ALL: What are your lost soap media "holy grails" for 2025?

[All My Shadows]

AMC from the mid-1970s

ATWT from the early 1970s

Secret Storm and Love of Life from the late 1960s

Anything from the “shorter”-lived soaps of the late 1950s to early 1970s that ran anywhere from 1-5 years (Young Doctor Malone, From These Roots, The Clear Horizon, The Young Marrieds, Flame in the Wind, The Nurses, Bright Promise, Where the Heart Is, A World Apart, Return to Peyton Place, How to Survive a Marriage)

Edited January 2 by All My Shadows

[Contessa Donatella]

Speaking of Robin Strasser does anyone have any idea why last year she just up & moved to Cleveland?

 

[Khan]

 

I've often joked that if I ever wanted to do a soap-within-a-soap, I'd call it "Upon This Rock," since it seems to have the same sort of cadence to it as FTR.

Edited January 2 by Khan

[Franko]

I guess my responsibility for 2025 will be curating all these bibles of soaps that weren't, since I thought of another: Paul Rauch's Grosse Pointe. My point(e) is that these would be fascinating reads, if nothing else to see how they would carry on what writers/producers had been doing before, or see what would have happened at a later time. 

On a non-bible topic, and piggybacking on the idea of The Doctors' last years, I'd especially like to see when it was apparent that Adrienne (Nancy Stafford) was actually her mother, Felicia.

[Faulkner]

Echoing more ‘70s OLTL and anything pre-1979 of TEON. More Bill Bell DAYS too and Susan Flannery as Laura.

Pretty much anything 1970s of any show. You folks who watched back then lucked out. 

[All My Shadows]

That really is my answer to this every time it pops up. Original masters of everything from the transition to color (1967) to the end of the expansion era (1980).

And more COLOR soaps actually in COLOR. It's disgusting that we're still stuck with grainy black and white kinescopes of things that aired in 1972 when there are other daytime programs from a decade earlier available clean and pristine, in their original color.

[P.J.]

I haven't seen enough to know if the writing simply drastically changed for Jackie, or if Carrie Mowbrey was just a complete washout in the role.

As much as La Zimmer grew to annoy me, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

[Khan]

Kim Zimmer herself didn't annoy me, but I did grow annoyed with how TPTB continued to write the wrong kinds of stories for her and for Reva.  It's as if TPTB thought they could keep giving her the most OTT material, because KZ was/is an actor who swings for the proverbial fences in every performance.  But what they never understood was that KZ and Reva worked best when the show kept it small and real.  Reva's breakdown over being humiliated by wheelchair-bound Josh?  Riveting.  Reva jumping in and out of time through old paintings?  Not so much.

If anything, I would have told KZ (nicely!) during those frustrating times when the show would put Reva through one ridiculous ordeal after another to tone it down, pull it back, play it much smaller than usual, so that the storyline becomes more relatable (although, how crap like Clone Reva ever could be relatable, lol....).  "Watch Genie Francis," I would've said.  "See how she handles all the unbelievable things GH keeps handing her."

Edited January 3 by Khan

[Vee]

Which is why she actually thrived in Peapack, where all the artifice was stripped away and she was just doing old, fat, horny Reva weary of the world. If they intended it to put her in her place after clashing with Wheeler it didn't work. I think some of that was Kim's best, most nuanced work with truly weak material. It's when I gained a new respect for her and began revisiting her classic years in the '80s. I've said it before: In middle to late middle age Kim could've thrived on the British soaps. They have dozens of women like her.

[Chris B]

2024 saw some exciting finds and I'm hoping 2025 continues the trend! My ultimate hope is one day seeing a episode of Return To Peyton Place. I've been waiting so long for this. One of the soap highlights of 2024 for me was discovering there was a pilot shot for a show called Peyton Place '79 and I even managed to find clips. Hopefully that is a positive sign and Return To Peyton Place isn't far away.

[Maxim]

I would love if the second half of Ryan's hope surfaced... just because I would like to know we have it in full. I know the first 1700 episodes are on youtube... but the other half is pretty much missing with some episodes here and there.

[titan1978]

Me too! Phil’s murder mystery episodes would be great, and more from the story of Lee Baldwin defending Jessie on trial. Wary Lesley and Genie’s first episodes would be fun too.

Also on my list, more episodes from the transition of 30 minutes to an hour of Y&R, and I would love to see Phillip’s death and the immediate aftermath for Katherine and Jill. Always happy to see more Terry Lester as Jack and Katherine when she was more villainous towards Jill when the show reignited them in the early 80’s.

DAYS- I would just love to see more of Susan Flannery as Laura, and the story of Susan (Denise Alexander) killing David. Add me to the list for the Salem Strangler too!

 

[Contessa Donatella]

Susan, Julie, David, poor little baby Dickie, all of that was literally the first DAYS storyline I remember the whole thing. If it were available, I would watch it over immediately! I loved it so and "dead baby" scarred me for life. 

[titan1978]

Which she was doing! I remember the year of Lucky’s fire Zimmer was quoted in a soap mag as saying the Emmy’s overlooked Genie for a nomination that year, and how good her work was.

The thing about bombastic soap acting by the likes of Zimmer, Tony Geary, Justin Deas, late B&B era Susan Flannery and Maurice Bernard is that when they got grounded material and played smaller, they really could just rip your guts out. These people were special for a reason, and almost all slipped into louder and with more passion meant more true emotion.

Somehow Jane Elliott has skirted the line but never gone over it so much that it became the norm for her acting like it did for the others I mentioned. You know who else walked that line so well? Erika Slezak and Robin Strasser.

[AMCOLTLLover]

Scripts from secret storm… This is the soap I’m really fascinated by.