In defense of Long, she wasn't the one to introduce Johnny nor his annoying kid sister.. those characters were created during her time away from the show. She at least knew to write off the kid sister and change Frank D's character into Frank Cooper and replace the annoying kid sister with Harley.
And she did try to liven Johnny up by pairing him with Roxie, or were they paired before she came back as head-writer? I don't think the cancer did him, nor that relationship any favors.
@DeeVee In defense of Marland and the Phillip story.. when he took over, he probably had to focus on the Roger story right away most likely because Michael Z was leaving (I think I read somewhere Marland was bummed because he really wanted to write Roger). And by the time he probably would have been ready to start focusing back on the Phillip story, Cindy Pickett was pretty much ready to leave the show so he probably thought he needed to find a new Jackie and get the audience to accept her first so he pushed back that story and decided to build on the Amanda story first.
@DRW50 In regards to Barbara, I think having her run the restaurant that her son Andy bought for her was an effective way of keeping her in the mix and giving her purpose outside of worrying about her kids... but once MG quit and the character of Andy was written in a corner, her character became expendable.
A question I had was that in reading write-ups of Vanessa in 1980, it said that she remembered Andy because of how he up and left Trish Lewis so am I to believe that she knew of Billy Lewis long before 1983?
Another thing I never understood was once Jackie officially was killed off in mid 1982.. why the show didn't think to have Sara and Justin interact with one another since the two had a past with one another and Jackie had sabotaged both of their attempts at being together in the past. It certainly would have given Justin something more to do in the first half of 1983 other than trying to date Helena with Evie accidentally coming between them due to her own lonliness after Ben had left town.
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Soaplovers ·
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