Fri Sept 1 1972
New Cycle For TV Soap Operas Expected By Cecil Smith
Last year or so, CBS dominated the daytime TV ratings with its soap operas. Now it's drowning in its own suds. Gloria Monty says the field is oversaturated. She believes a new suds cycle is inevitable and she doubts it will ever go back to the old form again. "The transition," she said, "will be from daytime serials to daytime serialization." She explained: "Serialization is what I grew up on in stories in The Saturday Evening Post. It's what "The Forsyte Saga' is. Stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. The serial as we know it in daytime television has none of these—it just goes on eternally." She should know.
Gloria is to daytime television what, say, Antoinette Perry for whom the Tony Awards were named) was to the theater. That's an idea. Maybe there should be awards for daytime TV called the Montys. She's one of the very few women in any branch of show business who, like the late Miss Perry, functioned successfully over a period of years as a director. First Director Gloria directed the first soap opera—or daytime serial—ever to be on television, The First 100 Years, with Jimmy Lydon and Anne Sargent in 1950. For nearly 16 years, she guided the troubled barometer of Secret Storm with Haila Stoddard. She first came here from New York to launch the articulate Bright Promise, which may have been a bit too bright for the audience.
She's here again to launch another of ABC's experiments in new ways to go in daytime television. This is again a 90 minute taped "movie," a legal melodrama this time called Courtroom One. Like the recent Honeymoon Suite, which lit no fires, this is another effort from Doug Cramer's unit at Screen Gems. It's rather like a woman's version of The Defenders. The lawyers are male, a father-son team played by James Craig and Stephen Young. But the judge is a woman: Marjorie Lord. And the case is one with a strong female appeal, "Mother Against Mother" by Richard DeRoy, a child custody'trial,In the guest cast are Don Galloway, Rosemary Prinz and Robin Strasser, all of whom worked with Gloria Monty on soap operas, plus John Conte, the host of the best daytime show in TV history, Matinee Theater.
Six-Week Drama
"As the structure for a series," said Gloria, "the lawyers and judge would be continuing characters, but each case would be a new drama with a new cast to run in daily half-hour episodes for five or six weeks—beginning, middle and end. "You could tell much stronger stories, knowing they would not have to stretch beyond their normal limitations. You could get better casts—many fine actors who wouldn't tie themselves up for an eternal serial would work in a six-week drama."
Gloria Monty was born Montemuro (in Union City, N.J.), but halved her name; she studied drama at the University of Iowa a few years after Tennessee Williams drifted through. Her first love was, and is, the stage—live TV in the days of the early soaps was a reasonable facsimile. As in the case of Bright Promise, she is here to launch Courtroom One, after which she'll return to New York where her husband Tom O'Byrne heads the state travel bureau. There's a steady flow of network propaganda that large male audiences watch General Hospital and other soaps, this Miss Monty dismisses as poppycock—"The audience is women. Stories must be close to a woman's heart." Such as? Gloria shrugged. "The best woman's story I know is John O'Hara's 'Appointment in Samarra.' That could have been created for daytime serialization, it is perfect. Another is "Pygmalion.' "l remember we tried a variation of 'Pygmalion' within the format of Secret Storm. John Colicos played it. He was wonderful and the audience loved it.
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Paul Raven ·
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