Trademarks of Different Creators/EPs/Writers

[Planet Soap]

What were some of the defining features that a creator, executive producer, head writer or writer brought to a show?

For example, a Bell created soap like Y&R and B&B focuses heavily on business, wealth and people of status, who seem like they live in a magazine. Examples being Jill, Katherine, Nikki and Victor. 

In contrast, Agnes Nixons's soaps were adept at showing a wide class of people from the welathy to the inner city. Noah and Julia's orbit on the same show as Erica's orbit.

As for writers, James E Riely clearly brought melo drama and fanatsy on both DAYS and Passions. 

What perhaps were defining features of Douglas Marland's or Jill Pharren Phelps' presences on a soap? 

Edited January 7, 2023 by ironlion

[Liberty City]

For Douglas Marland, I would definitely say it was his rules of "how NOT to ruin a soap," which are as follows:

• Watch the show.
• Learn the history of the show. You would be surprised at the ideas that you can get from the back story of your characters.
• Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience's favorites.
• Be objective. When I came in to (the show), the first thing I said was, what is pleasing the audience? You have to put your own personal likes and dislikes aside and develop the characters that the audience wants to see.
• Talk to everyone; writers and actors especially. There may be something in a character's history that will work beautifully for you, and who would know better than the actor who has been playing the role?
• Don't change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn't have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, "He would never do that," then you have failed.
• Build new characters slowly. Everyone knows that it takes six months to a year for an audience to care about a new character. Tie them in to existing characters. Don't shove them down the viewers' throats.
• If you feel staff changes are in order, look within the organization first. P&G (Procter & Gamble) does a lot of promoting from within. Almost all of our producers worked their way up from staff positions, and that means they know the show.
• Don't fire anyone for six months. I feel very deeply that you should look at the show's canvas before you do anything.
• Good soap opera is good storytelling. It's very simple.

[Melroser]

When JFP came to AW she tried to turn it into ER/NYPD BLUE. There was a brand new (large) hospital set with the outside entrance in the street where Gabe (John Bolger) was shot. She also changed the opening of the show to the last version it had. (Which I personally liked but a lot of people didn't).

AW had mostly been a show about families and relationships and JFP turned it into more of an "action"/plot soap in the beginning....or at least tried. I believe Justine (Vicky Wyndham) was created before JFP, but wasn't the character on for most of JFP's run? I'm sure Justine turned into a cartoonish character because of the way JFP wanted her show to be. 

[AbcNbc247]

^^^^ That was Jill's M.O on a lot of the soaps that she helmed: change it to make it like the biggest hit on primetime at that time and it often failed. 

Here's a perfect example of what AW became starting at 2:32

"We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast of Another World to bring you ER" 

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Edited January 7, 2023 by AbcNbc247

[Vee]

Wow, that's really blatant. And some of the handheld work isn't nearly as good as ER.

[Planet Soap]

That final intro, which I also like, was really screaming ER. Same font, similar two letter abbreviation logos, and similar tinted backgrounds.

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JFP's tendedncy for action was really evident on GH. Bill Bell's style of soap is daytime's closest thing to Aaron Spelling. Troubled lives of lavish people. Spelling's Dynasty's influence was obious in Dickson's Jill becoming Alexis Carrington from about 1985 onwards.  

Primetime's influence in daytime was also obvious with the show Texas and the Buchannan's on OLTL. 

Edited January 7, 2023 by ironlion

[Vee]

I don't think there's anything wrong with taking cues from primetime in moderation, or adding more action. The issue is what action or what cues, what show is it suited for and why (AW wasn't). GH partly revitalized itself refocusing on the hospital in the wake of the success of Grey's Anatomy, and I don't fault doing action storylines when they service characters or romance. It's about character, context and execution. JFP was never terribly interested in any of that where her sweeps action setpieces or her primetime riffs were concerned.

[DRW50]

The AW opening is just so generic for me, yet also, for all the talk at the time of how dated the previous opening was, feels far more dated to me. The other problem is the arrogance of putting an opening she should have known the show would not have the budget to keep updating, which meant the whole thing was about 3 seconds long by the time the show ended. 

Justine only lasted to about early 1996. I think Victoria Wyndham never really knew what to do with the character, which is why she was so defensive about her, but the character did go fully off the boil under JFP, with the hook and other nonsense.

I remember Eddie Drueding saying that every piece of brand new hospital equipment should have had a tag with the name of the actor who had been fired to pay for it.

 

[teplin]

Yeesh, that handheld work is terrible. I didn't remember it being that bad. I don't remember those sets lasting very long, either ... am I wrong about that, too?

I liked that intro as well, but yes, it didn't make sense in terms of keeping up with cast changes.

Lord, I still miss Vicky Wyndham.

[AbcNbc247]

I think it was only around for like three years.

Appearances wise, I think it looks good, but the style change of the show was just unbelievable. It didn't even feel like AW anymore.

[Faulkner]

I always hated that ER-style AW opening. I remember the soap press gushing about how sleek and modern it was, but like you all said, it’s pretty generic. And cold. The music sounds right out of a stock library. (There were so many cheap, ugly, nondescript daytime openings in the late ‘90s and into the ‘00s.) Say what you will about that stylized Crystal Gayle/Gary Morris opening: it was memorable and distinctive.

I suppose AW was in its do-or-die stages after so many years of neglect, and JFP has a good way of selling her shallow visions to upper management by using reference points (the big NBC primetime hit of the day) that will resonate with them. 

[j swift]

I appreciated the visual style and the music of AW's ER opening and JFP's later work on GH.

However, it felt crow-barred in because the image didn't match many of the characters.  Suddenly, there was no diversity in the costume style.  Donna, Felicia, and Rachel were all wearing shapeless Donna Karan and Armani looks.  Fashion of the period was a dynamic mix of the Grey-age Japanese influence and Versace's loud mix of color and print.  I doubt that Felicia Gallant would go from feathers and beads to long beige pantsuits.  So, it just homogenized the look of the show in order to seem like a contemporary drama, but it missed the fun of giving each character their own twist on the times.

Worse, for me, is that JFP seemed to ignore the diversity of class in Bay City, and later in Port Charles.  Suddenly everyone seemed to exist with middle class standards and values.  There were no young women seeking status through wealth, everyone was only interested in career advancement.  Victoria Hudson and Brenda Barrett went from spoiled brats to business women without any period of adjustment.  They no longer wished to vacation in Europe, now they wanted to sign contracts. It just didn't fit with the character's history to have Donna manage a media company and Felicia run a bookstore.

It felt very 90s (in retrospect) to ignore income and race, and just show an integrated cast where nobody had to deal with cultural issues.  Hiring Black and Latino actors may have seemed like progress, but not acknowledging their diversity was a JFP hallmark in ignoring the depth of that time in history.  She brought on Ricky Martin and Joseph C. Phillips, and never gave them a story about their minority statue, as if the casting was enough.

Edited January 7, 2023 by j swift

[Vee]

She did not bring on either Ricky Martin or Joseph C. Phillips. JFP started at GH in 2001.

She also only was involved with Brenda's appearances on GH from 2002-2003 and 2010-11, and both times JFP was no longer in the driver's seat at the show. Her creative power was severely curtailed by Bob Guza's return in 2002 after her disastrous solo tenure with Megan McTavish in 2001 tanked the show, after which Guza returned, took a co-producing credit (remembering his battles with Wendy Riche) and was given carte blanche over most of the show by Brian Frons until his exit. JFP had very little creative control from 2002 on.

Edited January 7, 2023 by Vee

[Forever8]

Wendy Riche brought on Ricky Martin and Joseph C. Phillips back when Mark Teschner's casting was taken more serious by the EP's. 

JFP also had a pattern, at least on Guiding Light and Another World, of pairing up young, spunky rookie cop blondes with the roguish older cops, i.e., Mallet and Harley and Josie and Gary.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 7, 2023 by Forever8

[Vee]

By most (alleged) accounts, JFP was reduced to a glorified line producer with Bob Guza back. She could work on production value, aesthetics, facilitate the nuts and bolts of sweeps stunts, etc. and she tried to give her many Friends of Jill guest roles or hire them on anywhere she could. As soon as she arrived, her ex Kale Browne from AW became the omniscient intercom voice-over at the hospital's main hub, and she allegedly attempted to get him onscreen at one point as part of a mob story but this was vetoed. (Possibly by some of the same network personnel who had him fired from OLTL within seconds of her leaving that show for GH; he was not popular there.) Similar to how the instant JFP lost power Jensen Buchanan, her new star from AW, was fired.

But facilitating was all she managed. The only time she regained any real power at GH, during the writers' strike of 2008, a frontburner story for Ric and longtime pal Rick Hearst - who had been reduced to a B or C role on the show, in which Ric romances an illegal immigrant bride he just met - magically materialized overnight. Meanwhile, Claudia Zacchara's introduction was made weirder than necessary by introducing a goofy color-coded introduction for the character and her fetishistic love for red wardrobe, exactly like the legendary flop of Angel Boris' character (also Angel) in 2001, who JFP had intended to be Sonny's next big love interest (Angel infamously only ever wore white, then experienced a life change after her father's death and announced to great fanfare she would only wear red). I think Jill may have done similar overly stylized entrances for characters like Tangie Hill at GL or others but I'm not sure. Anyway, it was all a bit pitiful. And once Guza returned JFP went back to the control room.

One thing she did do at many shows (somewhat less so at GH, which was the flagship of the network at the time) which followed her to Y&R and has plagued that show ever since is make it 'peppy and cheap' - give it the superficial appearance of being updated and made hip, and fill it with boring pop muzak that often isn't actually real music. Everything that's become of Y&R's production value over the last decade-plus began with JFP being brought it to make it more like an ABC soap, more 'hip', which means more of the coffeehouse vs. any corporate locations, more of the cop shop or hospital, more blondes named Courtney that she's done on almost every show she's been at (named for her daughter) and more vague unidentifiable muzak that plays nonstop instead of Y&R's original musical cues.

You could tell when she took Y&R over. She turned it into an even more cut rate version of some of what she did at GH. At least when she started at GH they still had money for real recording artists (and I credit their use entirely to Guza, because virtually all those big moments with The Police, Judy Collins, etc. came after he returned).

Edited January 7, 2023 by Vee