ALL--Large Families, helping or hurting soaps?

[slick jones]

Alex Schaefe  in 83,84. Allan Miller 86-88. Herbert (Will Hunt) was murdered. Quentin's second wife, Betsy was played by Peggy Walker Walton.   Celia (Sherilyn Wolter) married both  Grant Andrews and Jimmy Lee Holt.

[Dr Neil Curtis]

Ok I remember reading about a Celia and Alexandria Quartermaine

[slick jones]

I think Alex Q was cousin to Quentin  and niece to Edward. Her relation to the PC Quartermaines wasn't really specified.   

[cassadine1991]

She's Edward's niece.

I think Betsy is actually his third wife. 

[juppiter]

This is something the execs are pathologically obsessed with. They always blame it on the fans saying, “the fans want to know that the characters are related.” When I don’t think that is the case.

 

often you would have new characters become unexpectedly popular and they would rush to retcon them as a long lost family member. Well if the audience already liked them, were they really demanding that the characters be related?

[Dr Neil Curtis]

Exactly! I hate they did that with Daniel on Days. He should have just be Daniel, Victor’s Godson. And making Melanie his daughter with Carly was just stupid too. Mel could have been Robbins and Nicole’s child. No ties to the already huge Horton family. 

[ajsp35801]

It only becomes a problem after 3 generations when almost every grandchild is related. 

 

I've always thought that TPTB make new characters related to core families for two reasons: 

A) viewers care about the core families so they instinctively care about anyone related to those core families. It's lazy and keeps them from having to put in the work to endear there characters to the viewers. 

B ) they want other characters on canvas to care about what's going on with the new character to give the new characters someone to interact with and their story relevance. Hence,  they tend to marry into the core families for ties to provide them story and airtime, i.e. the anchor baby. 

[Winchester91]

The best thing Gottlieb ever did was ignore the "core family" bullcrap and introduced the Carpenters, Nora, Luna, Marty, practically all in one go. Practically brought the show out of the dumps. 

[Soaplovers]

 

The difference was that all those characters were tied to Core characters.. first as support until viewers grew used to them.

 

If you think about it, Marty/Andrew were both tied to Megan and her illness.. and once Megan passed.. they paired Andrew with Cassie (another core character) and Marty caused trouble for other core characters.   And Nora was an attorney with an exhusband and daughter that were already on (and those characters were paired with long term characters).. and Luna was paired with Max/Tina as the comic support for several months.

 

I didn't like how Marland introduced the Snyders... they practically had a family set and I felt were shoved down peoples throats fairly early in their run.

[slick jones]

Meaning  who her parents were. It never said whether she was related to the  Herbert branch of the family.