How would you save ALL MY CHILDREN?

[Clear Drama]

That's a big reason I want this. Ryan carrying Cambias does nothing. It lost meaning eversince Zach had it, Micheal and Alex were viable, but then it became a casino joke. Kendall is too hard to fix right now, she's stuck w/ latino no-heat. Greenlee is salvable, but it takes creativeness.

[EricMontreal22]

Community. Have Opal run Myrtle's boarding house. Try to bring back a couple of older characters.

[EricMontreal22]

Ummm you mean McTavish?

[Dr Neil Curtis]

Kill Ryan, Rid themselves of Kendall, Greenlee, Marissa, Colby, Jamie Luner's Liza. Bring in Mary Beth Evans as Liza, bring back Dimitri, Anna/Alex, Janet (Robin Mattson), Mark, Ellen, Donna, Nina, Daisy, Tara ( I think AMC should have made Greenlee Kelsey and hired Anna Stuart as Tara, if the original actress couldn't return), Gloria, Stuart should have died and Marian shouldn't have been written so badly after his death.

I hope AMC gets back to its glory days and doesn't get cancelled anytime soon.

[cct]

Assuming that a return "to form" would bring viewers back, (and that's a large assumption), here's what AMC has typically meant to me:

1. The Dialogue. When I first began watching AMC just over twenty years ago now, the dialogue was leagues above other soaps. I knew people that watched other soaps that used to comment on AMC's dialogue. The writers always seemed to know just how to twist a cliched line so that it came out sounding brand-new. Or how to lift up "coffee talk" so that it didn't sound like everyday conversation, but felt like you were adding new information. And the zingers and one-liners? Priceless. I see glimpses of this here and there on AMC these days, particularly when Kate Hall has the pen, but this is rare.

2. The Humor. Opal got me watching this show. I was passing by the television set one day; my grandmother had on AMC and I was pulled in by this humorous character. This wasn't typical soap. AMC has had its share of unusual, some say Dickensian, characters. There's not anyone on screen today that isn't bland everyday soap characters. Even Opal has been homogenized a bit. (and please don't take her in that tea-leaf premonition direction she was in for a while for "humor") Again, I've seen some humor recently, and a playfulness, particularly with Tad and Cara, but again, rare.

3. Organic Storylines. This one is tough to pull off and maybe it's my naive soap eyes, but I felt like when storylines developed, they seemed to grow out of the character and made a heck of a lot of sense. I remember having a dialogue with someone long ago on why it made sense that Nurse Gloria liked both Stuart and Adam. Nowadays, I think Kendall likes Griffin, why? Scott likes Madison, why? Sure, sometimes you have to have plot-driven storylines, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of deep motivation written in to help us CARE.

There are things that, since Broderick came back, I think AMC is doing well again, such as having a nice balance of characters and having characters interact among each other. I'm missing big soap parties though. Everyone mingling at ConFusion is not a soap party. I also think that we are getting more "coffee talk" scenes where people are just conversing and getting together because "we are friends." Angie, Jessie and Tad do the best at this. How to have these scenes and yet move the story forward is possible. Playfulness is fun to watch. And this is one of the few entertainment genres where we can stop and take that pause.

I'm not sure if any of these things will bring the ratings in, but they are the things that, for me, make AMC AMC.

[EricMontreal22]

I actually agree with all those points cct.