Was another Nixon soap really necessary?

[Y&RWorldTurner]

I will never understand why a show with Marland and Nixon's DNA was so bland and generic.

Loving really never found its footing creatively, and the behind the scenes turnover was so rapid all the damn time.

[Lust4Life76]

True, but it makes you wonder if the "cookie cutter" soap is what could partly attributed/attributes to killing the genre off soap by soap. I honestly believe had Capitol, Dark Shadows, Ryan's Hope, Santa Barbara, and Edge of Night...and maybe the Doctors had stayed on or had been introduced at a different time there would be more diversity in the line up. Capitol could have been the West Wing of daytime, Dark Shadows as the Vampire Diaries, Edge of Night as CSI, and the Doctors as ER since General Hospital likes to pretend it is the Sopranos. I wish somebody at ABC would take over who would make General Hospital a medical drama again, make One Life to Live the liberal minded soap and make All My Children the conservative soap with heart. The only other show I can see is remotely different is The Bold and the Beautiful because of its fashion world backdrop. Otherwise The Young and the Restless, AMC, OLTL, and Days of our Lives are cut from the same cloth.

[dsvd79]

And I loved this show! I even taped it when it was on at 2:00am.

[Soapsuds]

+1

I hated Loving for that reason.

[SFK]

I'm going to beat my buddy Eric to the punch with these two items, but I believe she did approach Ellen Holly and Lillian Hayman about joining Loving after all of that Rauch mess went down over at One Life. Warmth and familiarity, sure, but those characters didn't have the crossover appeal of spinning off say Luke and Laura (understatement!). Plus, when Angie and Frankie (and Pat) showed up in Corinth, there was no introductory crossover s/l on AMC that may have encouraged folk to tune in an half hour earlier.

It would have of course hurt AMC, but imagine Tad, Liza, Greg, Jenny, Jesse, Angie doing Pine Valley High the College Years at Alden University over on Loving. Honestly, I think with the proper scheduling of crossovers to the mother show, the masterful introduction of a new teen set on AMC and new college character on LOV, Agnes Nixon of all people could have pulled that off. After the show got its feet, a couple of them could have stayed on LOV with new characters while others moved back to AMC, maybe taking a LOV character or two with them (think Lisa Bonet getting the ball rolling on ADW and Jasmine Guy assuming lead). Of course such a thing with teens would have worked even better if LOV's timeslot was later for the sake of high schoolers, but the college kids would have eaten it up if well-written. Soaps were huge on cOllege campuses in the '80s and if you took popular characters like those on AMC in a college setting at that, I wonder what that could have been.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Was it ever said why Marland wanted his co-creator credit removed from the show?

The beginning years written by Marland seemed the most focused the show ever was, sadly.

[DRW50]

Even have the Amanda Bearse character or Bob Georgia go back and forth. Imagine Isabelle having to endure Enid Nelson at various society functions.

It seems like the ABC soaps moved away from synergy for most of the 80s. I'm not sure why.

[SFK]

Actually, I think "generic" (ugh) was kind of what AN was going for, even evidenced in her choice of the most blah soap title ever. She was going for a return to classic soap: romance, family, a little intrigue. I don't think 1980-anything was the time to return to the nuts and bolts of a genre. The country wanted wham-bam-swanky-glam and Loving was too Zzzzzz, even with its brittle, moneyed Aldens. "Ya gotta have a gimmick", look at Capitol and Santa Barbara, even Generations. Loving seemed like a watered down version of AMC and OLTL, nothing she couldn't have done on either one of those shows, so yes, perhaps the show needed a stronger identity. What that could have been, well, that's up to Agnes Nixon's imagination.

I think the show could be much more interesting now. A small town that's considered changing its name after the tragic events of 1995, citizens reticent to tell people where they're from... some dark teens take snarky pride in it, others emotionally eff'd from childhood paranoia about the very real bogeyman serial killer.[/fanfic]

[DRW50]

That's true. I really wish they'd considered staying in Corinth and just showing the dramatic changes, sort of like Emmerdale did a few years earlier. The City was just too radical of a change, and yet, not radical enough to get a new audience.

[All My Shadows]

I'd so watch that. I can hear one of those snarky teens now, heckling the new kid in town: "The Loving Murrrders. You've heard of the Loving Murrders, haven't you? Gwyneth Alden off'd her whole clan, man, it was reeeal wild. You know, they say, on some nights, you can still see Isabelle -- she was Gwyn's mother-in-law -- walking up to the Alden Mansion with a candle in her hand."

[Khan]

Basically, when Doug Marland left, he took the co-creator's credit with him, b/c he and Agnes Nixon disagreed that strongly in their overall vision for the show. Marland wanted what he had done earlier at GUIDING LIGHT, more or less, with an emphasis on young love stories, class and social conflicts, and topical issues. Nixon wanted these things, too, but with greater emphasis on humor and the sort of oddball characters that had come to define her other shows.

Like someone (forget who) said upthread, ABCD turned to Nixon to develop LOVING (w/ Marland), because they wanted creators w/ a proven track record. Nixon, of course, had come to be THE voice of their lineup, thanks to AMC and OLTL; and Marland had been terrifically successful both at GL and at GH, where he (and Gloria Monty) had turned that show around after it came the closest ever to being cancelled. Of course, I tend to think they were better off asking Bill Bell or even then-EDGE OF NIGHT headwriter Henry Slesar to do something with that half-hour...but that's just me.

[LoyaltoAMC]

ITA. I LOVED the first two years or so of Loving. I know many saw it as a diluted AMC, but I don't think that's an apt description. It was definitely trying to capture the AMC style of the time, which wasn't a bad thing. So many other shows at the time were moving away from domestic drama and class and intergenerational conflict, which I think are what soaps should be all about. Everyone seemed to be doing convoluted action adventure and-or spy stories that ripped off GH. I thought that Loving was so refreshing that first year or two, blending Agnes's small-town and Dickensian feel with Doug's tendency to write more complex, daring characters. I just thought it was great, and can't say enough good things about that first year or two. I'd love to know what went down between Agnes and Doug that eventually forced him off the show and to have his name removed as co-creator. This is one show that should have succeeded.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Didn't Agnes take over for a short time after Marland left?

I heard her vision was very different from what Marland had set up, and the corporate intrigue aspect that Marland loved and instilled was all but gone when Agnes succeeded him.

[Khan]

I tend to believe that the network's decision to truncate his plans for the Slater family (in order to make their TV movie, "Something About Amelia," appear more groundbreaking in its exploration of child molestation) went a long way toward making Marland ultimately quit the show.

[SFK]

That was so Degrassi! But I could totally see a bunch of kids who've turned the abandoned Alden mansion* into some sort of clubhouse slash meth lab with a skateboard ramp sweeping down from the balcony above the salon. Children of the Corinth

*(Deborah Brewster blew through her money and lost the house or she passed away and everyone's too creeped out to buy it, Corinth's real estate values rivaling Detroit's)