Sun May 11 1996
New team hopes to revive ‘Another World’ By Connie Passalacqua
United Features Syndicate
During the last few years, NBC’s “Another World," which was the No. 1 daytime soap throughout the 1970s, has gone into a serious ratings decline. A usually good cast has not been able to make up for story lines that have grown increasingly diffuse and worse, have grown tired and repetitive. To revive “AW,” NBC and Procter & Gamble recently hired two daytime television heavyweights, executive producer John Whitesell and head writer Margaret De Priest.
Whitesell, 33, got lots of publicity recently during his brief stint at the helm of “Search for Tomorrow” when he orchestrated the flood that was supposed to destroy Henderson and save the show. But it’s De Priest who has a longer and a more impressive record on various daytime shows. She first got involved in soaps in the early ’60s as an actress and later as a writer on “Edge of Night,” and later went on to write for “One Life to Live” and be the bead writer for “The Doctors.” Most important, she was on the headwriting team of “General Hospital” during the early 1980s when the Luke and Laura romance made the show a national cult. She also created another cult couple, Bo and Hope Brady of “Days of Our Lives,” • whose action-adventure-styled romance revived the show’s popularity.
De Priest says she has specific goals in improving “AW.” “I intend to bring a solid focus to the show,” she says. “The audience will be able to say in one sentence or see in one key scene what ‘AW’ is all about. And I intend to give each character a clear point of view. Out of these strong points of view come confrontation and conflict.” She also plans to sharpen the class conflicts between the show's three central families. “We’re going to do a classic drama in the vein of Sinclair Lewis — with all the wealthy Loves on one side of the spectrum, the blue-collar Mackinnons on the other and the wealthy but socially conscious Corys in between,” she says. De Priest also will introduce new characters including a Love family patriarch and younger brother and sister Mackinnons “The stories on *AW’ will have more surprising twists and turns,” De Priest promises.“We’ll do away with the Friday cliffhanger. I want to throw audiences off balance.”
During the next few months, De Priest will throw obstacles into the paths of three couples who are planning to wed or rewed — Sally and Catlin Ewing (Taylor Miller and Thomas Ian Griffith), Kathleen Mackinnon and Cass Winthrop (Stephen Schnetzer and Julie Osburn) and Marley Love and Jake Mackinnon (Ellen Wheeler and Tom Eplin)
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Paul Raven ·
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