SOD's excerpt from Carolyn Hinsey's new book

[SFK]

:lol:

I have my issues with CH after reading that infamous, highly entertaining blog, but I still will check out this book. I know she had been working on this one for a while, but generally speaking, I look forward to all future soap memoirs/analyses at this point.

[wingwalker]

Wow interesting tidbit. I knew of some of that stuff, like changing in cars, but just wow. Really sad that the show went out like that.

[JaneAusten]

Thats sad becasue I honestly thought the new production model could have worked if Wheeler would have payed equal attention to the other elements of the show that were as equally important. She seem enamored more with her experiment than really improving the show in any way. Perhaps she really didn't have the time to truly foster anything good since it really was a last ditch effort to save the show versus and kind of evolution

[LoyaltoAMC]

Yes, the Peapack location shoots were terrible. The whole show was a disaster, but the show would've been cancelled anyway. The decreased budget probably actually bought it a little more time.

[SFK]

I would have liked to see what One Life or AMC would have done with that production model. The City looked like a million bucks with the one main chameleon skeleton set. I admire some of the things EW tried and I think they would have worked beautifully backed by strong, intimate writing, and with a terrific creative consultant/co-EP with great taste at her side. Like a Linda Gottlieb-type functioning as Paul Rauch did on Y&R.

[Vee]

Something vaguely, vaguely similar to the hand-held location model could've worked with a lot more finesse, artistry and planning - like, years - but Wheeler was incompetent. I literally could not believe they were putting that [!@#$%^&*] on the air. The sound, the "production values," if you could call it that - it was like one of the many Film Production assignments I got failing grades on in school because I was a writer, not a technical person (except post-production). But even I would have known not to submit Peapack. I don't know how anyone could've looked at that and said it was broadcast-ready. It was a bad student project. Unfortunately, Ellen thought she could skate by on her new "vision" of the show, as outlined and hammered away at in the new theme song, the PR, everything, and on mood and scenes of people wandering the streets. There was no mood. There was no vision. There was no artistry. There was just vague improvisation set to shitty folk rock. It was the nadir of daytime and there was absolutely nothing to praise, beyond the dedicated performances of the actors, and the dialogue staff's admirable attempts to make a now-largely-plotless (or plotted-on-amphetamines) soap opera work. Usually it didn't, but they often gave a little good dialogue that simply would not sell due to the absurd contexts.

[DRW50]

The commentary you guys did on those episodes (was the Reva/Lizzie tattoo episode one of these production model episodes?) almost made it worth it.

I sometimes felt like no one at P&G cared in the last years, aside from Wheeler. Unfortunately that meant no one was there to keep her in check.

[Vee]

I think the tattoo episode was one of the test shoots. I did all those episodes of GL, Darn was doing something else. I hadn't really tuned in to the show in quite a while and I could not believe my eyes, and this was when they were still doing some studio work. It got far worse, obviously.

[DRW50]

I had stopped watching GL regularly back around 2003 or 2004 so the production model was a big shock - I mostly just noticed how bad the writing was, with people randomly walking around just to fill up scenes, and that hideous green hospital set that looked like a back bedroom from 1973.

When the writing got better, I didn't notice as much, and even liked the outdoor format sometimes (the scene where Lillian went to Maureen's grave), but you would have to have Marland, Nancy Curlee, Irna, Mulcahey, and Agnes Nixon all turning out scripts to get away with some of the cheap looking footage. That's why I wish someone had cared more.

But I did love your writing on that episode, and on the Jeffrey/Reva stuff.

[Vee]

Sometimes I thought they were sort of doing a really terrible YouTube fanfic of Eastenders.

I always thought the hospital resembled a sushi bar near the end, with rice paper walls. I kept expecting Homer Simpson to tear through them in lieu of the doors. And the use of the obvious offices as a church, as people's homes - oh, my God. Josh and Cassie's house also appeared to be condemned. It looked like something out of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was worried one of them would go inside and be killed by Leatherface.

I do think they had some good dialogue people, but the problem is that either the plots would move at lightspeed and change in a split-second (Alan wants Beth, no Natalia, no Natalia wants Gus, no Olivia wants Jeffrey, no Gus, no Natalia) and there would be no real character motivation or impetus, or there would simply be no plot at all, just bad music and people wandering the wilderness. The dialogue could not make that work, and sometimes it was just, instead of real, cloyingly cute. "Look how real and homespun we are, talking about nothing." Yeah, it's not cute when you can't back it up with story.

[DRW50]

I always thought it was kind of odd that some of the parodies of that production model had better production values than the show itself did.

[Marley]

The Gotham Vice episodes are hilarious, this from "webseries, the webseries" if I'm not mistaken. They made so much fun of the whole Otalia phenomenon. Having the lead character be a clueless actress drinking and pandering the lesbian fanbase she had all of a sudden gotten.

I remember this and it's such a perfect example of everything that went wrong and how incompetent Ellen Wheeler was.

I think they would also use Dinah wearing that big coat in the opening a couple of times.

It was embarassing and the utter incompetence by Wheeler was so noticeable, like having Spaulding enterprises holding a press conference in the middle of a field with a couple of chairs set up and with no extras, having giant industrial soap dispensers in someone's apartment which was in reality someone's office.

I hear people say that as long as the writing is good they will watch, not true. For me the writing is the most important thing but the scenery has to make sense not to mention I have to actually hear the dialogue which was almost impossible.

I remember (wrongly) thinking that RPG was a quitter while the other actors were being loyal and "good" employees but now I really wish some of them had just spoken up. Not that it would've made a difference but at least I wouldn't have felt like I was the one on crack for thinking that this sh*t just plain sucked.

I will so buy Hinsey's book after this excerpt and if it has anything about the jossip thread, I will have died and gone to heaven!

[Max]

While Wheeler's vision and execution were both disgraceful, my own opinion is that GL's production values from late-2005 (following a massive budget cut) to February 2008 weren't much better. During that time, GL had just a small handful of (cheap-looking) indoor sets, and it seemed as if every other scene took place at Company. Therefore, I concur with a previous poster's opinion that GL should have been cancelled in 2005.

Even though fans of AMC & OLTL are so outraged right now, such fans (along with ATWT fans) seem to forget a very important point: by cancelling these shows now, they can still go out with dignity. There is no doubt that AMC, OLTL, and ATWT all have/had a couple of extra years left in them; however, keeping those soaps around for that additional amount of time would have required a massive amount of budget cuts (to the point where these shows would have been unrecognizable). In my opinion, it is so much better for a show to end three or four years too early than three or four years too late.

[DRW50]

I still am glad the show made it to 2009, mostly because that meant there was a little more time for some longstanding characters instead of Jammy YELL YELL CRY Jammy how can these evil people oppose their love.

For me the biggest annoyance with GL's last years was everyone living in hotel suites.

[MichaelGL]

Every time AMC has one of their scenes take place in a park (which happens often lately) or at a pool, I'm reminded of just how good GL's final production model, could have been, but wasn't. I look at how AMC is produced almost flawlessly these days, yet still on a very tight budget, and I'm reminded that it can happen, just that with GL it didn't. So disheartening.

AMC even uses random unknown alternative rock for some of their scenes these days, but it's not as bad as how it got with GL during its final years.