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I can't believe they're getting rid of Ryan's Hope. Why? It's cheap programming that they can air at a time of night they don't have to worry about ratings. It makes no sense!

And you just know "classic" will, at the most, mean Rylee 2005 and OLTL Higley circa 2006.

I have no real reason to stomach Soapnet now.

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I'll go with pre-1998... I wouldn't mind even skipping the latter part of McTavish's first stint from 94 to mid-95 (with Janet running around PV like a cartoon supervillain, her hiring the lookalike Will Cortlandt just to annoy Dixie, who was kidnapped by Tad's evil heavily-sedated lookalike Ted Orsini, and the boring secret of Anton being Dimitri's son, with that goofy troll Helga von Schitzgargle terrorizing Erica).

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Moving Days to 8 pm and midnight sucks for those of us who watch it prior or after prime time ends.

Trying to imagine what constitutes classic, and that's hard. Hopefully they will drop an 80s episode here and there.

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I would watch some edited moments of 1996 or 1997 but nothing with boring Noah/Julia (except maybe the story with Leslie Uggams), mind-numbing Bobby/Anita, Maria weeping over mySam-mySam-mySam, that awkward Maria/Dimitri sex (although it might be good for a laugh), Tanner Jordan, overall-wearing Laura sneering at everyone, Brooke and the Pierces, etc.

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Carl, I'm sure we could find something wrong with every era of the show. I thought replacing Felicia Behr with Francesca "edgier storylines" James as Executive Producer in mid-1996 didn't exactly move AMC in a better direction, but it still worked and mostly stayed true to AMC in what was (through 1997, at least) character-driven and socially thought-provoking.

I just think it didn't go off the cliff until the reinstated McTavish's work (still under James as EP) took hold in 1998: when we were treated to the arrival of Camille Hawkins (aka "Lurker Girl") and her father, the wannabe Billy-Clyde-meets-Ray-Gardner Lee Hawkins plotting revenge on Adam for supposedly causing the death of Camille's mother, a woman nobody ever head of or cared about named Joy .... or the resurrection of Jackson's Miss-Congeniality of a sister Kit Fischer (TKFP, as the internet knew her) - who may be the only character on a soap who was raped (one of countless rapes written by McT) who the audience could never muster up any regard for.... or when Mateo - thanks to the aformentioned Lee trying to blow up his and Haley's apartment to get revenge on Adam (I know, "Huh?!?") - went into a coma and woke up with psychic powers, earning him the internet name "CoMateo" yet his new powers couldn't sense that he had fathered a long-ago son nor help him recall that he had a first marriage to the horrendously unappealing Raquel Santos #1 ....

....or when Brooke shot Jim in the back "in self-defense" (you know, because he said he was heading off to take more inappropriate pictures of Laura) and was acquitted simply because Tad "found" a picture of Amanda playing on her swing set (remember Janet's HORRIFIED reaction in the courtroom: "OMG, that's my daughter playing in my back yard!") that Tad actually photographed himself and falsely attributed to the perverted victim Jim... or let alone that respected chief-of-staff Joe Martin faked Brooke being in "medical isolation" with a phony contagious disease (so the cops couldn't see) while she was really on the run trying to prove her defense... I suppose this story was probably a precursor to what we'd see when McT wrote Tad as a sadistic murderer in her next stint.

This was the first time I saw how badly the show could be taken off-course thanks to a head writer. Other than the one episode about Bianca's anorexia intervention that earned Susan Lucci her Emmy (a storyline that was conceived of not by McT but by Broderick, by the way), I just thought 1998 was the very first - and probably one of the biggest - of "WTF" years in AMC's history!

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest... laugh.png

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I thought the show was at times awful in 1997, with 1996 heading that way. Beyond that I remember the show being very depressing. Jake berating Liza over her career, more of Maria the victim, the Tanner Jordan fiasco, the wife from the Commish reading Tempo in her Latin American jail, boring Tad/Gloria...looking back the Erica baby kidnapping story was probably what held my interest, along with Janet/Trevor, and the work from Skye before poor Carrie Genzel was dumped.

The show improved again by fall 1997, but I remember struggling to stomach most of it during the year before that. I actually thought early 1998 was an improvement, but unfortunately, as you say, things got really bad.

I think he said he was going to go after Jamie.

I bought most of the story, in terms of Brooke's hatred and desperation. It was just the part at the end where she was acquitted which I think was a mistake, and also helped set up the Martin vigilante squad which has taken a horrible toll on AMC ever since.

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I remember those scenes. Yes, Jim said he was going after Jamie.

Even as a kid I thought it was utterly ludicrous that Jim was both a) an underage pornographer and B) an international terrorist. And even then I was like, "come on, all these men are after Brooke?" It took me years to warm up to her in any capacity.

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The story was ridiculous. It would have made more sense to me if he was a hood who was a part of this big conspiracy, but not the actual ringleader. The story was very sick and someone clearly just said "to hell with it" and perpetuated the uber-evil stories we see all the time now.

Even then I thought the story had a lot of drive up until how they handled the verdict. I think Brooke should have been put in prison for a while and that could have driven another story for her. Although, knowing the writing for Brooke in the late 90's, she probably would have f***ed the warden.

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1998 is a year I think we'd all like to forget. Up until 2006, it was the worst year in my viewing of AMC for all the above mentioned reasons. It was just insulting, degrading, bad. McTavish was let off her leash.

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As Vee said, you're right, he was going to make Jamie his next victim...I had my wires crossed there, but my thoughts remain the same: So Brooke thought she had no choice (calling whoever had Jamie at the moment and telling them to keep him away from Jim? Nope... calling the police and tell them Jim was threatening her child? Not that, either...) but to shoot him in the back! The whole international terrorist angle, among other disagreements with McTavish, was what reportedly caused Roscoe Born to walk away from the role (necessitating the recast with David Forsyth). I could add a few more WTF's about 1998, but I think we got the gist of it!

I agree that 1997 was dark in storytelling... that was part of Francesca James' own described vision for the show - how it would be different than it was under Felicia Behr. With the exception of Maria boinking Dimitri (one of the particular "edgy" things FJ credited herself for), which I think trivialized her having Sam ripped from her arms hours before, I liked everything with Maria's character. Jake's treatment of Liza moved her toward Adam, which was another relationship I also enjoyed... in addition to liking everything about late-1996 through 1997 that you did, Carl... Even though there were things that I didn't like (a lot of which Carl & I share), I still thought it was All My Children... It was still artful, well written, smart, and still felt like Pine Valley.

1998, I thought it had morphed into a wannabe Days of Our Lives. To me, it was like a bulldozer came in and plowed through everything... as if McTavish decided to just throw everything out the window, and give a gratuitous "middle-finger wave" to Behr and Broderick!

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I think this has been hashed over before but I think Born quit before McTavish really took over. I can't remember now though. I thought it was the stuff with Laura that made him leave.

I didn't have a problem believing Brooke would lash out, especially when she knew Jim was this all-powerful figure with connections and she wouldn't truly be safe. But Brooke never had to answer for what she did, which is where the story failed her, and the viewers.

I guess for me, as someone who hadn't had a lot of experience with AMC, I couldn't tell what was or wasn't AMC. All I knew was that day after day of Hayley weeping and seeing herself as a whore, Liza being verbally abused over daring to want a tabloid career (which was, IMO, the real destruction of the Liza character - she had one or two good months of story with Adam after this before Broderick had her miscarry and this led to Liza permanently losing any humor or edge), Skye being verbally abused and having meltdowns, Maria weeping, Laura's constant chip on her shoulder, on and on, was not anything I watched soaps for. I did like some elements, and by the fall, I enjoyed pretty much every story (Bianca's eating disorder, Tim wanting revenge on Janet, Kevin's reparative therapy, Dimitri/Gloria, early Brooke/Jim...the only stuff I didn't like was Liza's miscarriage and that rushed mess about how Adam owned the airline which led to the plane crash and then to Liza's miscarriage, exposed on TV by Mateo). I had mixed feelings when Broderick left, because I genuinely thought the show was improving, but I wasn't overly sorry to see a change.

That's why, initially, I enjoyed McTavish's stuff, like redeeming Dimitri (which was necessary, as I think he was a very strong male force on the show and worked better as a hero/conflicted guy than as the evil of evils), the early days of Ryan/Gillian, continuing to explore Bianca's eating disorder, the wonderful Stuart/Marian, the filler but fun story with Janet and the fake Axel Green, the story with Adrian and Opal (although that came along a little later), Brooke and Phoebe working to get Jim. I enjoyed most of this enough that I could ignore Camille and ignore Liza's baby rabies (a story that sadly kept getting worse and worse and worse).

It was around summer 1998 that I felt like the wheels came off and everything got worse and worse and worse, and while I kept watching, the show did go to hell.

Generally I have very mixed feelings about McTavish and Broderick on all their soaps.

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