Best & Worst Soaps: Less than 10 Years On Air Division

[j swift]

Just for clarification, I was 3-years-old when it premiered, and we only went to nursery school three mornings a week, but it was an emblem in my memory of how boring tv could be for a kid before children's daytime television became a thing.  This was right before Sesame Street premiered, and kindergarten was still voluntary, so pre-school kids my age in big cities wound up watching a lot of adult TV.  My most visceral memory is the talking heads, which in retrospect, were probably way ahead of their time.

 

To be perfectly honest, I thought SB ran for more than a decade, otherwise, it would have been on my original list. It is my favorite first episode of a soap and I think the use of the time jump in the pilot was very influential for future soaps.  

   

 

I also considered Loving, but it was so variable in its run that I cannot decide which list I would place it on, overall. 

Edited May 26, 2019 by j swift

[danfling]

One of the major reasons that How to Survive a Marriage seemed so dull  may have been that the words of its initial writer, Anne Howard Bailey, could not be changed.  The performers were instructed to never change a single word, and that made the show wordy and possibly dull.

[vetsoapfan]

 

Well, no toddler can decipher all the complex nuances of adult conversation, and I daresay that 3-year-olds would find even universally-acknowledged classics like Little Women, Pride and Prejudice or Hamlet to be largely incomprehensible and/or tedious. At that young age, I found Irna Phillip's and Agnes Nixon's shows dull too. All the people did was talk!  It's unfortunate that you cannot sample HTSAM (particularly Edelstein's reign as headwriter) now.

[robbwolff]

 

Was Edelstein writing HTSAM when David Bachman had his fatal heart attack? I was around 11 at the time and those scenes were riveting. I would love to see Edelsten's stint on HTSAM. I wasn't impressed with his short stint as head writer of The Doctors in the 1969 reruns. There was a noticeable shift in the writing as soon as Rita Lakin left. There was a unique intelligence in the writing when Lakin was there that disappeared as soon as she was gone. I think he only last five or six months before Ira Avery replaced him. I would love to know what Edelstein planned for Julie Forrest, who changed drastically under Ira Avery and Stanley Silverman.

[vetsoapfan]

 

Yes, that story unfolded under Edelstein. You're right: it was riveting and brilliant. I sobbed like I had known Fran Bachman for decades, LOL. I'm glad that the actress who played the role, Fran Brill, won the Best Actress in a Single Sequence that year at the Afternoon TV awards. She deserved it.

 

I agree that Rita Lakin was better than Edelstein on The Doctors; she was that soap's best scribe during its run, IMHO, but then again, some writers just end up being better suited for certain shows. Ann Marcus was very good on Search for Tomorrow. Under her pen, the ratings took a huge and sudden swing upwards. She was also perfect for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Unfortunately, when she followed Pat Falken Smith on Days of Our Lives, she was DREADFUL. To me, her work on DAYS was the worst of her entire career. It was so terrible that I wrote a furious letter to Betty Corday, the first and last time I have ever written to the producer of a show.

[amybrickwallace]

I think they packed so much story in that time that SB seemed that it lasted longer than 8.5 years.

[Marissa Gallant]

You know that I will always love Santa Barbara. CC and Sophia forever. Julia and Mason forever. Cruz and Eden.

And the last few years were so awful that they don't count. So, it's an odd one, AGAIN, because it really is almost like 2 shows. One is the best, the other one of the worst.

[AMCOLTLLover]

Sunset Beach and Dark Shadows were my stuff! Loved every minute of both sjows

Passions had 2 bad years out of 9 but I still managed to pull through loved it.

peyton place was hit or miss! 
 

worst:

santa Barbara! Yeah there were a lot of good storys and great actors/actresses on it but this show was more camp than Passions! I hated that they made it about Eden/Cruz and when Eden left u could see that show falling apart

[Khan]

TBH, I've always maintained a love/hate relationship with SANTA BARBARA.  The show often had great moments/scenes, or string of episodes, but it also had the shortest attention span of any soap I've ever watched.  Potentially great storylines were always killed before they had a chance to develop, either because Charles Pratt, Jr. lost interest (as he tended to do...a lot), or because he was more concerned about keeping viewers (and himself) on their toes than about simply telling a good, complete story, or because he COULDN'T tell a good, complete story, or a combination thereof.

And I know the Pam Long/Paul Rauch period has its' many detractors, but I personally give that regime props for recognizing that SB needed to become a more conventional soap if it was ever going to survive.  It's just a shame that it was all a case of "too little, too late."