23 hours ago, Neil Johnson said:

Has anyone mentioned Mike Marshall on Another World?  His suicide was by shooting himself deliberately after he'd been cheated out of his fortune.  In the lead-up to AW's spin-off, Texas in 1980, Mike's suicide took place on an episode of Another World, but all the characters in his orbit lived in Houston and became characters on Texas.  Mike was never in Bay City and none of the Bay City characters had ever met him.  After Mike's death, the remaining Marshalls became one of the core families on Texas.   

That sounds like more my taste.

On 1/14/2022 at 10:34 AM, Khan said:

Soap operas are turgid by nature...but, underneath the sturm and drang, they're also supposed to offer viewers some hope.  Having characters commit suicide seems to run counter to the idea.

I believe there's way to still offer hope in doing them though.  By the way they effect the people they leave behind.  Soaps are always at their best when reflecting the real world and people die everyday, not just by natural causes in their sleep. Encourage that viewer that's been watching your show for 30 years that's struggling with losing a special love one.

I believe Sherri Saum's character Keri Reynolds committed suicide on One LIfe To Live and Antonio was accused of murdering her.

Yes, Keri did commit suicide if I remember correctly.

 

Wasn't the conclusion to that 'Who Killed Vinny?' mystery on B&B recently was that Vinny killed himself and framed Liam so Thomas could have Hope? 

On 1/13/2022 at 8:08 PM, wonderwoman1951 said:

in her 1972 new yorker piece on soap opera, renata adler mentions a storyline from ‘the doctors’:

“of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder.“

have no idea who the character in question is.

Renata Adler published a book of her essays & it began with mention of this sick suicide to frame someone, ... I did a write up of the whole chapter & here's the whole bit about this guy.

Renata Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968–69, she served as chief film critic for The New York Times. She is also a writer of fiction who uses the pen name Brett Daniels. She was born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy. Her family fled Nazi Germany and later moved to America. She grew up in CT.

CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT: Essays on Politics and Media. by Renata Adler. St. Martin's Press. New York. © 2001. "Afternoon Television: Unhappiness Enough, and Time"

"You have to tolerate extremes of hatred and loneliness to follow, Monday through Friday every week through a still unterminated period of months, the story of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder. Yet there is an audience of at least six million at two-thirty every afternoon New York time (other times across the country) prepared to watch this plot line, among other plot lines, develop on "The Doctors," a television program of the genre soap opera, or daytime dramatic serial." And, this is no joke. It is for fiction a single act of rage and isolation like this imploded revenge, a suicide caroming across the board. "This contriver of his own death to make it look like someone else's literal crime has, ... detonated incalculable threats in other lives." "The Doctors plays this all out".

For all I know, this might happen all the time. But "The Doctors" has a special instance here. Now, no one writes high drama. But in a time of violent death, individuals in dire straits look tabloid. "Most fiction keeps its personal crises low profile and small; writers with serious claims upon the desperate dramatic themes seem to have crossed further out of tragedy and into melodrama than writers of soaps going the other way." The term 'pop culture, never of much use or elegance, is empty now. "There is almost no culture of any other kind." People with a taste or instinct for the arts are thrown back on the classics or must bide their time. "The arts, first-rate, second-rate (the creative enterprise is not a horse race, after all), are just not much in evidence."

 

 

 

Can someone point me to those Doctor's episodes?

Here’s a clip of Dan’s suicide on The Doctors.  It’s from August 17, 1971.  To make it even darker, he did it on his young son’s birthday.

 

I really hate that the Pollocks wrote Dan Allison into a corner.  He could have become a great, long-term villain or anti-hero - a John Dixon to Matt Powers' Bob Hughes or Steve Aldrich's David Stewart.