I don’t think they did think it was a mistake to be honest. It is wild to think about it this way, especially because I watched it when it was airing and now this just would not be accepted. But if the audience went along for the ride they just didn’t have a problem in those days with a rapist becoming a romantic lead. If it wasn’t for Roger Howarth fighting them the whole time he would have been shirtless and flaunted as a soap hunk and put through the supercouple rounds. He may have been annoying to TPTB, but damn, I’m happy he did fight them. They certainly wanted to walk him back from being a villain, which he was through the Marty story and stalking Nora. Didn’t he also attack Luna once? She was very vocal about him not just walking free around town.
I wasn’t old enough to watch the original Luke & Laura story, and I was a kid and didn’t get it when Jack wasn’t really punished on DAYS with Kayla even though I did see that story. But by the time we got to DAYS having Carly fall in love with Lawrence, who had brutally raped her best friend Jennifer, and the weird dynamic they were toying with for Marty/Todd, I was disgusted and though it was ridiculous and unacceptable! And I was a young teen, the adults at ABC should have known better by then!
It’s interesting to think about this in hindsight. Not that I didn’t think it at the time, he was one of those actors that you could tell when he didn’t want to be there. It was very present in his performance.
But we had Todd as an acceptable romantic lead on OLTL. We had Sonny dominating an increasingly anti-woman GH. And Zach Slater on AMC. Frons was out of his mind, I don’t care how popular these men were (To a sharply declining audience I might add). There is a lot of gross storytelling at ABC in the Frons era. And I have no problem with an anti-hero lead, or a complex villain. But that’s not really what they did, because the counterpoint was not accepted in the very micro-managed writing.
By
titan1978 ·
