I think that the first year material is good emotional material, and probably more mature than a lot of its the same era when the "love on the run" stories were taking over everywhere. A lot of the show's domestic drama is potent, but its hard for me to appreciate it without the original Englsih language track. Lorna's failed seduction of Doug was wonderful and there were so many nice connections built between characters that this whole inconvenience could have fueled a series of interactions given that Lorna is Roger's daughter and Merrill has recently called off her engagement to Doug to be with Roger. I do hope we someday get more English language material, but until then I'll survive.
I think Ralph Ellis is credited in the scripts as headwriter even though he isn't credited on screen. I'm not sure exactly when that is though. I know the late 1986 stuff I watched felt very much like reheated Search for Tomorrow, but I've seen Nixon previewing the April Hathway story in mid 1987.
King and Taggart with Joe Hardy isn't my favorite material. I cannot remember if there was any point it was King, Taggart, and Joe Stuart, but I don't think so. The stuff that was good in those sequences online recently become even better in 1990, but so much of the story doesn't work for me. I know this is sacreligious, but I don't like Trisha and Trucker. To me, I could probably tolerate them as a C-couple, maybe a B-couple, but they carry too much story and Trucker isn't that interesting a character to do that. Trisha and Trucker work better as a concept when it was Trisha and Steve. By the end of the couple's run, Trucker basically is a surrogate Steve without the connection to the Rescotts.
1991 is strong from what I've seen, but not perfect. I think from Jackie Babbin to Fran Sears and Taggart/King to Taggart solo to Mary Ryan Munisteri is pretty engaging. There is definitely big turnover with the change in EPs. Sears overseas the departures of Clay, Abril, Rio, Rocky, and some of the supporting players like Walter Bobbie's Denny and Ilene Kristen's Norma and we get Ally, Matt, Flynn, Dinah Lee, and Giff. This is after, earlier in 1991, we see off Cabot, Isabelle, Curtis, Alex, Egypt, Dane, Elizabeth Savage's Gwen, and Monty to the second murder mystery in under a year.
I am one of the people who thinks (at least in 1992) the show leaned too much into the younger set. The soft launch of the college revamp in the fall of 1991 worked well because it focused on the established players (mostly Trisha and Trucker) and included a solid crossover (Jeremy and Ceara). Once you launch the sorority storyline, it's a lot of new characters at once in a single story (Cooper, Staige, Kent, and Casey). Hannah and Ally are the carry overs. I also didn't like sacrificing Carly, Flynn, Michael, and Paul, but Walsh didn't write for them well anyway.
Also, the revamp is such a hodgepodge of the two headwriters obscure soap opera work. When Casey/Revel is originally mentioned in the scripts (December, 1991), he is one of Giff's three sons and he is a musician. There is immediately a storyline in January, 1992, under Walsh that involves Matt joining a band and an attraction between Aly and one of his bandmates, James. Munisteri had very recently written a similar story on Tribes and had also had a plot where a young woman accused a teacher of something sexual in nature the way Ally, under Walsh, also accused Giff of getting her pregnant. It is my hypothesis that Walsh revised Munisteri's existing story projections to run out the story for the characters she inherited while she built up the younger crew.
While Munisteri cribbed from Tribes, Walsh recycled from her work on Riviera with Cooper Alden arriving on the scene just as Beatrice and Laurent de Courcey's niece and nephew appeared after the tragic death of their parents. In addition, the romance between an illegitimate de Courcey, American Sam, and his presumed half-sister Gabriella de Courecy, was upended by Sam's paternity reveal while it was revealed in the concluding episode that Gabriella was the product of an affair between Beatrice and another man. I wonder if Wnlsh was considering a Shana / Clay romance.
Haidee Granger's arrival causes its own shockwaves. Yes, Paul Anthony Stewart stated that the show had no headwriter by the middle of the summer of 1992. I believe the crux of the conflict between Granger and Walsh was over the Cooper sexual assault plot with Granger rewriting the story to suggest that Cooper initated the encounter with Selina, the nanny, which Walsh rewrote in her return in September, 1994. It is never clear to me if Walsh came back in 1992 though she was credited until January, 1993.
Things turn around a bit in late 1992 when they start to reshuffle the canvas and decide what the direction is with the younger set involving Ally-Casey before Ally becomes pregnant. It isn't really until Guza and Taggart return in January that the show really ignites.
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dc11786 ·
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