Carolyn and Richard Culliton – The Interview

[cassadine1991]

Any GH talk?

[DeliaIrisFan]

It was an interesting interview.  My teenage self would never in a million years have believed I would be typing this, but I'm glad they remained in daytime all these years.  They both have clearly contributed a lot to the genre and, in hindsight, Richard got raked over the coals—including by me—for things at GH that clearly were beyond his control.  (See also Riche, Wendy.)

It probably didn't even register for me at the time how creating a new daily show while head writing another one must have been impossible to do well.  (I didn't appreciate that going to work in an office was actually...work.)  I wonder who at ABC was so adamant about the Cullitons helming the spinoff, and how anyone would think that such an arrangement would turn out well for either show.  I was rooting for Claire Labine's spinoff and, by the time PC premiered, would have been happy to see A Daytime to Remember become a permanent fixture.  If anything, though, the network should have recruited Carolyn for PC to ensure the head writers of both shows would get along, and paired her with someone who had been on the GH team and had a history writing the crossover characters, like Michele val Jean or Karen Harris.

[BetterForgotten]

A lot of PC was Wendy Riche being a bit over her head - part of the reason ABC ordered it as opposed to something else was because Riche pitched the financial efficiencies they'd get from leveraging the same studio as GH, and using much of the same production and writing staff. In the end, it just never really worked out that well (and GH suffered as well with Riche putting her focus on launching PC). 

Edited August 22, 2021 by BetterForgotten

[DeliaIrisFan]

For sure.  In hindsight, it's like the Great Recession came to soaps 10 years early.  GH—like most if not every other soap—was getting ratings that would be unheard of today and the economy as a whole was booming, but soap budgets were starting to shrink in the most ridiculous ways.  Even as they obviously had money for the most pointless things: Culliton's anecdote about the PC premiere becoming a Sunday night movie at the eleventh hour reminded me that GH/PC got not one but two primetime specials during Richard Culliton's brief, rocky tenure.

Edited August 22, 2021 by DeliaIrisFan

[amybrickwallace]

Not much. They actually talked more about PC than GH.

Edited August 24, 2021 by amybrickwallace