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Linsday said they were all brought out on stage, they brought a promptor up and a monitor and OLTL was on the other side of the feed. They could see each other, OLTL could see AMC and vice versa. Then they were told at the exact same time the show was cancelled.

I love the hosts of Home & Family. Cristina Ferrare said that was mean

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Yes, and from then on, that day has been known as Black Thursday for soap fans. That particular day, I had come home from a job interview, changed into my regular clothes and got online. I read that AMC and OLTL had been given the ax. My first reaction was "BOTH of them?" I thought what a waste it had been to uproot the AMC people to the opposite coast when the cancellation happened only a year (if that) later? At least OLTL got to stay in NYC.

I'm still surprised that The Chew (what a stupid title) is still on the air. The Revolution - and I don't even remember what that show was about - sank without a trace. The only good out of the whole thing was Susan Lucci ripping Frons a new one. I'm still applauding her for that.

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Posted this in Discuss The Soaps but it belongs here also

IN DAYTIME TV, THE GOLDEN AGE IS NOW BY AGNES ECKHARDT NIXON

The term must be defined, of course, its usage analyzed. Since the phrase is customarily employed to designate the past, it would seem that a certain interval of time is required to give any era the full, connotative glow of those words. Thus, one wonders if Aeschylus or Sophocles knew, while in the throes of creation, that his was a Golden Age? Indeed, did Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, or Horton Foote, as they struggled to fit their work to the dimensions of the small screen console themselves with the thought that they were making television history? Or were they, rather, plagued by the medium's then inexorable limits of space, time and money? Did they anticipate the catastrophes which can befall a live show? Finally, were they upset by the sure knowledge that the result of their labors, no matter how brilliantly produced and acted, would - after that one performance- vanish forever into the ether? To be sure the script remained, as did the director and the actors -save those who had been knocked unconscious by a boom mike, broken a leg by tripping over a cable, or suffered a nervous breakdown from those thirty second costume changes. And so, pragmatically speaking, the show could be recreated. But the mystical coalescence of all that talent, the special moment of magic was irretrievably lost. Still it was a Golden Age of creativity and credibility-as we all acknowledge now -perhaps because of the traumas as well as in spite of them.

Well, the trauma may have been forgotten, but it wasn't gone.... It simply moved to daytime, where the dramatic serials grapple with the same old perils and pitfalls five times a week, 52 weeks a year, with never a hiatus and nary a rerun. In case you're interested, that's 260 original half -hour episodes per annum, each produced in a single day, either live or live -on -tape. And how we do it is a question we frequently ask ourselves, since all our nighttime neighbors are too busy -doing 13 or maybe six originals a year -to inquire. We suffer all the illnesses, births, deaths, psychic traumas, accidents, and natural disasters known to man. Yet the show must -and always does -go on. Now, I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression; if the above sounds covetous it's only because we are. Not greedy, just envious. We envy evening hours their vaster amount of time and money, their lavish style of planning, casting and rehearsing. We covet the space and freedom for interior shooting as opposed to our daily ration of four small studio sets. Upon occasion, we even become paranoid over the fact that our efforts, once aired -no matter how good - are gone forever. We'd also enjoy the residuals. Having heard that daytime TV provides more than 60 per cent of the networks' profit, we may be forgiven for feeling unappreciated now and then. Despite all these handicaps. the daytime drama with which I have been associated has held to a high standard of excellence. We're professionals, from stagehands to leading ladies. Still, our art has not been accorded the high respect it deserves, though it surely is rising in public esteem. If we're unappreciated, you may ask, why do we work so hard in daytime TV? What drives us? That our jobs pay well is surely part of the answer. But it is not the basic one. Moreover, our salaries are meagre alongside the prevailing nighttime scale. No, some other factor must account for the amazing esprit of these companies. I believe it is the pride and stimulation that comes of performing well in the face of all our restrictions and handicaps. Aside from ability, our work requires a stamina, a tenacity and self discipline of which many people -even talented people -are incapable. Thus a sense of elitism, as intense as it is idiosyncratic, sustains us. (After all, if the Roman gladiators could have it, why not we ?) Creative satisfaction also comes from presenting a type of dramatic fare -and often, in the process, performing a public service- which, by its very genre, is unique in television. For a serial to be successful, it must tell a compelling story about interesting, believable characters. Characters with whom the audience can personally identify or emotionally emphathize. The ingredients are the same for any good dramatic presentation, except for one basic difference: the continuing form allows a fuller development of characterization while permitting the viewers to become more and more involved with the story and its people. In a nighttime series, though the leads are placed in different situations and challenges week after week, their characters are fairly set. They do not progress or undergo mutations, as the program continues. In the serial, however, some characters work toward maturity while others regress; they go through psychological cycles, run emotional gamuts from weakness to strength, from love to hate, from cowardice to bravery. Gone are the days of the cardboard cast, the super- saccharine Helen Trents, Young Dr. Malones and Mary Nobles. Protagonists with whom the viewers most identify today, the ones they champion most, often take the wrong step, make the wrong judgment and must suffer the consequences. They're human. That suffering of the consequences is, this writer submits, key to a serial's popularity and longevity.

For any dramatic entertainment to be a success in 1972 it must be relevant. And relevance repudiates the cliché of the sunset fadeout, of Nirvana on earth. In contemporary society, the mind viewing the small screen knows, if it knows anything at all, that life is not perfect, and that man has caused the imperfections. Has caused them and must "suffer the consequences" -from a family quarrel to a global war. Thus a certain kinship is established between the fictional characters with their problems and the viewer at home with his. The viewer naturally wishes to see how these TV neighbors cope with their misfortunes, day by day, week in, week out, year after year. Audiences are bound, not by the chains of hero worship, but by the easily recognized common bonds of human fraility and human valor. Naturally, staying contemporary and topical means that our plots and our style are more sophisticated now than ten, or even five years ago. But all forms of entertainment are more sophisticated today. Soap opera is simply keeping pace with that trend. We must, however, always bear in mind the motley nature of our audience, and the responsibility which that wide spectrum of viewers -from preschoolers to octegenarians -imposes. Still, observing all guidelines we have gone far. We have done the story of a young college couple living together without benefit of clergy. We had the first legal abortion on television. We have dealt dramatically with the subject of male infertility and, in the near future, we shall explore the problem of female frigidity. Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of "relevance," is the way it has permitted us to incorporate into our "soaps" many socially significant issues, to educate viewers while we are entertaining them. One is not suggesting for a moment, however, that this service has been performed solely by daytime shows. But implicit in the serial is the opportunity to give an important subject an in -depth treatment, over weeks and months, which is impossible on any nighttime series that must have a new theme, or message, in each episode. Thus, a five month campaign to inform women of the efficacy of the Pap smear test in detecting uterine cancer in its early stages brought a bonanza of mail from appreciative women across the country, many of whom, having followed our advice and discovered the condition in themselves, claimed we had saved their lives.

For almost two years we told the story of a young Negro woman of light pigmentation who passed as white. This sequence was done primarily because it furnished us with an intense. absorbing drama that attracted viewers. But the mail response substantiated our belief that it was absorbing because it was relevant and because it explained to the viewers the sociological motivations for such a denial of heritage and race, due to the rejections suffered by the young woman from both the black and white communities. The ultimate tragedy we were presenting was simply another instance of man's cruelty to man, instigated by ignorance and prejudice. In a drug abuse sequence, after taking six months to bring a teenage character -in whom the audience had great interest -to the point of serious drug involvement, we made a daring departure from our fictional format by introducing "Cathy" into the reality of the Odyssey House Drug Rehabilitation Center in New York City. Once on location there, with eight real -life teenage ex- addicts, no thought was given to prepared scripts or rehearsal. We simply taped, hour after hour. over three consecutive days, marathon group therapy sessions. Here these intense, highly articulate kids related their own experiences and the messages they had for young Americans, and their elders, on the subject of drugs... . The tapes of the sessions were then edited into briefer, self -contained segments, and presented throughout the summer in twenty different episodes. When 17 -year old Austin Warner calmly spoke of having slashed his wrists, not because he wanted to die but because he was a lost, confused youth seeking affection, his words had a devastating impact. An impact I challenge the best writer or actor extant even to approximate. When Wendy Norins said, "Cathy, it's not a weakness to ask for help; if people hadn't cared about me eleven months ago when I first came into the program, I would probably be dead on a slab," young viewers knew, by the magic transmitted only through truth, that Wendy was not speaking soley to Cathy, but to each of them personally. Our "pitch" to Dr. Judianne Denson -Gerber, executive director of the various Odyssey Houses in and around New York, had been that the medium of a soap opera -many of whose viewers, of all age groups, are not the sort who read periodicals or even their daily newspapers, and who would be apt to turn off a documentary program on drug addiction -could be the means of disseminating a vital message to the people most in need of receiving it. The huge number of letters, telegrams and phone calls -for which we were at first totally unprepared either in manpower or emotionally- showed us how right our thesis had been. More recently, we have had an eight month campaign to educate viewers - particularly the young ones -to the endemic proportions of venereal disease and all its ramifications. We followed this with an article on the subject - supposedly written by a young reporter on the program -which we offered free to any viewer who requested it. "Venereal Disease: A Fact We Must Face And Fight" also gave the address of the Venereal Disease Branch of the Public Health Service for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for anyone wishing to get further information on setting up some type of educational program in his (or her) own community. Over 10,000 requests for the article were received by ABC and, according to William Schwartz, educational consultant for the Public Health Bureau, letters arrived at his desk from all over the country in a steady stream, all as a result of the story and the printed piece. To quote Mr. Schwartz, "We were never before able to reach, effectively, the teenagers who are most in need of this information but you have now shown us how it can be done."

Our next project, still in the planning stage, is the subject of child abuse which is rarely mentioned because it is so abhorrent even to consider. Yet it does exist, to a horrifying degree, and needs to be brought to light. Other relevant topics we have dealt with include ecology, mental health - particularly the very common anxiety- depression syndrome -the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning in the home, a returned POW and a young soldier missing in Vietnam. These are only some of the subjects treated on only a few of the soaps. There are many other fine serials, on all three networks, done by talented, dedicated writers, producers and actors, similarly motivated and equally effective.... It is surely superfluous to add that if they were not garnering an audience they would be taken off the air. No form of entertainment receives more criticism, or ridicule, than soap opera. The term has become a cliché of literary denigration and we are the frequent butt of jokes and parodies within our own industry, even on the air. Certainly we should be the last to say that we have no faults. But occasionally we do wonder how nighttime's offerings would look, by comparison, if they had to meet our output and our production schedule? We ponder how much they might accomplish under the same circumstances. It is what we manage to achieve in this regard, despite our failings, that fostered the temerity of my title. We are in a Golden Age and we are making the most of it.

AGNES ECKHART NIXON's television career began with live evening drama when she wrote for STUDIO ONE, HALLMARK. PHILCO, ROBERT MONTGOMERY PRESENTS, and SOMERSET MA UGHAM THEATRE. In the daytime serial field, she created "Search For Tomorrow," co- created "As the World Turns" with Irna Phillips, was head writer on "The Guiding Light" and "Another World" and most recently created, and packages "One Life To Live" and "All My Children" for ABC. She has had at least one program on the air, five days a week, year round, for the past 17 years.

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