What if James E. Reilly had written your soap?

[y&r_fan]

JER at Y&R would only have been marginally worse than MAB I think.

[CCCapwell]

I believe a big part of Corday allowing Reilly to get into SciFi or whatever you want to call it was the fact NBC Daytime was overseen by a guy who proposed to cancel all the NBC soaps in 1992 as the entire lineup was at the bottom of the ratings. He canceled Santa Barbara and replaced it with game shows. Corday knew he had to jumpstart the ratings so he let Reilly do buried alive the ratings in 1993 started to rise and the gameshows failed and were quickly canceled. NBC was happy and decided to keep DAYS and AW and Corday and NBC wanted more shocking stories so we got Satan and all the rest. So it was the perfect storm that created the environment for Reilly to try his bag of tricks. It wouldn't have happened on other soaps as ABC and CBS weren't as desperate enough to allow Reilly to go down his path

[soapfan770]

That was John Rohrbeck who came up with the game show fiasco. He later ended up leaving NBC for rehab(no joke!) and was replaced by Susan Lee. Of course Susan Lee had major issues too, especially in the PR department(it got her fired).

[MontyB]

Oh hell. You got me up here cracking up!

[saynotoursoap]

I agree. Writers will write what the network or the audience wants. Reilly would not have written nonsense without a reason. His work at Guiding Light was good, and although it went against the grain of the show itself, for pure drama his work at Ryan's Hope was fine, too.

Personally, I never understood all the hate for Jim Reilly. He was no worse than any other writer of the era. It was certainly superior to that of the supposed soap saviors Ron Carlivati and Hogan Sheffer, and unlike those two, at least Reilly's work was often entertaining.

[DRW50]

I guess it might be down to the passion of the DAYS fanbase. I hated Sheffer's writing, for me he's the worst soap writer (or very close), but I'm not sure if ATWT fans were very vocal about it.

[saynotoursoap]

Agreed regarding Sheffer, at least he seems the most misogynistic to me.

[DRW50]

That's putting it mildly, but I guess I shouldn't say anymore since the thread's on JER.

I think JER's writing for his first DAYS run is generally very solid, sometimes it's fantastic, and he seemed to refocus what feels like a very aimless show (if the bits of 1992 I've seen are any indication). I do think something happened after that, either in his writing or his relationship with NBC (and Corday).

[jfung79]

First you say, "Writers will write what the network or the audience wants" as a general disclaimer dismissing the validity of any criticism of Reilly, implying we can't know what he would really write without those constraints, then you attack other writers who have had ratings success. Seems contradictory to me. I think Sheffer is overrated but he did have some success getting viewers and acclaim to ATWT. My judgment is still out on Carlivati -- I'm loving him giving me what feels like "the real GH" (80s/90s) back so far in the few weeks I've started watching again, but it's only been a few weeks -- but his impact on the ratings since he started on GH last year has been strong. The show is up huge year to year.

I really doubt Reilly's repetitious writing with people standing around with their shirts off in the same place for a week was because that's what the audience wants. Earlier in his career, he probably had more people reining him in, but by the time he was writing Passions, he was writing his vision for soap opera, and I found it was not watchable most of the time that I happened across it.

[sungrey]

Okay, I'll bite.

First off... Reilly's time at GL with Stephen Demorest and Nancy Curlee was excellent. That trio really knew how to write good, solid drama with a little bit of the fanciful thrown in at times (Ross's election dream, etc.)

I also thought, for the most part, Reilly's first run at Days was good. He seemed to get the history of the show, effectively referring to long-dead characters like Addie and understanding the soap's bible.

The possession may have been his undoing. I still think stories like that don't have a place on daytime TV (it would have been excellent on Dark Shadows... a show that may have been solid had it been revived under JER's pen). The ratings boost during that story may have convinced Jim that he had to top himself.

I was not a fan of Passions at all. (Yes, I watched Another World. I'll get that out of the way now) I realized that style of writing would not have worked on Days, but what did NBC do? Brought him back for a second go-round. Anyone with the clairvoyance to look way ahead knew this wasn't going to end well, but if you dared voice your opinion against JER back in 2003 you were deemed an idiot, an A-hole, etc.

I tried very hard to stop from saying "I told you so" after Melaswen. Needless to say, my favorite day in Days' recent history was the day he got canned.

While I wasn't a big fan of his at the end, I was sad to see his passing. Of course, now we'll never know what he really had in mind.

[dannigold]

His second stint at Days was ruined because, it was too much for one man, to headwrite two soaps at once. Most headwriters struggles with 5 hours a week, JER was writing 10 hours a week for 4 years.

[Cheap21]

OMG, DEAD! I love how Chit hasn't posted in this thread since. This thing is her anti-repellant...lol

[chicklitsandfantasies]

This makes him worse than the rest of them

I was so annoyed Valerie got ruined for that crap!

[Gray Bunny]

I feel like Reilly ran out of all creative ideas after 1997. By the time he got to Passions, he already had to recycle his same ideas (burying Sheridan alive, using demons/hell/the devil etc.) to try to shock people into watching Passions, but the problem was, by 1999, the daytime audience was used to (and tired of) over-the-top plots thanks to DAYS in the 90's, Sunset Beach, and other wackadoo plotlines that most of the other soaps were trying out in attempts to cash in on DAYS' ratings success (cloning, mind control, miracle plastic surgery, etc.).

I didn't watch DAYS before Reilly's mid-90's era, so I can't get into specifics about how the show was before 1993, but what I do know is that I enjoyed the mid-90's era immensely, but anything Reilly did afterwards just seemed like desperate attempts to relive the glory years of his successful 1993-1997 reign.