IMO, OLTL's best HW's (aside from Agnes Nixon) were Sam Hall, Peggy O'Shea and Gordon Russell. To me, they were like the Jules Furthman of daytime: if there were six ways to approach a storyline or scene, Hall/O'Shea/Russell always found the seventh way; and their way was always earthier, more surprising and more delightful to watch than anything else this side of EON. Moreover, the three had a knack for turning a single action, such as Karen Wolek's turn toward prostitution, into something that reverberated throughout the entire Llanview community; as well as an ability to turn eccentric or lowlife characters that either wouldn't have cropped up on other shows, or would've been relegated to recurring or "comic relief" status, into viable, empathetic leads. O'Shea's successor, S. Michael Schnessel, who had been with the show since the Joseph Stuart era, tried maintaining all that, along with the sideways approach to scriptwriting that prized originality over functionality, but the show had become so mired in Rauch-era excess by that point that the consistency got drowned out by all the bizarre and outlandish ideas.
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Khan · 15 minutes ago 15 min
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