EastEnders - Pauline Fowler. I think she wins this, hands down.

Some of mine have already been mentioned:

Gabrielle's 2 exits (prison and death) from OLTL. The first time, yes, she had committed a crime (under Carlo's orders) but Carlo threatened to kill her family if she mentioned his name so she bore the full blame and punishment. Blackie on GH who decided to punish himself for an accidental death that he physically hadn't even done and who was basically wiped from GH's memory. Laura on GH who apparently was never allowed to depart happy and of her own volition.

Others:

OLTL - Hugh Hughes. The man died and nobody even knew it because they assumed John was killed and Hugh was supposedly the bandaged up mute dude in the hospital bed. By the time the truth came out the only people who cared were his newfound mother and Vincent.

AMC - Gillian. Shot in the head because the assassin mistook her for Anna Devane.

GL - Dolly/Clone Reva. Overlooking the whole scifi aspect that turned some people off, there was a bleakness in the circumstance of a person who, during her short life, was not loved for the reality of who she was, who only existed because Reva had supposedly "died" and when Reva came back Dolly was not only rendered useless but a dangerous liability as well. And when she died, only Josh & Reva knew and couldn't even give her a public gravesite.

AW seemed to revel in bleak deaths in its final years when it killed off Frankie begging for her life to a serial killer and shot Gabe McNamara, showing us his guts splayed open on the operating table.

I think those stories where a character is killed in a case of mistaken identity (like Gillian) are especially bleak: GH's Bill Eckert killed in place of Luke; OLTL's Sam Rappaport shot by Lindsay mistaking him for Troy Macgiver. Storywise, it becomes less about remembering the character and tends to get reduced to being just another circumstance in the story of the surviving character.

Edited October 11, 201114 yr by applcin

Donna Ludlow, an early character on EastEnders, choked on her own vomit as she overdosed on heorin. Of course, the show played it off as an anti-drug story, but it was morbidly bleak all the same. Donna was Kathy's daughter, who was concieved by a rape when Kathy was 14. I've always assumed Donna was the prototype for McTavish's Kendall - at least with SMG in the role.

I'm glad others mentioned the Iris exit, because that was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this topic. I thought it was extremely sad even if you just took the story at face value, but, if you read into the backstage implications, it was even worse. For me, as a young teenager at the time, that was my first exposure to how any soap character who was not important to the current management - and especially a female character of a certain age - could just be cast off without any resolution. Poor AW seemed to be a laboratory for many of the dumb things that TPTB later did across the board that helped ruin the genre. I remember thinking when I saw some '80s OLTL clips on YouTube that even Paul Rauch at that time didn't have the gall to just leave Dorian rotting in that prison in which Robin Strasser believed he stuck her for a long time in order to demean her into quitting - by the time Dorian left, she had been exonerated and she left town triumphantly to spearhead prison reform in Mendorra or whatever.

DaytimeFan, I sort of agree that that last scene of Iris's could have been an amazing ending. I'm a sucker for those Edith Wharton reversal of fortune tales, but she plotted her books so meticulously that every misstep that the tragic (anti) heroine made converged (along with the underlying gender and socioeconomic injustices that were being critiqued) to bring about her downfall. Whereas on AW, even parts of Iris's most recent history that a relatively new viewer like me actually was aware of were ignored (hell, by her last few days, key plot points from the very story that precipitated her exit were thrown out the window). And it wasn't until years later that I learned what an extensive history Iris had on AW, and specifically that she had once been in Rachel's shoes - watching her groom-to-be get shot at the altar at their wedding. Was that ever addressed on-screen? Or the fact that Iris's biological mother, whom she had always been ashamed of, was an ex-convict, and I believe one of the most devastating revelations for Iris about her true parentage was that she had actually been born in a women's prison? If the writers had actually mined 20-25 years of Iris's history, it could have been an epic conclusion for the character. As it was, not so much.

To be fair, it also would have helped if I'd actually seen Iris's last scene at the time...my affiliate had an OJ Simpson preemption that day and it wasn't until well over a decade later when it turned up on YouTube that I actually got to watch it.

I absolutely love Edith Wharton's writing. The Custom of the Country is one of my favourite books. I definitely understand why you don't like it, I just try to see the positives in it. Especially as Carmen Duncan has gone on to a very happy and comfortable life in Australia.

I still like her exit line, "Life is too short for regrets"...she spat in Rachel's face, verbally, one last time.

I wish that scene was still on YouTube.

UK soaps tend to have a number of fairly bleak exits in general..

UK soaps are unbeatable when it comes to bleak exits. So many deaths at weddings, on Christmas eve, getting run over by trucks, explosions galore, dumped on the side of the road, set up for a crime or just taking one last look at the village and walking away never to be seen again. So few characters ever leave happy.

The UK soaps are so gritty and fabulous in even the bleakest of scenarios.

Marian's REALLY upset me, and I'm glad they gave her a happy ending, even if it was of course rushed. To have her locked up in an asylum like that, and her family seem to instantly forget her, isn't a nice way to think of a character who became so loved.

The scenes leading up to Marian's exit gave Jennifer Bassey a hell of a lot to work with and she acted the hell out of those scenes...but then to have Marian literally lose her mind and get guided off to an insane asylum...disgusting, it went so against who the character was, Marian was a "never say die" kind of character. She certainly would have faked insanity, but she never would have just lost it.

Again though, there was a great line to be found when Marian was being escorted out of the courtroom by the police, looked at Adam and exclaimed "I had to try! You didn't have the courage!". Hell of a line for a hell of an actress.

It seems Marian's exit personally offended Agnes Nixon, she brought her back and gave her a happy ending at the eleventh hour. I'm so glad she did.

UK soaps are unbeatable when it comes to bleak exits. So many deaths at weddings, on Christmas eve, getting run over by trucks, explosions galore, dumped on the side of the road, set up for a crime or just taking one last look at the village and walking away never to be seen again. So few characters ever leave happy.

The UK soaps are so gritty and fabulous in even the bleakest of scenarios.

I have always just been a casual watcher of the UK soaps that air here in Canada (Coronation Street, Emmerdale, and now more recently Eastenders), but nearly every exit I can think of was bleak, in some way. But it does suit their style more than the US soaps.

Also all the Alden's on Loving.

In hindsight I think Mari Jo Mason's exit on Y&R was pretty bleak for an actually fascinating character played by a viable actress who just seemed to fit in well on Y&R. I know it was always hinted that Mari Jo had a mysterious/bad past but after revisiting old clips and videos it saddens me Mari Jo got the short end of the stick in the end and went psycho.

The less said about Ben Reade's exit the better.

Wow...I guess I really wasn't paying attention to GL, I'd completely forgotten how A-M was written out.

Carly's Montana/presumed dead arc wasn't a maternity write out for Maura. (it was Sage's 2003 birth, and she was only "presumed dead" for maybe an episode.) Getting kidnapped to the Hell Spa in 2002 was. She didn't have another maternity leave until 2007.

Yeah, the worst part was A-M was actually thankful and happy.

Thanks for clearing that up for me, I guess I've always thought West was pregnant in real life when they wrote in Sage's pregnancy and she seemed to be off for a good month it seemed there before they found her in Montana.

Rosanna got bleak exits of her own as time passed, first being ran off the road and put into a coma, then slipping into a coma while in jail after committing several bad and illegal deeds, then having to leave town as a self-punishment/self-exile, and finally what a possible reunion with Craig?

Also all the Alden's on Loving.

But they were killed in harmless, loving ways, by design, Gwenyth was careful to design them that way

Edited October 12, 201114 yr by EricMontreal22

But they were killed in harmless, loving ways, by design, Gwenyth was careful to design them that way

Think of poor Jeremy he became a freaking sculpture .

UK soaps have four levels of exits -

Happy

Vanish/who cares

Death, but happy, or poignant moments in the throes (Jamie and Dennis on Eastenders)

Horribly depressing and agonizing (Pauline Fowler)

Hollyoaks always likes to have the last when they do fires. They did one for Steph Dean which was very poorly written and put together. I tend to prefer the one for poor Joe. The girl he was about to reconnect with called his cell phone, trying to get through to him after the pub fire/explosion.

Just for extra kicks, this clip had a popular heroine people assumed had made it then suddenly die from smoke inhalation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8MMeqjuLR0

Has Gwyn herself been mentioned? Psycho killer or not, that was pretty dang bleak.

Has Gwyn herself been mentioned? Psycho killer or not, that was pretty dang bleak.

No, she hadn't. You're right. It was awful. That whole story was so strong because they played the emotional beats most serial killer stories on soaps just touch on briefly.

Yeah, the worst part was A-M was actually thankful and happy.

How very Bauer of him.

Thanks for clearing that up for me, I guess I've always thought West was pregnant in real life when they wrote in Sage's pregnancy and she seemed to be off for a good month it seemed there before they found her in Montana.

She may have been off-screen for two or three weeks from when she skipped town and when Jack found her in Montana. And they tried to insinuate she was kidnapped, with bleak looking shots of her lying in bed with (the heretofore unknown) Hannah leaving her plates of food and stuff. And they pretty much dropped the entire Carjack/MikeMolly quad after the wedding and Sage's paternity reveal for the rest of the summer, which led to speculation the story had been retooled on orders from CBS. So I understand confusing it with one of Maura's maternity leaves...it was one of the few times Carly was ever backburnered. But it coincided with Howarth's arrival, so I think that may have ate up airtime.

Rosanna got bleak exits of her own as time passed, first being ran off the road and put into a coma, then slipping into a coma while in jail after committing several bad and illegal deeds, then having to leave town as a self-punishment/self-exile, and finally what a possible reunion with Craig?

LOL...yeah, her convienent stress-induced coma relapse seemed bizarre and punishment for not taking Paul's infidelity with a curtsy and a smile.

I absolutely love Edith Wharton's writing. The Custom of the Country is one of my favourite books. I definitely understand why you don't like it, I just try to see the positives in it. Especially as Carmen Duncan has gone on to a very happy and comfortable life in Australia.

Aah, The Custom of the Country... After I posted what I did, it actually crossed my mind that only Edith Wharton's earlier work (maybe just House of Mirth) was comparable to what Iris's end on AW was/could have been; as Wharton honed her irony, her endings gotten even bleaker in some regards than anything soaps have ever done. Custom took the cake. Good stuff, though, to be sure.

Like I said, when I finally saw Iris's last scene on YouTube after missing it due to preemption, I saw the potential there, and that was a great line. As it was, at the time, I hadn't realized she'd been written out for some time...of course AW was terrible about updating that "You take me away to..." opening (I think we saw Iris in her Snowflake Ball dress every day for about a year after that) and I remember even checking the end credits weeks after her last scenes when I was starting to wonder, and she was still listed. Being a young and naive viewer at the time, I thought the actress was on vacation and when she finally returned, we would see some "women in prison" story culminating in her release. I wondered who else would end up in prison with her...

I still wonder what exactly happened behind the scenes. At first, Iris accidentally shooting Carl seemed like a silly summer story and after Carl recovered and they were all back in Bay City (I think there was even a surprisingly witty comic relief story with an amnesiac Carl having a thing for Iris) I figured it would be forgotten/swept under the rug. Then it turned serious at some point and Iris was arrested, but I can't help but think that if they knew all along they were going to have a trial and all of that they would have at least had the shooting take place in Bay City. I've heard conflicting rumors that the show decided not to renew CD's contract or she quit and they were going to recast but that later got scrapped in a behind-the-scenes change (not when Jill Farren Phelps took over, surprisingly - I believe there was another EP in between - although JFP allowing Beverlee McKinsey's first legendary soap character to slip through the cracks like that would have made for a more historic footnote).

Either way, it seemed like there was an impetus to get the character off the canvas asap. At that point, though, the most efficient way to do that would have been for Iris to see the writing on the wall and go on the lam. Her whole trial took place in, like, a day (right after the jury found her guilty the judge said "I am prepared to sentence you here and now to..." which I'm pretty sure would have been automatic grounds for an appeal in a real trial) and, again, took place halfway across the country from the scene of the crime. As though they didn't have time to put out a casting call for some extra and had to turn to the show's current recurring district attorney actor.

Whatever was really going on, I think maybe toward the very end one or more of the script or breakdown writers who had been with the show for a while recognized the gravitas - that this was the last time we might ever see this character who had been an integral part of the show on and off for two decades, and that it was a tragic end - and wrote some individual scenes for (almost) all they were worth. (For some reason, I still vividly remember a really jarring scene where Paulina, at the beginning of that dopey story where she signed away her trust fund because Jake was too proud to live off of her money, had a rare sisterly moment with Iris, who in her newfound wisdom confided that she wished she'd given away every cent she had and married her most recent ex-boyfriend and left the Cory fold when she had the chance. As contrived as that scene was, it was kind of touching.) But nobody higher up seemed to think that viewers would care that Iris was gone or notice if she was only mentioned a handful of times ever again, so the impact of her send-off wasn't reinforced in the big picture, and I think the soap press wasn't paying attention to AW by that point because I can't remember anyone calling out the show's handling of this.

And then within months Iris's sister was playing out a "star-crossed love story" with the character who framed Iris, who became a romantic hero, only for Amanda herself to be written out abruptly by the next regime (I think that one was JFP) and then return a few years later under yet another regime to do the same kinds of things Iris had done to break up Rachel and Carl. Even that could have been powerful family drama, in which Iris continued to cast a shadow on the Corys even off-screen from prison, but it didn't seem like Amanda threw her half-sister under the bus because of the legitimate reasons that she would have had to hate her - it was more like she just didn't care much about her one way or the other. And when a show's core family couldn't care less about each other, why should viewers care about those characters?

Edited October 12, 201114 yr by DeliaIrisFan

Think of poor Jeremy he became a freaking sculpture .

He loved art

I admit, the murders were still done pretty creepy/bleak. The two most for me was Curtis in the water therapy tub at the insane asylum (a kill Brown/Esensten seemed to borrow from Halloween II, and actually I have no idea of how drowning or being boiled alive or whatever was meant to be loving and peaceful, maybe she sedated him first, I should rewatch those creepy scenes), and as mentioned Gwen herself.

No, she hadn't. You're right. It was awful. That whole story was so strong because they played the emotional beats most serial killer stories on soaps just touch on briefly.

ANd ironically when The City a year later tried a copycat story--that was one reason it really didn't work. But yeah, there's really never been a serial killer story on any soap to compare IMHO (and I still give B/E some affection because of it)