As The World Turns
September 29, 2009
- In the wake of Guiding Light's cancellation and the current state of affairs on As the World Turns (while we haven’t seen them for a month, we can only hope that Kim's recovered from her heart attack and Bob from his brain surgery), One Life to Live has become what fear may be my final port in soap's choppy waters.And so I took great solace in last Wednesday's episode, "Fathers and ...
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August 4, 2009
- The past few weeks I've been having hard time writing. With Guiding Light's end looming large, there's a long term project I've been struggling to get my arms around. Then there's the oppressive heat that finally arrived after weeks of relentless rain. And now that Nina Tassler's (CBS President of Entertainment) comments to the Television Critics Association meeting have begun the official ...
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July 28, 2009
- It's taken me a while to get to this, but a while back, Red Room member, Lana Nieves, challenged the conventional wisdom that the 1993 death of Maureen Bauer was the beginning of the end for Guiding Light. It was a great piece, and Lana made a lot of good points, but...To quote Lana, "I respectfully disagree." I actually agree with a lot of what Lana had to say, particularly her ...
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June 28, 2009
- then soap opera is like hollandaise sauce. Making hollandaise is tricky business. It's an emulsion, and you have to keep whisking; add the butter to the eggs too quickly, the whole thing separates and falls apart. And so it is with how soap opera viewers suspend disbelief. The very nature of soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media when it comes to suspending disbelief. It's a ...
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June 19, 2009
- My friend, Robert, and I have been soap fans for many years and, as such, I consider us to be sort of experts on the subject. We don't just know a lot about the characters, the plot lines, the family histories in Springfield, Genoa City, Oakdale, etc....but we know about how soap opera works, as a genre. We know the shape and structure of daily soap. We know how it differs from, say, the ...
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June 16, 2009
- A while back, I posted about the parallels between the changes the auto industry is going through, and the challenges that traditional media (especially soap operas) face. The industries are vastly different, but some of the challenges – adapting the scope of your enterprise to the new marketplace – are the same. In many of the stories we’ve heard about GM and Chrysler, we’re reminded ...
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June 15, 2009
- Last week's news that Crystal Chappell will be returning to Days of Our Lives pretty much assures that Guiding Light's 72-year run will end on September 18th. I say "pretty much" because to quote Yogi Berra, "it ain't over ‘til it's over." But, all things being equal... Anyway. I got to thinking about something I wrote in late March, as rumors of Guiding Light's imminent ...
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May 31, 2009
- Last week As the World Turns illustrated perfectly soap opera as the tattered macramé wall hanging I discussed last week. Memorial Day in Oakdale used to mean Bob raising the flag before the Hughes' family picnic. This year, no picnic, and while a couple of vets, Lisa and Barbara (who were involved in the Paul-Rosanna-Meg-Damien thing about which the less said the better), were seen, Susan ...
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May 5, 2009
- I had forgotten that today was Douglas Marland's birthday. But as I watched today's episode of As the World Turns, it occurred to me that perhaps the writers had not. There were actually parts (not all, but yes, plural) of today's episode that echoed the best of Marland - in fact, it may have been most of the episode. And it's been a good long time since that happened.I've never had much use for ...
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May 5, 2009
- Today would have been Douglas Marland’s 74th birthday. In any case, it’s a great opportunity to celebrate his talent and his work. The newer generation of soap viewers may not know who he is, but he touched so many of the shows I know and love: Guiding Light, As The World Turns, Another World (where he was a staff writer for Harding Lemay), and General Hospital.Last spring, Marlena Delacroix ...
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