18 minutes ago, Vee said:

I had a fondness for poor Susan Misner, not unlike Tava Smiley. Grace was just a futile role.

Never knew Susan Misner was on a soap. I know she had numerous roles on the Law & Order franchise, and she was pretty good! One of those roles on Criminal Intent was opposite a then-unknown David Harbour as her wackadoodle religious-nut hubby. LOL.

I do also remember Darlene Vogel (Melanie, OLTL) from that USA cop show on bikes, Pacific Blue. Why I remember the name, I don't know! And Barbara Niven had at least three separate guest roles on Silk Stalkings back in the day. Cheesy, but fun!

1 hour ago, carolineg said:

I feel like Jax wasn't very committed to a type like Sonny is. Well, actually his type is probably woman Sonny dated mostly

Ha

56 minutes ago, alwaysAMC said:

I liked Juan Pablo more than Carlos, but yeah, both didn't really last long. Wasn't that all part of the Fusion Sex and the City thing they were going for?

It was.

23 minutes ago, Wendy said:

Never knew Susan Misner was on a soap.

Her most memorable moment was a brief dance interlude with RSW at the LPD, IIRC.

AW in the 80's was a revolving door of characters who were brought in and given prominent stories and then dropped-mainly because new writers arrived.

I think they were often too hasty in dumping some characters instead of working with what was there and doing some tweaking.

Derek Dane-the brooding mystery man destined for a sizzling romance with Stacey Winthrop.

Miranda Bishop-Iris in waiting

Amy Dudley, Neal Cory, Olivia Delany, Tracy De Witt Matthews, Diana Frame, Vince Frame, Leigh Hobson etc etc

With all the upheavals it had to endure throughout the '80's and '90's, the fact that AW lasted as long as it did at NBC is nothing short of a miracle.

4 minutes ago, Khan said:

With all the upheavals it had to endure throughout the '80's and '90's, the fact that AW lasted as long as it did at NBC is nothing short of a miracle.

And they wondered why viewers were leaving. If you got attached to characters that weren't named Mac or Rachel chances are they'd be gone within a year or so.

24 minutes ago, Paul Raven said:

AW in the 80's was a revolving door of characters who were brought in and given prominent stories and then dropped-mainly because new writers arrived.

I think they were often too hasty in dumping some characters instead of working with what was there and doing some tweaking.

Derek Dane-the brooding mystery man destined for a sizzling romance with Stacey Winthrop.

Miranda Bishop-Iris in waiting

Amy Dudley, Neal Cory, Olivia Delany, Tracy De Witt Matthews, Diana Frame, Vince Frame, Leigh Hobson etc etc

The most egregious to me was the Shea family, where the parents were violently killed off in separate stories about six months apart.

10 minutes ago, Khan said:

With all the upheavals it had to endure throughout the '80's and '90's, the fact that AW lasted as long as it did at NBC is nothing short of a miracle.

20 years of transition...and one of the more stable periods (around 1993) was when they were nearly canceled.

SFT Laine Adamson

An ambitious businesswoman, a contrast to her more sedate sister Sunny, more like her scheming father Ted.

She got involved with Gary Walton, Stu's grandson and broke up his marriage to Carolyn, getting pregnant with his child in the process. She also had a thing going with David Sutton.

There was years of story potential there but Laine left town after a year, never to be seen again for the next 6 or so years Sunny remained on the show.

6 hours ago, DRW50 said:

Speaking of B&B, thanks @Huntress for the extensive list. Some of those characters like the ones played by Ellen Wheeler and Kin Shriner were likely never intended to stay and B&B just stunt cast whether they needed to or not (the same happened with Tristan Rogers).

Yeah, you're probably right about some of these characters. I think the “we just start introducing new characters and don’t really have a long-term plan for them” phase began with Claudia and Enrique in late 1996.

I completely forgot about Brian Gaskill’s short-lived character, Oscar Marone. He was brought in as a love interest for Amber and later Bridget, but only lasted a few months. Didn't help that the Bridget recast, Emily Harrison, also didn't last long and was bumped to recurring after just a few weeks.

I didn’t include the characters played by Sydney Penny, Lorenzo Lamas, Lark Voorhies, Lindsay Price, Dylan Neal, et al., because all of them were on the show for much longer than a year. 😉Otherwise, half of the cast would fit the criteria of this topic.

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by Huntress

Ryan's Hope had a meat grinder with Jack and Mary. I think there was a man who worked beside Mary at the news station, then an old doctor friend of Jack's whose story was curtailed due to Kate Mulgrew's pregnancy, and finally, Mary's producer, played by Patrick Horgan.

Rose Alaio, whose work as Rose I dearly enjoyed, was also cut very short in Jack's life due to backstage issues.

For the show's first year, mobster Nick Szabo came and went, joined by his daughter, Reenie. Whatever plans Reenie was meant to have with storyline-allergic Bucky were cut short as the character vanished, with Julia Barr having better luck in Pine Valley.

There was the sad case of Nancy Feldman, who was probably on for a year and some change, played by three actresses, Nana Visitor being the longest-lasting. They wanted an interfaith love story with Pat which never went anywhere due to casting choices and lack of chemistry. I will always remember a very odd post-coitus between them where Nancy was going on about how they looked like brother and sister. Why??? I've heard that '70s NYC was trashy but not that trashy, surely.

As one of about two John Blazo fans, I was very disappointed when his delicate Pat was fired and replaced by the temper tantrum Brady brother recast, one of the worst recasts of all time. Both characters were shipped out not long after.

Sam Behrens was also hired for this story and must have impressed someone in the audience or at ABC, as he lingered for a while with nothing to do.

1981 started the parade of short-lived Faith love interests, whether it be cops or archaeologists, all of whom fought and lost the battle of having chemistry with Karen Morris Gowdy.

1980 and 1981 saw the arrival of the "Ryan cousins," first Barry, who had a compelling intro as a music agent who juggled two women before falling in love with one of them (Delia). As Labine and Mayer could never let Delia mature, this was all thrown away, and Barry spent months judging Delia in-between a gambling story that ended in him being dumped from the canvas.

Inexplicably, just after Barry left, his sister, EJ, arrived looking for him. Her story amounted to yet another round of Delia being crazy to try to make viewers like her (spoiler alert: [spoiler]it did not work[/spoiler]), and being paired with Roger, who by this time had lost any of his compelling personality traits under sanctimony and tedium. EJ also helped to expose a soap actress played by a wasted Judith Barcroft. This "story" is a big part of one of the very last Soapnet episodes. Her 1982 material is not available, but as it heavily involves a man named Ox, I doubt it is very good.

Such a horrible waste of Maureen Garrett and Richard Backus (in what was maybe his only good - initially anyway - soap role).

The moral of the story is don't mess with Delia.

Edited 1 minute ago1 min by DRW50