I started watching in the 80’s and a pretty young kid, and didn’t really get invested in a deeper level until I was a teen in the 90’s.

My classics would absolutely include BJ’s heart transplant on GH. I have recently seen a bunch of it again, and you forget many of the small moments like even in his rage, Tony stops for a minute and shows some glimpse of compassion when he needs to tell Bobbie about doing a direct donation. And when she later agrees, there is this silent look between them in a later scene, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. And everybody was included in the weight of the story that should have been- not just Felicia and Tony and Bobbie, but also Lucy, Frisco, Monica. Steve and Amy in the emergency room just broken hearted. Luke and Laura telling Lucky. It was a special story.

Stone and Robin’s tragic love story. The Romeo and Juliet play, the edge of danger with the mob much like her mother Anna with Duke. A near perfect young and tragic love story. Stone’s gradual decline and poignant death. The fact that they actually went there, that Robin Scorpio was HIV positive, was shocking in 1995. The meds were not the same as they would be even by 1998, there was no guarantee that Robin would survive because they played it real. It was a risk, lost the show viewers, but they told the whole story anyway. The episode where Stone got to hear what he meant to everyone was special. Little things like him helping Lucky and Sly with a go-cart, cutting himself, and Laura took care of it with compassion after he freaked out. Stone breaking down and Mac finally just hugging him, because it was too late to keep being mad at this kid. I had a parent involved with caring for gay men dying of AIDS in the late 80’s/very early 90’s, before a lot was known. She also said it was the most realistic story she had seen as far as progression of the disease.

OLTL- when Robin Strasser returned, and they told the story that landed Dorian in jail for killing Victor, eventually leading to all of Viki’s alters being revealed was also so compelling. It was gothic at times, and was gritty. All that thunder and dramatic music. I know people that watched when the show began have issues with what they did with Victor Lord. But for where the show was at that point, and the psychology of the day, they took something that had been played for camp and made it so grounded and painful.

Young and the Restless- Sheila’s reign of terror. I didn’t follow her to B&B, so it stops with the fire for me. But it is just so psychological and thrilling. Lauren was a complicated character, she wasn’t that nice a person back then, but it was so horrifying to watch Sheila basically destroy her life. And we understood Sheila’s motivations! She wasn’t just psycho to drive the plot along.

 

Dark Shadows not being owned by ABC nor a production company that undertook erasing tapes is a blessing in so many ways.

We got to see a show change from a gothic soap opera to a supernatural Edge of Night to an interesting anthology-soap hybrid (which Port Charles tried to undertake with mixed success in the early 2000s).

- Seeing the climax of the Bill Malloy murder case involving Matthew Morgan, ghosts, and Victoria Winters

- Seeing the Phoenix story with a final battle between two 'mother's' for the very soul of a child

- Seeing Barnabas Collins and his adventures

- Even the less than stellar Levithan story was interesting and gothic.. if a little too fast paced.

 

2 hours ago, titan1978 said:

When I finally got to see nearly all of that run, it quickly became a favorite. That writing team spreading the story wealth around and making it a true ensemble was wonderful. There were so many great stories and characters, and nobody really felt generic. The dialogue couldn’t just be swapped between characters. The adults felt like adults, and people like Bridget and Michelle felt authentic.

Yes. At the time, I started to have a glimmer of hope that the light was finally going to return to its former radiance and shine brightly for a long time to come.

The return to glory did not last long, alas, but we were lucky to have gotten that brief renaissance.

2 hours ago, titan1978 said:

My classics would absolutely include BJ’s heart transplant on GH. I have recently seen a bunch of it again, and you forget many of the small moments like even in his rage, Tony stops for a minute and shows some glimpse of compassion when he needs to tell Bobbie about doing a direct donation. And when she later agrees, there is this silent look between them in a later scene, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. And everybody was included in the weight of the story that should have been- not just Felicia and Tony and Bobbie, but also Lucy, Frisco, Monica. Steve and Amy in the emergency room just broken hearted. Luke and Laura telling Lucky. It was a special story.

Stone and Robin’s tragic love story. The Romeo and Juliet play, the edge of danger with the mob much like her mother Anna with Duke. A near perfect young and tragic love story. Stone’s gradual decline and poignant death. The fact that they actually went there, that Robin Scorpio was HIV positive, was shocking in 1995. The meds were not the same as they would be even by 1998, there was no guarantee that Robin would survive because they played it real. It was a risk, lost the show viewers, but they told the whole story anyway. The episode where Stone got to hear what he meant to everyone was special. Little things like him helping Lucky and Sly with a go-cart, cutting himself, and Laura took care of it with compassion after he freaked out. Stone breaking down and Mac finally just hugging him, because it was too late to keep being mad at this kid. I had a parent involved with caring for gay men dying of AIDS in the late 80’s/very early 90’s, before a lot was known. She also said it was the most realistic story she had seen as far as progression of the disease.

The Wendy Riche/Claire Labine era of GH was the last time any soap truly attained the level of greatness, IMHO. BJ's heart saga and Stone's battle with AIDS are exactly what I think of when  I think of soap masterpieces. So many moments still resonant to this day. I'll never forget Felicia finding out what was happening, runni ng upstairs to find Bobbie, and then sinking to the floor shrieking/crying, "Not Barbara Jean! Not Barbara Jean's heart!"

Mac hugging Stone made me love him dearly.

2 hours ago, titan1978 said:

OLTL- when Robin Strasser returned, and they told the story that landed Dorian in jail for killing Victor, eventually leading to all of Viki’s alters being revealed was also so compelling. It was gothic at times, and was gritty. All that thunder and dramatic music. I know people that watched when the show began have issues with what they did with Victor Lord. But for where the show was at that point, and the psychology of the day, they took something that had been played for camp and made it so grounded and painful.

OLTL really milked the Victor Lord business and Viki's alters way too many times, and it all ultimately became absurd. (Victor supposedly being alive...UGH! That was one of the show's worst and most egregious stories ever.) But the period you mentioned was well done, with a lot of good acting. It's true that the Victor Lord we longtime viewers knew from 1968 to 1975 bore no resemblance at all to the monster he was later said to be, and that irritated me, but some writers handled the revisionist history better than others. I just wish TPTB had left well enough alone, and allowed VL and Viki's alters to remain in the past after they had already been milked bone-dry. The Victor-is-Alive dreck was just embarrassing. (I appreciated hearing, much later on, Dorian remarking, "If that really was him," in reference to the suddenly-reanimated "Victor Lord". There was no way to fix the plot at that point, but at least the show was giving us a throw-away line offering hope that all that garbage wasn't even real.

2 hours ago, titan1978 said:

Young and the Restless- Sheila’s reign of terror. I didn’t follow her to B&B, so it stops with the fire for me. Bu t it is just so psychological and thrilling. Lauren was a complicated character, she wasn’t that nice a person back then, but it was so horrifying to watch Sheila basically destroy her life. And we understood Sheila’s motivations! She wasn’t just psycho to drive the plot along.

Complex villains, whose motivations we can at least somewhat understand, are always the most captivating. To me, Rachel Davis, Roger Thorpe, Iris Carrington, Erica Kane, Barnabas Collins, etc., captured the audience's imagination because no matter how badly they behaved, we could see their soft underbellies and understand  their pain. "Suffering antagonists" are more magnetic than one-dimensional, cardboard caricatures, which many soap villains tend to be.

Edited September 7Sep 7 by vetsoapfan

1 hour ago, Soaplovers said:

Dark Shadows not being owned by ABC nor a production company that undertook erasing tapes is a blessing in so many ways.

We got to see a show change from a gothic soap opera to a supernatural Edge of Night to an interesting anthology-soap hybrid (which Port Charles tried to undertake with mixed success in the early 2000s).

ITA. While I believe the show ran out of steam towards the end, and tried too hard to offer more and more outlandish material at the expense of character development and exploring all the quieter moments of their stories (which had made the first few years so mesmerizing, IMO), DS worked wonders with the restraints it was under. There's a reason it became such a fiercely-beloved cult classic, warts and all.👏

The fact that this show and most of the run of The Doctors (including its best years) survived is a blessing and a miracle!

I've been over this before, but I watched some of the later moments mentioned on this page at GH and OLTL (the Robin/Stone story, the Victor Lord/DID saga) live and I never forgot them or where I was. Particularly Viki turning into Tommy and hurling Dorian down the stairs - I was a kid and had no idea she'd had multiple personalities, so I was terrified. I also was there live with Bianca coming out on AMC and I'll never forget it.

I also have seen Dark Shadows in full, but that was because of being a kid obsessed with its reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel. I still know a lot of it backwards and forwards, even though for all intents and purposes I left it behind years ago.

delete

Edited September 7Sep 7 by Vee

1 hour ago, Vee said:

I've been over this before, but I watched some of the later moments mentioned on this page at GH and OLTL (the Robin/Stone story, the Victor Lord/DID saga) live and I never forgot them or where I was.

I think that's an experience many soap fans have in common: there are certain scenes which become imbedded in our memories, and which we never forget.

1 hour ago, Vee said:

Particularly Viki turning into Tommy and hurling Dorian down the stairs - I was a kid and had no idea she'd had multiple personalities, so I was terrified.

Do you remember who the head writer at OLTL was at that point? Was it Michael Malone?

1 hour ago, Vee said:

I also was there live with Bianca coming out on AMC and I'll never forget it.

Harding Lemay failed at getting permission to have the offspring of a core family be gay on AW. He probably would have done a fine job with it, but AMC's handling of this similar story was quite the success. I never understood why they later tried replacing Bianca.🙄 After the character's involvement in such a groundbreaking story, I highly doubted the audience would embrace a replacement.

 

3 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

I never understood why they later tried replacing Bianca.🙄 After the character's involvement in such a groundbreaking story, I highly doubted the audience would embrace a replacement.

It wasn't their choice. Eden Riegel steadfastly refused to return after Chuck Pratt's run tanked the Bianca/Reese story she'd been promised, and IIRC she may have been otherwise engaged at Y&R when they did the brief recast with Christina Bennett Lind. Lind did a decent job under the circumstances, but it was better to have Riegel back (albeit in a clearly recurring capacity) on AMC 2.0 on Hulu.

And yes, Michael Malone (and Josh Griffith) did the entire DID story in the '90s at OLTL. You could see the roots as early as '92 or '93, when Sloan Carpenter came to town writing a book about the 'great man' Victor Lord.

As a child I started watching OLTL in summer '93. The fascination with Victor, the relationship Viki had to him, the backstory with Dorian was all unveiled to me in dialogue and it was fascinating to me that a show's history could stretch back decades to now. That was how I fell in love with soaps. But I knew from the outset something was very wrong about what they were telling me about Victor Lord. I had watched Twin Peaks live on ABC with my mother not long before this, which also featured an incest/molestation story at its center. Something about Viki's worship of her father, of the unanswered questions seemed 'wrong' to me instinctually. I suspected what it was long before they came out and said it. And going back and looking at the material recently - as far back as the summer 30th anniversary of the show in '93, where Viki has an extreme emotional reaction to them unearthing Victor's secret room while trying to save Max and Tina's sons - you can see the seeds were there very early on. (To say nothing of Erika Slezak's absolutely terrifying performance in the '80s, during the original Tina Lord story when they first discovered that Victor had sired Tina and had an affair with Viki's college roommate.)

I understand why people have issues with the story, but to me it is still pretty much pitch perfect. It holds up.

3 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

I think that's an experience many soap fans have in common: there are certain scenes which become imbedded in our memories, and which we never forget.

Certainly the case with the scenes I mentioned, and with Alan Quartermaine telling Robin she is HIV positive. I came home from school one day and there it was. She was maybe a year or 2-3 older than me. I was floored.

I wish GH had a fraction of that courage today - re: COVID, abortion rights, you name it. AFAIC that is and always had been daytime's duty and social compact with its audience, not just kids coming home from school but all viewers. Now more than ever.

Edited September 7Sep 7 by Vee

8 hours ago, Vee said:

It wasn't their choice. Eden Riegel steadfastly refused to return after Chuck Pratt's run tanked the Bianca/Reese story she'd been promised

 

I had never heard that tea. I'd have remembered it, considering how much I loathed Chuck Pratt.🤢

8 hours ago, Vee said:

IIRC she may have been otherwise engaged at Y&R when they did the brief recast with Christina Bennett Lind. Lind did a decent job under the circumstances, but it was better to have Riegel back (albeit in a clearly recurring capacity) on AMC 2.0 on Hulu.

Actually, Lind really did do a good enough job, but she just wasn't Bianca. After Kate Mulgrew left Ryan's Hope, the show recast her role with Mary Carney. Carney was a fine actress, but no one else but Mulgrew would ever be Mary Ryan. (The less said about Kathleen Tolan the better.)

8 hours ago, Vee said:

And yes, Michael Malone (and Josh Griffith) did the entire DID story in the '90s at OLTL. You could see the roots as early as '92 or '93, when Sloan Carpenter came to town writing a book about the 'great man' Victor Lord.

As a child I started watching OLTL in summer '93. The fascination with Victor, the relationship Viki had to him, the backstory with Dorian was all unveiled to me in dialogue and it was fascinating to me that a show's history could stretch back decades to now. That was how I fell in love with soaps. But I knew from the outset something was very wrong about what they were telling me about Victor Lord. I had watched Twin Peaks live on ABC with my mother not long before this, which also featured an incest/molestation story at its center. Something about Viki's worship of her father, of the unanswered questions seemed 'wrong' to me instinctually. I suspected what it was long before they came out and said it. And going back and looking at the material recently - as far back as the summer 30th anniversary of the show in '93, where Viki has an extreme emotional reaction to them unearthing Victor's secret room while trying to save Max and Tina's sons - you can see the seeds were there very early on. (To say nothing of Erika Slezak's absolutely terrifying performance in the '80s, during the original Tina Lord story when they first discovered that Victor had sired Tina and had an affair with Viki's college roommate.)

Whom did that old rascal NOT sleep with, LOL?

8 hours ago, Vee said:

I understand why people have issues with the story, but to me it is still pretty much pitch perfect. It holds up.

It was really well served by that great cast.

8 hours ago, Vee said:

Certainly the case with the scenes I mentioned, and with Alan Quartermaine telling Robin she is HIV positive. I came home from school one day and there it was. She was maybe a year or 2-3 older than me. I was floored.

I wish GH had a fraction of that courage today - re: COVID, abortion rights, you name it. AFAIC that is and always had been daytime's duty and social compact with its audience, not just kids coming home from school but all viewers. Now more than ever.

 Discarding attempts at social relevance and current events hurt the soaps a lot. They used to deal with mature, adult subjects significantly better than primetime TV. Nowadays, they don't seem to make a point about anything.

Edited September 7Sep 7 by vetsoapfan

3 hours ago, Vee said:

I had watched Twin Peaks live on ABC with my mother not long before this, which also featured an incest/molestation story at its center.

That really is the core of that story, and many seem to either gloss over that or don’t get it. Fire Walk With Me is a very hard watch, but it really is important for the truth of the darkness of Laura Palmer’s story, and where she ends up at the beginning of the show. Yes it was quirky and had other stories, and the element of supernatural. But it was rooted in that horror, and was groundbreaking for network television in nearly every way.

3 hours ago, Vee said:

As a child I started watching OLTL in summer '93. The fascination with Victor, the relationship Viki had to him, the backstory with Dorian was all unveiled to me in dialogue and it was fascinating to me that a show's history could stretch back decades to now.

OLTL was my grandmother’s favorite show, and I can remember her saying Dorian did kill Victor, and she was shocked they were revisiting it and sending her to jail. I also love that even though Nancy Pinkerton played that, Strasser felt so deeply that Dorian having killed Victor was essential to playing her. She often said she still believed that Dorian believed she killed him, no matter what the story revealed.

9 hours ago, vetsoapfan said:

 

Harding Lemay failed at getting permission to have the offspring of a core family be gay on AW. He probably would have done a fine job with it, but AMC's handling of this similar story was quite the success. I never understood why they later tried replacing Bianca.🙄 After the character's involvement in such a groundbreaking story, I highly doubted the audience would embrace a replacement.

 

Actually the final months of AMC's run on ABC, there was a recast of Bianca and she was instantly accepted.  She came across like an adult with a voice that didn't sound like she was a whiny Minnie Mouse.

 

Twin Peaks:

I was a kid when that show was on, and my parents used to host Twin Peaks parties with coffee and cherry pie for their friends.

However, the episode where Laura Palmer's killer was revealed wasn't a surprise since my mom since episode 1 had guessed the killer correctly.  What surprised me was that Poor Maddy was a victim of her uncle, and it was heart wrenching because she was such a sweet and uncomplicated girl (the direct mirror opposite of her deceased cousin Laura).   

I locked my bedroom door and window after that episode aired for many a week until I could trust my parents.  

Dallas:

I was very little, but I remember the final scene of the 1986 cliffhanger with Bobby in the shower.  As a small child, I didn't understand the significance.. but my parents spent the whole summer arguing over it.  My dad correctly guessed that the show was going to play off the previous season as a dream while my mom said only a man would come up with that solution.  

And I remember the Pam car accident episode in 1987 and seeing that live as a child... and my mom stating 'If Victoria Principal leaves, I'm going to stop watching the show'... and she kept her word.

 

Edited September 7Sep 7 by Soaplovers

3 hours ago, titan1978 said:

That really is the core of that story, and many seem to either gloss over that or don’t get it. Fire Walk With Me is a very hard watch, but it really is important for the truth of the darkness of Laura Palmer’s story, and where she ends up at the beginning of the show. Yes it was quirky and had other stories, and the element of supernatural. But it was rooted in that horror, and was groundbreaking for network television in nearly every way.

Even though Twin Peaks did have its missteps along the way, its first season was excellent, and the bits we saw of BOB were truly terrifying (particularly when he quietly entered Donna's house and crawled over the living room couch to get to Maddie. EEEEEEK!)

The episode that featured the big reveal about Leland was one of the most intense and horrifyingly violent episodes of television I have ever seen. Right in the middle of it, my telephone rang and I almost hit the roof. When I answered, my friend didn't even say hello. He immediately hissed, "I am losing it! I can't watch this alone!"

3 hours ago, titan1978 said:

OLTL was my grandmother’s favorite show, and I can remember her saying Dorian did kill Victor, and she was shocked they were revisiting it and sending her to jail. I also love that even though Nancy Pinkerton played that, Strasser felt so deeply that Dorian having killed Victor was essential to playing her. She often said she still believed that Dorian believed she killed him, no matter what the story revealed.

We never actually saw Dorian kill Victor Lord; when the character died, it was off-screen. We did know, however, that she was doing a lot of manipulating back-stage, and trying to isolate him from everyone. She was up to no good, and it certainly looked like she had taken his life. That implication was woven into the show's canon for years until later PTB chose to do some revisionist retconning.

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

Actually the final months of AMC's run on ABC, there was a recast of Bianca and she was instantly accepted.  She came across like an adult with a voice that didn't sound like she was a whiny Minnie Mouse.

I know about the recast (I watched her), and fully acknowledge that the actress was decent. I just don't know how well she was accepted by the overall audience. I mainly heard comments along the lines of, "She's a lovely young woman, but she just isn't Bianca." To each his own.

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

 

Twin Peaks:

I locked my bedroom door and window after (the Leland-reveal) episode aired for many a week until I could trust my parents.  

LOL! When I was in prep school, I had a film course in which the teacher screened the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn't as explicitly gory as I had been told (still disturbing enough, thank you), but UGH. It had a certain...quality that really creeped me out. When I returned home, my father was in the yard trimming the hedge with a chainsaw. I took my dog, went to my bedroom, and stayed holed up in there until I KNEW it was safe to come out.😬

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

Dallas:

I was very little, but I remember the final scene of the 1986 cliffhanger with Bobby in the shower.  As a small child, I didn't understand the significance.. but my parents spent the whole summer arguing over it.  My dad correctly guessed that the show was going to play off the previous season as a dream while my mom said only a man would come up with that solution.  

It really was a dumb move for the show to make. They should not have killed off such an integral character in the first place. That shower scene and the explanation that followed ("It was a dream!") were pretty embarrassing, IMHO. I never would have killed Bobby off, but after the character was confirmed dead, I would have kept him that way.

2 hours ago, Soaplovers said:

And I remember the Pam car accident episode in 1987 and seeing that live as a child... and my mom stating 'If Victoria Principal leaves, I'm going to stop watching the show'... and she kept her word.

I get the sentiment. The moment I saw that AW had recast Alice Frame in 1975 (and dropped Jacquie Courtney), I stopped being a daily viewer of that soap. And after the last of the Brooks family members left Y&R, I bowed out of that show too.

 

On 9/6/2025 at 12:25 PM, vetsoapfan said:

And for many years, the successful soaps existed in a "reality bubble," staying more or less within the bounds of events that could take place in the real world. We had ordinary people next door to watch on-screen, and we never knew from day to day what would happen to them. It was easy to get immersed in the stories and identify with the characters' problems. There were no clones, extra-terrestrials, time travelers, devil possessions, mad scientists freezing the world, towns filled exclusively with the uber-rich, etc., all of which broke the magical reality bubble of the genre, and reinforced the idea that everything we were now watching had turned to cartoonish farce. To me, the advent of over-the-top camp alienated a lot of the die-hard soap fans who had loved the shows for their lost, immersive and HUMAN qualities.

But for decades, we had experienced something magical!

BTG brought a lot of that back. Have you had a chance to watch it?