40 minutes ago, DeeVee said:

Yes, you would definitely see the genesis of certain things that ended up on Y&R and B&B.  

Two siblings in love with the same person was a Bill Bell classic 😂

12 minutes ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Two siblings in love with the same person was a Bill Bell classic 😂

We saw that across Days, Y&R, B&B.

Brothers fighting over a girl: Mickey/Bill, Snapper/Greg, Lance/Lucas, Jazz/Tyrone, Victor/Matt, Ridge/Thorne, Neil/Malcolm

Sisters fighting over a guy: Leslie/Lorie, Donna/Katie, Ashley/Traci, Olivia/Dru

If I'm missing any, please add.

Just now, kalbir said:

We saw that across Days, Y&R, B&B.

Brothers fighting over a girl: Mickey/Bill, Snapper/Greg, Lance/Lucas, Jazz/Tyrone, Victor/Matt, Ridge/Thorne, Neil/Malcolm

Sisters fighting over a guy: Leslie/Lorie, Donna/Katie, Ashley/Traci, Olivia/Dru

If I'm missing any, please add.

Greg/Eric Peters on Days.

And, when I was watching 1990 B&B, I got the impression that he was planning on going there with Kristen/Felicia too but then Teri Ann Linn left.

@AbcNbc247 Thanks for the additional info.

22 minutes ago, AbcNbc247 said:

And, when I was watching 1990 B&B, I got the impression that he was planning on going there with Kristen/Felicia too but then Teri Ann Linn left.

Yeah it looked like a Kristen/Felicia/Clarke triangle was being set up but that didn't happen.

Edited September 13Sep 13 by kalbir

3 hours ago, I Am A Swede said:

I think that Emmerdale could possibly be saved if they got rid of every single character that has any connection at all to a Dingle. I want that family obliterated, annihilated and exterminated, by any means necessary. But considering how they have infested practically every aspect of the village (I still think Amos and Henry are spinning like mad in their graves that the Woolpack is run by Dingles) I fear it is Mission: Impossible. The rot has probably gone too deep and to yank it out the way I want it to would probably leave the village uninhabited.

ITA about the infestation of Dingles, and how they have permeated the fabric of the village thoroughly. Trying to decontaminate the show of the entire horde would probably leave Emmerdale in tatters, and ultimately not salvageable.

To me, DAYS has long been contaminated with abject idiocy, and the ludicrous stories foisted on its characters have destroyed their integrity and viability (exhibit A: Marlena Evans). I came to the conclusion long ago that the soap would be better off dead and buried than limping along in its present state. Of course, there are still viewers out there who watch it, and I'm not selfish enough to want them to lose their show, so the best solution for me is just to pretend it is already gone. The show I knew, admired and loved died decades ago anyway, for all intents and purposes.

3 hours ago, I Am A Swede said:

That's true. They just filled the village with the most revolting, hypocritical, unappealing, despicable family anyone (in this case: producer Keith Richardson) has ever come up with and elevated them to leading status. It just makes me furious how this lowlife scum run around the village doing whatever they will to anyone but act all incensed and morally superior when someone else does something.  🤢

Sounds like General Hospital, with its fixation on glorifying rapists, unrepentant murderers, degenerate mobsters and the like, and treating them like the charactes we are supposed to root for.🤮

2 hours ago, kalbir said:

Three distinct eras: Bill Bell, supercouple, Reilly.

Unfortunately I wasn't alive for the Bill Bell years but those who were fortunate enough to have seen them describe them as a well-written masterpiece.

Yep; 1966-1976 was a rich, golden era for the show.

2 hours ago, kalbir said:

My school years overlapped with the supercouple years and Reilly years but I couldn't get into them at all.

It was such a complete and utter change from the magic we had seen before, it was hard to stomach...and ultimately downright revolting.

2 hours ago, kalbir said:

I don't know how much of the Bill Bell years has surfaced but I would watch them to see actors and actresses that Bill Bell later worked with on Y&R/B&B and elements of storylines that Bill Bell later used on Y&R/B&B.

He worked some elements similar to DAYS into Y&R, and then a lot of Y&R's elements into B&B. I always found B&B to be a weaker copy of Bell's earlier work.

2 hours ago, Tisy-Lish said:

Bill Bell wrote super couples on DOOL.  He wrote Bill/Laura and Julie/Doug.  They were the first two super couples on DOOL.  Just because they didn't go on silly capers and cloak and dagger espionage, doesn't mean they were not super couples.  

It helped so much that Edward Mallory and Susan Flannery as Bill and Laura, and Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth as Doug and Julie, exuded great chemistry with each other. And their characters were layered, complex, and intelligent (characters in later years tended to be one dimensional and dumb as rocks, LOL).

1 hour ago, DeeVee said:

I am old enough to remember. I stopped watching DOOL after Bill Bell stopped having anything to do with it, which I guess tells you something.

I stopped being a daily viewer when Pat Falken Smith was fired as head writer in early 1977 and replaced by Ann Marcus, whose style was not a good fit for the show. Bill Bell was still credited as story consultant, but Marcus made it clear that she dismissed his ideas when and if she saw fit...and it showed onscreen.

1 hour ago, DeeVee said:

I think if you could watch those episodes today, they would seem VERY slow moving. And he had a some attitudes that would come across today as very old-fashioned. (He obviously evolved when he wrote Y&R, which from the beginning was meant to appeal to a young, hip audience). 

I was young at the time, and I did wish the show would move a little faster.

But I could not stop watching.

That's just it. His style was to tell long-range storylines that lasted for years, and often moved at a snail's pace (we waited almost a decade for Bill and Laura to get married). It's didn't matter, however, because his characters were rich and the stories were engrossing. You felt mesmerized into watching and it was hard to turn away.

1 hour ago, DeeVee said:

And while his lens would seem old-fashioned today, he did do some pretty daring stuff for the time. He an abortion storyline where the girl was not at all sorry for having one, he tried to create an interracial romance (which unfortunately got so much heat from some viewers he had to drop it), and I think he was the first to do a multiple-personality brought on by SA story on a soap. 

The genius of Bill Bell, Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon was that they could deal with adult, controversial, topical material in such a subtle way that the audience still knew exactly what was going on and what was being said. For a long time, daytime TV dealt with strong subjects that primetime shied away from.

1 hour ago, DeeVee said:

Yes, you would definitely see the genesis of certain things that ended up on Y&R and B&B.  

I think Y&R handled subject matter in a franker way than DAYS, but both soaps dealt beautifully with their plots and respected the audience's intelligence.

1 hour ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Two siblings in love with the same person was a Bill Bell classic 😂

Two siblings in love with EACH OTHER was a theme played out on Bell's DAYS and Y&R, too.

 

Edited September 13Sep 13 by vetsoapfan

15 minutes ago, vetsoapfan said:

Two siblings in love with EACH OTHER was a theme played out on Bell's DAYS and Y&R, too.

Y&R had Lorie/Mark, Cricket/Scott, Victoria/Cole (although they turned out not to have the same father). Bill Bell didn't go there on B&B.

8 minutes ago, kalbir said:

Y&R had Lorie/Mark, Cricket/Scott, Victoria/Cole (although they turned out not to have the same father). Bill Bell didn't go there on B&B.

Of all of these stories, the Lorie/Mark saga was by far the most compelling and the most devastating.

On 9/13/2025 at 3:19 PM, Tisy-Lish said:

Bill Bell wrote super couples on DOOL.  He wrote Bill/Laura and Julie/Doug.  They were the first two super couples on DOOL.  Just because they didn't go on silly capers and cloak and dagger espionage, doesn't mean they were not super couples.  

I think when discussing the supercouple era it does revolve around the types of stories that involved capers or were thrillers at heart. Lots of supercouples existed before the formula. But Pat Falken Smith and the writers under her at GH from 1979-1981, including Sheri Anderson, developed the prototype with Monty for the Luke and Laura on the run story. Then came the spies. And Sheri Anderson took that and “perfected” it at DAYS. There it became almost a grinder for every couple to be put through, and was less and less successful as the 80’s became the 90’s. Even shows that were better structured overall fell into the habit at times during the 80’s.

On the topic of Bill Bell repeating stories, I think he ultimately benefitted greatly from the lack of access to his earlier work. Victor and Hope on the farm has echos of Mickey/Maggie. The multiple sibling romantic rivalries. He even did the cut up photo as blackmail twice on Y&R in less than 10 years.

@vetsoapfanwe have discussed your disliking of Reilly at DAYS a few pages back. It also left a bad taste in my mouth back then once Marlena was floating around, and I quit watching it for years, never was a true habit again. I also didn’t enjoy Passions, that kind of camp without any true wit or intelligence was lost on me. But during COVID I had access to the earlier part of the run, and I was surprised that I enjoyed a lot of it when I had maligned him for years. My question is did any of it work for you? The John/Marlena affair, and I thought the backstory for Billie and Austin with Kate and Curtis Reed was very compelling, as was Sami’s slow descent into villainy with her attachment to Roman and psychological damage from witnessing the affair and everything that came after. They lost me with Sami around the time she faked sex with Austin. Deborah Adair was the Kate for me, classy with an attitude when needed, more vulnerable. The lighting team and styling people also really knew how to show off Eileen Davidson, I don’t think she ever looked as beautiful as she did during her first couple of years at DAYS.

Also- feel free to rip anything above to shreds. I ask purely for discussion, I have no real attachment to James Reilly or his work. Maybe on Guiding Light as a part of that team. Now if you were to direct vitriol towards Claire Labine’s General Hospital, well as they used to say them’s fighting words. 

That's because he had Sheri Anderson to help keep him in line at the beginning of his tenure. Once she left, the craziness really set in. 

16 hours ago, titan1978 said:

I think when discussing the supercouple era it does revolve around the types of stories that involved capers or were thrillers at heart. Lots of supercouples existed before the formula. But Pat Falken Smith and the writers under her at GH from 1979-1981, including Sheri Anderson, developed the prototype with Monty for the Luke and Laura on the run story. Then came the spies. And Sheri Anderson took that and “perfected” it at DAYS. 

General Hospital started the action/adventure and supercouple trends but Days took them to a whole other level.

16 hours ago, titan1978 said:

less and less successful as the 80’s became the 90’s. 

We saw in the 1980s and 1990s ratings threads that Days had a ratings drop in the last year and a half of the supercouple era. 

16 hours ago, titan1978 said:

Even shows that were better structured overall fell into the habit at times during the 80’s.

Practically every show in the 1980s jumped on the action/adventure and supercouple bandwagons.

16 hours ago, titan1978 said:

On the topic of Bill Bell repeating stories, I think he ultimately benefitted greatly from the lack of access to his earlier work. Victor and Hope on the farm has echos of Mickey/Maggie. The multiple sibling romantic rivalries. He even did the cut up photo as blackmail twice on Y&R in less than 10 years.

For the longest time I had no idea that Victor meeting Hope in Kansas was a redo of a Bill Bell Days storyline. Another Bill Bell Y&R redo was Michael Scott in the dungeon/Brad in a cage and Bradley dusted off both of these storylines on B&B with James in the dungeon.

16 hours ago, titan1978 said:

I have no real attachment to James Reilly or his work. Maybe on Guiding Light as a part of that team.

James Reilly worked fine as part of that early 1990s GL writing team. AFAIK he was left to his own devices at Days and we saw what happened from 1993-1997.

Edited September 16Sep 16 by kalbir

18 hours ago, titan1978 said:

On the topic of Bill Bell repeating stories, I think he ultimately benefitted greatly from the lack of access to his earlier work. Victor and Hope on the farm has echos of Mickey/Maggie. The multiple sibling romantic rivalries. He even did the cut up photo as blackmail twice on Y&R in less than 10 years.

I read a great interview with Bill Bell, way back when, in which he acknowledged that so many stories on soaps echo those on other shows. He said there is only a finite number of plots out there, and the difference comes in how individual writers develop and explore those plots; that even familiar storylines become unique because of the specific characters involved, and their reactions to the events.

18 hours ago, titan1978 said:

@vetsoapfanwe have discussed your disliking of Reilly at DAYS a few pages back. It also left a bad taste in my mouth back then once Marlena was floating around, and I quit watching it for years, never was a true habit again. I also didn’t enjoy Passions, that kind of camp without any true wit or intelligence was lost on me. But during COVID I had access to the earlier part of the run, and I was surprised that I enjoyed a lot of it when I had maligned him for years. My question is did any of it work for you? The John/Marlena affair, and I thought the backstory for Billie and Austin with Kate and Curtis Reed was very compelling, as was Sami’s slow descent into villainy with her attachment to Roman and psychological damage from witnessing the affair and everything that came after. They lost me with Sami around the time she faked sex with Austin. Deborah Adair was the Kate for me, classy with an attitude when needed, more vulnerable. The lighting team and styling people also really knew how to show off Eileen Davidson, I don’t think she ever looked as beautiful as she did during her first couple of years at DAYS.

The horror of watching what DAYS had turned into, and knowing that Passions would end up reinforcing a type of storytelling which I knew was destructive to daytime, precluded me from ever appreciating or even tolerating JER's material.  The abject stupidity (IMHO) was too overwhelming, and negated any small moments of "better" storytelling that may have seeped through.

18 hours ago, titan1978 said:

Also- feel free to rip anything above to shreds. I ask purely for discussion, I have no real attachment to James Reilly or his work. Maybe on Guiding Light as a part of that team. Now if you were to direct vitriol towards Claire Labine’s General Hospital, well as they used to say them’s fighting words. 

I think the team JER was part of on TGL did much better work than Claire Labine did on that series. (I have a feeling JER really only made coffee runs and used the copy machine, bwahahahahaha.) Real writers like Nancy Curlee and Lorraine Broderick created magic there. Claire Labine gave us some sweet moments, but the heavy focus on the Santos mob and all those vile San Cristocrapians running around (probably a mandate from MADD and TPTB) ruined her tenure in Springfield for me. The last straw was the shoot-out in the Bauer kitchen. BLASPHEMY.

That being said, Labine was brilliant at Where the Heart Is, Love of Life, Ryan's Hope (mostly) and General Hospital. It's my contention that her tenure on GH, dealing with BJ's heart and Stone's AIDS, was the last time any daytime soap reached the level of greatness.

Edited September 16Sep 16 by vetsoapfan

17 hours ago, Bright Eyes said:

That's because he had Sheri Anderson to help keep him in line at the beginning of his tenure. Once she left, the craziness really set in. 

It's like the situation with Hogan Sheffer on ATWT.

When he came aboard in 2000, he had writers like Carolyn Culliton to keep him grounded, and it seemed lie he might work out.

After CC departed, however, and fellow hack Jean Passanante joined Sheffer's team, the show went quickly to hell and never rebounded. 

21 minutes ago, vetsoapfan said:

It's like the situation with Hogan Sheffer on ATWT.

When he came aboard in 2000, he had writers like Carolyn Culliton to keep him grounded, and it seemed lie he might work out.

After CC departed, however, and fellow hack Jean Passanante joined Sheffer's team, the show went quickly to hell and never rebounded. 

Your post made me look up head writers for ATWT. I can't believe they kept Passanante around for almost ten years! It goes to show that the lack of care of, if not the intended destruction of, the show really started a long time before it actually ended. 

5 minutes ago, Reverend Ruthledge said:

Your post made me look up head writers for ATWT. I can't believe they kept Passanante around for almost ten years! It goes to show that the lack of care of, if not the intended destruction of, the show really started a long time before it actually ended. 

Back in the golden era of the 1960s and 1970s, soaps made mistakes and hired weak writers too. The difference was, those errors in judgement were rectified  pretty quickly, and hack scribes did not last for ten freaking YEARS as ratings sunk lower and lower.