All My Children AMC: The Prospect Park Era (old production thread)

[Vee]

It's nice to hear they'd planned to make the whole CorTech/David medical tech plotline go somewhere important. They had a lot of balls in the air and the show was really excellent. OLTL was also drawing some of the various plot strands together but it'd had a rockier road getting to where it was by the end.

[ellabelle]

I don't know for sure that's where they'd intended to go, but it made sense as Kendall was apparently sick - we saw her in a bed looking ill as Bianca gave her some medication - and David had a heart-related device he was testing. I mean, unless Oliver or someone else was going to develop a heart condition, Kendall was the most logical choice.

[Steve]

Damn, damn, damn that they couldn't get the funding to continue! I would've loved to have seen Miranda's paternity play out along with David & Cara fighting for custody of Oliver.

So was I.

ICAM! There were several intertwined stories going and for the first time in ages, it felt like classic AMC again.

[ellabelle]

I will freely admit that there were a lot of things I didn't like about nuAMC, but I thought it had potential and that they were setting up some good stuff with David/Pete, David/Cara/Oliver/JR, Miranda/AJ, etc. I'm still disappointed it didn't work out better for PP.

[DramatistDreamer]

This is an interesting article in the NYT about the online shows being shut out of the Primetime Emmys. I had a similar feeling when the PP online soaps first debuted, that perhaps Daytime network dramas (who were less than welcoming) might have felt a bit threatened by the newcomers. Notice a similar pattern: won some Creative Emmys while totally shut out of the Main Emmy awards.

Of course PP did not exactly endear themselves or engender goodwill in how they did, pretty much everything. They did however, produce two good online shows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/arts/television/explaining-status-quo-at-emmy-awards.html

[marceline]

I got an email from Hulu with some updates to the site and one of the things they talked about was how great the response to their original programming has been. It makes me want to punch sad clowns because I think that the PP shows would be fairly successful by now if they'd just had the chance to build an audience.

[Vee]

I think they were doing reasonably well on Hulu under the circumstances, or so I recall from the numbers. The real issue was not those numbers IMO or the audience, which was growing more and more, it was that PP simply could not sustain the production, audience or not. They had an insane expectation for how fast the shows would turn a profit.

You had these speedballing L.A. guys who had no concept of how to maintain a soap production schedule, who had bet the house (and a lot of other people's money) on these things taking off like they were Scandal overnight, and even Scandal didn't necessarily do that. And those shows are on network television. PP seemed to expect a massive return on investment immediately from the online soaps which would make them whole, so they neglected to pay just about anyone on time. They produced amazing-looking soaps (with real music, etc.) for a fraction of the network cost, but they did end up going overbudget to some extent. (And while I think real, good music is important to soaps, like all the really excellent EDM they played at Shelter - and I still remember them playing Lorde before she was really Lorde last summer for Pete and Celia in NYC - I still can't get over them using Sonny and Cher and the Rolling Stones on OLTL for thirty seconds for no good reason. Talk about a waste of money.) And while I think it is incredibly laudable that they apparently brought both(?) shows in for 30 million or close to it - which is somewhere in the neighborhood of GH's current budget - I don't think we have no idea how overbudget they really were or would have been if they had actually paid people.

You had a boutique Hollywood sensibility being applied to a daytime product, which was wonderful to see for the first time in however many years - because you had people coming in from outside who wanted to use real music, who wanted to do new stories and use new ideas that were outside the usual daytime curve, not unlike a Linda Gottlieb. But Linda Gottlieb had had the massive ABC apparatus and money behind her. These guys just had venture capital and a lot of gambling. So they put out great product, but on borrowed time and cash. It was a wonderful ethos, but the way they handled it in execution BTS was, IMO, a disgrace. They treated the people well, yes, they meant well, yes, and that's all very important. But the way they ended it, and they way they failed to pay just about anyone was beyond unacceptable.

The only way it could have worked out would have been for someone else - Disney, ABC, whoever - to come in and backstop it financially. And that was not going to happen, thanks to all the strife.

[te.]

I said the same thing in the Corday "net soaps" thread that I had hoped that they had planned ahead at least 2-3 years and prepared to take a loss and not earn money immediately. In theory, soaps moving to the web is the next logical step, just how they went from radio to tv all those years ago, especially now that people don't have the time to sit down daily at the same to watch them and in theory new viewers could easily catch up with old episodes if they wanted to. Sadly, I think because PP was running against a deadline to launch these before the rights went back to ABC, it all went tits up.

Perhaps we'll see the true potential of a web based soap once NBC dumps Days, then again, perhaps not.

[John]

PP screwed up in 3 ways as I see it

1) Allowing GH to use OLTL characters

2) Not hiring a pR firm that understood daytime dramas & its fan base

3) Paying a lisence fee. Every year they owed. 4 Mil for oLTL & 4.5 Mil for AMC and that was annually

I would have negoiated that ABC recieve profit participation and thats it. A certain percentage

By doing the lisence fees, PP was shooting themselves having to PAY ABC Money and being in the whhole. They could have used that money to continue production

Plus maybe if ABC were only paid a percentage they would have been more willing to work with PP snce that way the shws being a success would have meant more dollars in ABC's pockets

[Vee]

How does this show get better every time I watch it? How?

I am back at the tail end of Pete and Celia's New York trip, which plays a lot better now knowing they leveled off on the story later on (Jordan Lane Price also is a lot better in smaller doses, with the vets and Brooke Newton to play off of). I wish we could've gotten a straight answer on the Celia SL. I know they cut a lot of the original material, where Billy Clyde was apparently revealed to be her father, presumably for rewrites. I had found some of the cutting with her and Dimitri to be a little too convenient, and began to suspect she was related to Gillian or the Maricks, which would have been a nice swerve - I believe Agnes was always very fond of Gillian.

I remember that I had originally mistook the picture in Celia's locket for an ancient picture of Francesca James, but it apparently wasn't her. I'd like to believe they would have eventually tied Evelyn back to Kitty and Kelly, though.

I know Jared Kaplan used to lurk on the board and I was very tempted to bug him on plot details for these shows a while back. But I'm not a big bugger.

(And yes, I am trying to update my sig.)

[LeClerc]

There are two story bibles I would kill to get at: Lisa Connor and Agnes' bible for "season 2" of AMC Online (I'm just going to assume Chip Hayes sat by himself in the corner watching old eps of Melrose Place while LC and Aggie worked) and Kay Alden's bible for AMC in 2007.

[allmc2008]

I thought Kay was offered and she turned it down?

[LeClerc]

I believe Frons turned her down. She made no secret of the fact that she wanted the HW spot in a speech she gave in early May 2007. A few weeks later Esensten & Brown were named HW.

All she has said about her bible (as far as I know) is that she felt the show had had way too many "events" (kidnappings, murders, stabbings etc etc) such that they had no impact anymore. So she wrote a bible that included none of those things and which repositioned the canvas so that it was ready to take off come November sweeps 2007.

Meanwhile Esensten & Brown submitted their "Crash" story projection, with a car going off a cliff, a deaf baby, a premature birth, psychopath Richie etc.

With Frons making the decision Alden's approach never stood a chance.

[cassadine1991]

Alden had a story Bible for All My Children?? She would been a good choice as HW

I also wonder about Jessica Klein and Marin Gazzaniga's Bibles for OLTL

[Vee]

I'm not convinced there were any bibles whatsoever.

I was initially down on Chip Hayes given some of his background on my Spelling soaps when he started, but was later informed that he was actually apparently one of the more solid writers on AMC in the 2000s. Same with Jessica Klein - they came from a turbulent era in the Spelling soaps, but they took the good with the bad in those days, like most soap writers, and I think I was more quick to judge due to what Chuck Pratt had done to AMC. As it happened, I noticed no major difference once each took over at AMC and OLTL.