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When was your favorite soap broken?


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Yes, Jack Smith. Honestly, I think they wanted to neutralize the Kay/Jill feud. They never would've done so themselves, so making them mother/daughter would eventually lead to a truce, a joining at the hip, and languishing. Which is exactly what happened.

 

 

Exactly! Especially a Billy and Mac BABY would've kept them going for another 10 years with good writing. But, again, they wanted it done.

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I'm with Gray Bunny.

 

DAYS broke when JER came back for his second stint, which was also the same time, IMO, that Passions started to really decline. I don't know how Reilly thought he can handle the demands and the pressure of writing two 60 minute soaps simultaneously. The greats struggled when they were writing two 30 minutes soaps. A mid-level soap writer like Reilly had no chance.

Edited by AbcNbc247
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GL was broken so many different times. I'd say the damage beyond repair was when P&G decimated so much of the show's structure and cast from 81-84. The show had good periods in later years, especially 89-92 or so, but was in a fragile state, which it never would have been if they had handled those key years more carefully. 

 

I believe that the GL of 2009 could have, with some changes, still continued on - there were much worse periods in the show's history. But they couldn't get past all the mistakes that had taken them to where they were.

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AMC: Although his impact was not on-screen yet, I had a feeling of doom when, in his first interview, Brian Frons  essentially said that the only characters that really interested him were Simone, Aidan, Maggie (at the time, all three had been on the show less than a year and were poorly-developed and pointless) and Greenlee, and that he hated everything else about the show. For me, the "What Women Want" episode that launched Fusion signaled the breaking of the show. When McTavish returned, she put some of the pieces back together for a while, but then smashed it to smithereens with the callous way in which she wrote out Edmund. Edmund had become a bore, and John Callahan has been phoning it in for years, but that was just insulting and awful. To me, it was at that point that McTavish's third HW stint went off the rails, which started a downward spiral the show never recovered from. 

Edited by LeClerc
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Is that the period when everyone on GL lived in the same room at the Beacon, and you could grab a cup of coffee from a free (and apparently unattended) coffee cart in the middle of town?  Ah, those were the days, lol.

 

But seriously.  I agree, @Gray Bunny.  The threads were starting to show even back then.  Budget cuts and salary cuts meant seeing less (or, in some cases, none) of GL's beloved veteran actors, the ones who'd always been there to help the show pull through lean times in the past.  Losing Leslie, Bert and Maureen Bauer was one thing; but when they had to kill off Ross Marler, who'd grown over the years into being GL's combination Stage Manager (from "Our Town") and Jiminy Cricket, because Jerry verDorn got a contract role with OLTL, you knew GL was spiraling down.

 

 

YES.  I know that episode, and Fusion in general, has its' fans.  But, to me, it was a tonal misfire.  Pine Valley had already become too cosmopolitan compared to the quaint, small town it'd been before.  Fusion, however, really signified that Brian Frons intended to remake AMC into a daytime "Sex and the City."

 

 

Even at the height of the Babe/Bianca baby switch, I was like, "A baby switch?  On AMC?  Since when?".

 

 

Frankly, Ken Corday shouldn't have panicked and forced JER to change his plans with that story.  On the other hand, allowing the Salem Stalker storyline to continue along its' original course wouldn't have guaranteed that DAYS would be a much better show today.  But, I feel like everything since then has, to one extent or another, been an attempt either to rectify the mistakes made with that storyline, or to top it in its' audaciousness.

Edited by Khan
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Worse, it seemed to neutralize and de-claw Kay and Jill individually.  When Kevin started referring to Kay as "Mrs. C.," or whatever, I knew it wasn't Bill Bell's Y&R anymore.

 

 

I realize JER had his personal issues, but PASSIONS' decline in particular felt to me like a giant F.U. to NBC for possible interference with his shows.  I mean, even he had to have known that Vincent/Valerie's lopping off Julian's member and having a drunken Eve reattach it upside down was beyond the pale even for him, lol.

Edited by Khan
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Passions, and probably Reilly too for that matter, were done by that point.

 

We didn't have DirecTV in my house, so I couldn't watch it but I followed it as much as I could. When I read that and saw the spoiler clips, even I, a teen who had pretty much grown up with Passions by that point, was like "WTF?"

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David Kreizman and Ellen Wheeler were just so damned incompetent, lol.

 

AMC: Proteus and Libidizone.  Two kinds of stories never worked on AMC.  One kind was the GL-esque "umbrella stories" that would draw together otherwise unrelated characters; the other was any story involving drugs (but not necessarily drug addiction).  With both Proteus and Libidizone, however, the writers thought combining AMC's two weaknesses into one package would somehow do the trick.  It didn't.

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Peapack move stunk.  For years we saw Springfield as a bustling city with Towers, hotels, and the lighthouse and Cedars, and upscale country club and then suddenly it was a quiet little town overnight.  Hated it.  And the real country club they used for the country club scenes looked run down and poor.  I remember cringing when I saw it.  Spaulding mansion set was shrunken down to nothing.  The only thing in the last days that kept me somewhat interested was Otalia and O's son Rafe finding out about their relationship.  I did like the last episode but so many more people should have been there and the lack of extras was glaring.  Lack of Harley disappointed me.  

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I feel pretty much the same way you do.  That said, I think I still had hope for the show when Luke & Laura got divorced.  I think I thought they'd eventually make their way back to each other.  But when they killed off Alan Q, I just cried and *knew* that my beloved GH was gone forever.  And it hasn't been the same since.  I've barely watched the show since then and now just keep up on it a bit online. 

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Y&R broke when Bill Bell was no longer running the show.

 

Dallas broke with the Bobby back from the dead fiasco. The final nail in the coffin was the exit of Victoria Principal as Pamela Barnes Ewing.

 

Dynasty fell apart after the massacre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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