As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

The writer who came up with the idea for the "Oakdale Three (or Four)", now that's youth obsessed.

[Khan]

"Free the Oakdale Three!"  LOL!!

 

I'm pretty sure that was Goutman's (lame) idea.  TBH, I thought it had some SLIGHT potential.  Especially with the idea of taping on real-life college campuses.  But, its' half-hearted execution was bound to fail.

[DramatistDreamer]

 

I'm sorry but every time I think of that storyline, I keep hearing Helen and Christian Slater yelling "Fair is Fair!"

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[Khan]

 

LOL!!

 

Really, though, that story needed Mary-Ellis Bunim to work.

[Soaplovers]

Lucinda during the Marland era was written as the heavy especially when it came to Lily/Holden.  I wish she'd slapped the brat..tbh.

 

And Marland's scripts could be a little too talky/stilted... so I'm glad she infused some life into her part.

 

And Althea was a strong character..but a total 180 from Lucinda.  Though I do think the Althea/Penny relationship had more layers and showed both of them being right and wrong...as opposed to the Lily/Lucinda relationship..that was kind of a rinse,lather and repeat. 

[Mitch]

Well, I am sure Zenk was just embarrassed by the OTT that Sheffer made Babs..jumping out of the window??? Hubbard..love her but you can see she was a pain in the ass...she was on ALL the time and she complains?? I can see why writers and producers ignore actors..they can be a bit narcissistic.

[BetterForgotten]

The truth of the matter is, so many actresses in that age range would literally kill to play a role like Lucinda - not only these days, but back then too.

[Soapsuds]

I remember when Marland made them allies. Then rivals after Lucinda stole BRO from Barbara when she was in prison for James murder. Their scenes together were always so good.

[DramatistDreamer]

 

Lucinda and Barbara had an interesting relationship, especially in their early years. You got the sense that Barbara looked up to Lucinda (and became a sort of protege) and Lucinda seemed to genuinely like Barbara, so much so that Lucinda held back from any retaliation when she discovered that Barbara had been having an affair with her son-in-law Tonio.

Things changed when Lucinda's "It's just business" ethos caused her to do to Barbara what she essentially did to Steve Andropoulos, which was to take advantage of a vulnerable proprietor and vulture the company.

On most other soaps, this type of storyline would likely be written for men, but I like the fact that it was written for two women and in such an organic way.

[titan1978]

If you can believe this- she looks back fondly on Sheffer’s writing for her character.  It’s when Marland made her a vixen going after Tom that she didn’t enjoy.  She thought that was out of character.  On these recent interviews, she has spoken highly of Sheffer.

 

I think she just didn’t like being a home wrecker that was set up to loose- it was always going to be Tom and Margo.

[Soapsuds]

 

[DeliaIrisFan]

Was there a layer to Barbara's initial transformation (in the triangle with Tom and Margo) where she justified her actions—and/or any other characters at least sort of sided with her—specifically because Margo had been Barbara's husband's mistress?

 

I admittedly do not understand how Margo went from that to the HBS/ED scrappy heroine version, and I've seen very little of Barbara in vixen mode before she was sort of redeemed once James came back from the dead and put her through (more) hell.  In fact, most of Barbara's mid-'80s villainy that I have seen involved Brian and Shannon, whom I don't believe had done anything to Barbara; Shannon just seemed to be replacing Barbara as the ingenue in off-beat far-flung caper stories, with Barbara now as the heavy.  I could see how Zenk might have resented that.  On the other hand, if part of Barbara's reasoning for going after Tom had been that Margo deserved what she got because she had been in league with James, who went on to ruin Barbara's life, it would be hard to fault her.

 

The comparison between Zenk and Hubbard is kind of ironic, because by the time Sheffer arrived Barbara was presumably close to the age Lucinda would have been during the Marland era.  Perhaps by that time, Zenk was content to be playing a lesser-written version of Marland's Lucinda, given what was happening to many of her contemporaries at that time.

 

On the other hand, I wonder if some of Hubbard's aversion to Lucinda as the perpetual villain of Lily's stories was because sometimes Lucinda was being punished for actually doing something atrocious, but other times not so much.  Lily's reaction to finding out about her biological parents, aka the first time she ran away, was so over-the-top—and her anger didn't seem to be focused on the things Lucinda had actually done wrong, like the shadiness of the adoption, given that she treated Iva equally abysmally.  I can see how the aspect of Lucinda's role that involved walking on eggshells around Lily all the time might have seemed tedious, when there were other ways to create conflict between Lily and Lucinda.

[Khan]

 

Frankly, Margo went from homewrecker to scrappy heroine, because of Margaret Colin's popularity.  Otherwise, I don't think the character would have recovered.

 

IIRC, when Margo confronted Barbara about her and Tom's (alleged) ONS, she did mention that fact.  However, James and Margo's affair had happened a long time ago (at least five years in real time, who knows how many more in "soap time").  If Barbara's motivation in upsetting her ex-fiancee's marriage was revenge for his wife's being the other woman in her marriage to James Stenbeck, then she took her sweet ass time making that happen, lol.

 

Personally, I've always chalked up Barbara's transformation during that period as her growing tired of always getting the short end of the metaphorical stick whenever it came to the men in her life.  There were her ill-fated relationships with that guy named Steven (who turned out to be married, I think?) and with Tom, which ended with the discovery of Paul's existence; and then there was James, a marriage that turned out to be made in Mary-Ellis Bunim hell; and then there was Gunnar, whom Barbara fought tooth and nail (and bull!) to be with, only to watch him leave Oakdale, terminally ill and in a hot-air balloon; and then there was Brian, who ended up falling for quirky Shannon before moving onto boring Beatrice.  Barbara had just had enough.

[DeliaIrisFan]

 

For sure, I get that—but I could see how Zenk might have been annoyed, having played the initial story with Margo and James, if Barbara was treated as just a pariah when she tried to get Tom back.  At minimum, I think Barbara could have helped justify it to herself because of that history, even if it was ancient history by that point.

 

I guess part of my question was whether Margo's evolution had made sense and that history could have been presented as a major component of the triangle with Barbara and Tom, or if getting into that too much to justify Barbara's actions would have opened Pandora's box because Margo was essentially a different character who had never really been redeemed from her earlier behavior.  That's kind of what I suspected, and it sounds like I was not entirely wrong.

[DramatistDreamer]

See, I didn't see it as Barbara trying to get Tom back. At all. I saw it as Barbara burning through the vestiges of her former life as a doormat and put upon wife. People seem to forget that she interjected herself even more between Brian and Shannon. Now, you can make a case for her wanting Brian back, even going so far to plot a surprise to bust up Shannon and Brian's wedding. If you saw the scenes between Barbara and Margo where Barbara accused Margo of bringing about the trouble in her marriage, by not being a good wife to Tom, you'll see that it was more about her relationship to Margo, rather than Tom. If it was about wanting Tom, the tension and enmity would not have continued when Barbara was with Hal, but it did. AFAIC, it was more about old wounds between Barbara and Margo bearing fruit.

 

Another thing, these actors contradict themselves. In an interview, Colleen said that she spent her first several episodes apologizing to various characters, because apparently, the character previously caused a lot of tumult and promptly left town. Apparently, Barbara was no angel even from the earliest incarnation of the character, so Colleen should've known what time it was,

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. Now, had she won an Emmy (and quite frankly, she should have been nominated for her performance), she likely would've felt differently.

 

It's likely the reason why unfortunately these soaps usually deferred to the men to play the most complex characters-- most of the women just seemed as if they didn't want that smoke, lol.

Edited January 3, 2021 by DramatistDreamer