's not as if she got a minute or two while Carly and Jack got ten. As someone who made her own edits, the CarJack segments were usually between 6 and 7 minutes. I never bothered with editing Katie scenes, but any perusal of youtube would find Katie clips with her various screen partners running approximately the same amount of time.

 

I'm not going to apologize for Carly and Jack's airtime, statistically "being the face" of ATWT over the last thirteen years, although Lily would be right with Carly if you added in MB's Rose appearances and NB's appearances the last two years. They drove tremendous amounts of story. And believe me, there were plenty of posters who didn't like that either.

 

Katie was irritating. Her stories were often nonsense filler (like the summer she spent on an island with Simon and Henry , or her "butt busting" video/gym days) that's why she got the nickname "Fluffy". It was the way she was written. Like hounding Simon to chase him out of town after she cheated on Mike with him, like using Henry to make Mike jealous, and the horrible way she "befriended" Jennifer to bust her and Mike up. And the fact that other than her humiliation at the Endicott awards, she never got a comeuppance, and the entire town seemingly embraced "America's sweetheart" and acted like butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth.

[P.J.]

 

I would guess...

 

Don Hastings

Eileen Fulton

Helen Wagner

Kathy Hays

Larry Bryggman

Colleen Zenk

Don McClaughlin

Marie Masters

Patricia Bruder

(David Stewart)

Rosemary Prinz

Conrad Fawkes

Martha Byrne

Jon Hensley

Scott Holmes

Ellen Dolan

Anthony Herrera

Liz Hubbard

Kathleen Widdoes

Kelley M Hensley

Ben Hendrickson

Scott Bryce

Maura West

Michael Park

 

If we were going simply by characters, Bob, Nancy and Tom would probably be on top of the heap, since they were Hugheses.

 

 

 

 

 

[DRW50]

My main issues with Katie, beyond the amount of characters badly damaged for her sake, was that Terri Conn was a cold, limited actress who lacked chemistry with nearly all her romantic partners. 

 

She certainly didn't get ATWT canceled, and she isn't why I stopped watching the show, but I do think she was a drag on the show. Conn was lucky to have a lead role as long as she did. She was badly exposed once she got to OLTL. 

[Vee]

I think Conn was good in a secondary female lead role, which Katie was for many years. Putting her in the top tier later on was a mistake, and her RL relationship with Austin Peck made them both pretty insufferable though they clicked onscreen initially. She didn't start out cold IMO, but she became cold as the frontburner grind wore her down. And she was too old - or at least, came off too old and hard - to be playing the unnecessarily elongated role they gave her on OLTL.

Edited June 24, 2018 by Vee

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

Yes if we were going by character counts instead of actor counts, I think Tom would probably be first since that character was on the show so many years and as a young man he was always put in frontburner storylines. By the time Scott Holmes took over in '87, he'd already been prominently featured for about twenty years. I am sure that during the Justin Deas era, he was on four days a week. And if we add up all the actors who played Paul (going back to child star Danny Pintauro), I'd say he ranks high on the list too.

Edited June 24, 2018 by JarrodMFiresofLove

[Khan]

 

Nah, he's just letting the ladies grope him.

 

Do I believe Katie/TC ate the show?  No.  Is/was she largely (or even singlehandedly) responsible for ATWT's ultimate demise?  Again, no.  But TPTB tried way too hard to sell her as a heroine; and as a result, I think many viewers were simply turned off.

 

(But, you know, dragonflies IS right when she says an actor or character doesn't have to be on everyday, in every scene, in order for the entire show to be about them.  GL's obsession with all things Jeffrey O'Neill/Bradley Cole is proof of that.)

Edited June 24, 2018 by Khan

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

I've had time to reflect on the episode I watched yesterday, from the 31st of August 2010...the one about Nancy's death. I supposed the budget was low at that point and they wanted to use Larry Bryggman at the end, which I assume was not cheap. But it would have been nice if part of the episode had depicted the funeral with people like Nancy's daughter Penny and Nancy's best friend Ellen Stewart present. Also if I had been writing it, I would have brought Tom's daughter Lien back for the funeral. I think that would have brought things a bit more full circle in terms of the legacy characters.

 

One thing that seemed off in the flashbacks was they had Tom remember talking with his grandmother after Dan died. But then in another flashback which seemed to be from Nancy's last year on the show, she tells Katie about how she still speaks to Chris all the time. As if Chris was still her husband in spirit and Dan meant nothing.

 

I did not have a problem with the emphasis on Katie during parts of the episode. I think like Ellen, Lisa and Kim, another person that Nancy had become close to over the years was Katie. This show always was good at multigenerational relationships so it's kind of nice to see how Nancy's death impacts a younger character like Katie. Also I think we're supposed to believe that Katie becomes the new Nancy later on regardless of the show going off the air. She is the soulmate of this Chris the way Nancy was the soulmate of the other Chris. So it works for me.

 

I do think it was a blessing in disguise that Helen Wagner passed before the end of the series with enough time for them to do this special episode near the end. A blessing because it gave us all those great flashbacks of the Hughes family over the years. The writers did not have to contrive an anniversary or some other hokey event to do this because Nancy's death just naturally lent itself to reflection of this kind. And probably if they had done something else with flashbacks we would not have seen Don Laughlin on the show again. I don't think he had appeared since Chris' death in 1985. Nancy never had flashbacks of him because Marland was eager to move her forward and put her into a new marriage with Dan. So right near the end, we do get to see Nancy and Chris in various flashbacks and though it's not the final episode of the program, it still helps give closure near the end.

 

Another thing that struck me about this telecast is how well defined Nancy was as a character, probably because Irna Phillips had established her so clearly in the beginning and Helen Wagner never wavered in her portrayal. We don't really get cornerstone characters like this now on soaps. During the scene with Kim and the others in Tom's office, it is mentioned that Nancy was not one-dimensional. And the beauty of this character was she didn't need to have a second personality or occasional lapses in judgment to be multi-dimensional. She could be a woman with virtually no evil in her and still be a well-rounded character. That makes her a very special part of As the World Turns.

 

Also I think the character is an important one because she really was a port in the storm to all these other ones. Lisa often turned to her for advice, so did Kim, Bob and Tom...as well as Nancy's other relatives and friends. One of my favorite storylines was one Doug Marland did where Nancy was volunteering and helping a young black girl to read. Again it was a multigenerational use of the character, this time across racial and class boundaries, and it gave Nancy so much more added meaning within the framework of the show.

[P.J.]

 

Bob Hughes would be a clear number one. He was on from episode one, a leading man from 1960 to 1980, and never written off even temporarily like Nancy or Lisa in the 80's (or Lisa's year on Our Private World), or between recasts like between Marxx and Holmes as Tom. Even I didn't quite realize how many women Bob went through until I was reading the ATWT book. It seemed like every page he was dating a new woman. Today, poor Bob would be a manwhore. 

 

 

 

Or Danny Santos or Gus [!@#$%^&*] Aitoro, for that matter. 

[vetsoapfan]

 

Other posters have made similar comments and I see the point, but to me, Chris really was the principle love of Nancy's life. They had been together over 50 years and had had four children together. Like many older widows after losing a long-time spouse, Nancy probably started "talking" to Chris in her head/heart long before she even met Dan. He certainly meant a lot to Nancy, but I saw Dan and Nancy's love story as more companion-based, while Chris remained her eternal love.

[DramatistDreamer]

@P.J. My point was that TPTB had plenty of time.  Wagner didn't go in her 70s like McLaughlin, it wouldn't have even had to have been a "final" scene.  It could've been done 10 years earlier, as part of another story... just a simple "Good Night, dear". 

Soaps never think ahead, was my point. 

By the way, the NYT does interviews with people about their legacy, way before they die, you'd be surprised at the number of people who actually would like their laurels while they're alive.  People like to know that they can actually contribute to the building of their legacy and how people will see them after they're gone.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I guess I can buy that.

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[P.J.]

Nancy remembered Dan as well. (The special Valentines episode for instance). Scott Holmes' Tom bringing up Dan makes sense, as SH never worked with Don McLaughlin. The show referred to her for years after Dan's death as Nancy Hughes McCloskey. I don't see her saying she talked to Chris all the time as a slight. After fifty years, its a hard habit to break.