Members Cheap21 Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 IDA. Pacing is a vital component to storytelling. Alot of good stories have potential but the audience loses interest bc the pacing moves so slow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Khan Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 Frankly, even I am guilty of over-generalizing audiences' attention spans. One person's "too slow" is another's "not slow enough"; and it does truly vary from person to person. That's something TPTB fail to understand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rlj Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I agree with errol. I was not a fan of Reilly, on Dats (though I was facinated by the Devil story) his stories dragged on waaaay too long and the dialogue was elementary imo, which is another reason why I didnt like Passions. However Bell could drag a story out Y&R and I was always fascinated and intrigued LOL. I also was entirely a fan of Marland's ATWT, I hated those scenes where you had 6 or 7 characters in one place talking to each other as they moved from one spot to another in said place, he also did it on GL too. What years was Weston on GL ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members John Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 The HW was Susan Seaforth Hayes' (Julie) Mom, Elizabeth Harrower. Susan even admitted in her & Bill's book that her mom was not good at all for Days. 2003-2004 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members frequentsoapfan Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 Reilly was the worst when it came to dragging out storylines, he was wort with it on Passions then on DAYS though. And then revealed always happened to be the day I didn't tune in. But they can't drag out stories for 6 months anymore. There are other daytime viewing options beyond soaps. I know most days when I'm bored there's different channels I can turn to for syndicated reruns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Susan Hunter Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 Some criticisms of Jim Reilly are fair. Most aren't. It wasn't his fault that everyone tried to copy his style without truly understanding what made it work. Soap opera has always been doing that. When something is successful on one soap, the others start copying it, usually to horrible results. Remember all the young people and dark lighting that showed up on the soaps in the 70s? All the guys with perms and spy organizations that showed up in the 80s? Reilly said it over and over again in his interviews. You 'beat the drum' to get them to tune in and they'll stick around for the stories that soaps have been telling forever. And c'mon lets be real here, was anything written by James Reilly as over the top as attempting to freeze the world? And Jim Reilly received carte blanche at NBC for the simple fact that he turned Days into a big success which kept their afternoon lineup profitable. Think about it, because of Days success in the 90s, Another World probably lasted a few more years longer than it should have. Aaron Spelling developed a daytime soap and Passions was created. Now Sunset Beach wasn't my cup of tea and I hung in with Passions for about 5 seasons, but the fact that NBC was developing new soaps and trying to build a lineup was because of the success of Days. Which was all Jim Reilly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SOAPSFOREVER Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I agree. Henry Slesar was brilliant. A very humble man, he didn't have the ego of a Harding Lemay or some of the other greats, but his episodes were tight, well-paced and plotted. Over 15 years he had a few clunkers, but EDGE was a thinking man or woman's soap. Slesar never gets the credit he's due. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DRW50 Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 And Slesar adapted his writing style to change with the times. If you watch Edge episodes from the late 70's, they stand up to anything on TV today. Soaps today are far more regressive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members frequentsoapfan Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 Lol funny cuz I beleive Reilly was on the GH writing team when they tried to freeze the world. I'll give it to him that he knew how to write a triangle(aside from the biased writing of Ethan/Theresa/Gwen) because if one couple started being liked more than the other, he would write against the other couple to even out sides. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members foxhunter Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 DAYS - The 2nd half of Reilly 1.0 fell apart for me. Before that I loved it. The Paris Adventure was so good, but there were bad signs at the time that I missed (ie virtual goggles and that guillotine mess). The Secret Room was the beginning of the end. Towards the end of that reign it became glaringly obvious that JER ran out of ideas and was only able to write love triangles. I was only interested in John/Marlena/Kristen but JER was determined to drive Kristen in the ground and she was my favourite. But liking Kristen was sacrilege because Marlena was a saint. The Jungle Adventure was WTF dumb. Reilly 2.0 was just. Plain. Bad. There was definitely a FU feeling to his writing. Dr. North. Iraq. The trillion deaths of Jack. And the island. Awful awful stuff. PASSIONS - By the time Reilly was at Passions he was utterly lazy and had no originality left. Now I would argue that Passions was Plot Driven and not Character Driven but for the most part there was no plot with Passions. Nothing happened. Just people talking about what happened. It was very boring. Bad acting. Bad sets. Bad writing. The ratings NEVER justified its existence. To say that most of the teens or next generation of soap viewers preferred Passions to the rest of the pack is like saying 14000 of 20000 12-17 viewers who what daytime watch Passions. Its still an overinflated number that was used to argue its popularity. By the time the show got to DirectTV that's when JER REALLY tried to get the headlines but that didn't work. There was something so meh about Julian getting his son/daughter pregnant and Jaunita (or whoever) trying to kill everyone. The show should have ended with her bomb going off instead of Harmony being engulfed by lava. The cumulative effect of Reilly's writing really painted a disturbing picture of his psyche. YR - This was is tricky for me. Alden was terrible. The show was boring and slow and things seemed goofy. Even when Bell's YR was boring you always KNEW that they were building to something and that when it happened it was going to be HUGE. Alden's writing was just flat lining through most of it. Then there was Jack Smith. His stories were no better and he butchered Sheila's return. At least he tried to show how Sheila got into Lauren's head by tormenting her but the story was dull and fell flat. By the time he was done YR didn't seem like YR. I loved LML at first, then I hated her and I stopped watching by the time the Pheila story started. Her's was the first "you can't miss YR because something always happens" style of writing but then the shows went off the tracks. That style of story-telling continued with MAB. I was really into the show when MAB brought back Ashely right up until Adam and Sharon part 1. Then there was the Chipmunk. I could not understand how anyone associated with the show would allow a man in a cheap chipmunk costume eat up the screen time. I looked so bad. The Marge/Katherine 2.0 story started off so good but ended so badly. Then MAB got worse. Patty. Sarah. Tucker. I don't even see their appeal on paper. Out of the four of them I cannot tell which one is the worst because sampling Alden and Smith's work on BB does not bode well for them. For me those are the hacks that ruined their respective shows. Though I cannot deny that JER saved NBC Daytime while creatively destroying it at the same time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Kylie Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 Ack, which soap is being cursed with Pissant? My vote for biggest hack goes to Megan "shut up and let me tell my story" McTavish. I'm going to give Lorriane Broderick special mention for her last one run on AMC. I thought sh was treading MMT territory. Yeah, I said it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Skin Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I think Megan is one of the better writers AMC had (yes non-abortion and all), especially considering the last four or five teams AMC ended up with in it's final years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members frequentsoapfan Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I remember insiders at Passions saying one of the endings for Passions filmed was a cliffhanger with the bomb going off. I kind actually wouldn've liked to see that end just because I didn't find that the ending fit the show well after all the crazyness that had went on that year. I was a teen during some of Passions years, and yeah all the teens I knew actually either watched Passions or GH for Sonny and Jason. I did not think the sets were bad. The Crane mansion set was actually very nice, so was the Crane pool house. Now Fancy's bedroom was very childish but for the most part the sets were not bad. I saw soem of 90s DAYS and did like some of it. It had way more spark then than it does now. Gh is stuck with Passante after all she was just associate headwrite at OLTL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Skin Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I was surprised at how young the Passions fanbase was when I started watching it on and off from 2002-2005, there were a lot of girls and women who I knew who would watch it. Not religiously but they were very aware of it. Most of them were college aged or younger around Highschool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DRW50 Posted April 8, 2012 Members Share Posted April 8, 2012 I remember Michael Logan, when talking about worst of 1997, claiming that Reilly did that stuff to sabotage DAYS on his way out the door. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.