one life to live
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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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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March 23, 2009
- while it would be so very nice if every soap opera episode could be as great as one life to live was last wednesday, i could live with what i got today. each of the three shows i watch regularly -- oltl, guiding light, as the world turns -- had some nice, relatively quiet (which is to say not too over the top) moments between characters that gave voice to the inherent ambuity that is life. i've ...
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February 8, 2009
- I was going to circulate this little rant among a few friends, but once it's out there, it's out there... So, what the hell.I logged on to We Love Soaps Sunday morning - before I had my first cup of tea - and what do I see but the following headline: "ATWT Wins WGA Award." That was enough to make me wonder if the judges had been on drugs. But reading on, I come to find out that As the ...
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December 3, 2008
- I have been watching soap operas for a long time - 50-plus years - and never can I remember a story that has generated more passionate, thoughtful and, yes, contentious, discussion than the past six months of One Life to Live's Todd and Marty saga. And by that measure alone, this current story, controversial and divisive as it is, has been a smashing success. It all started back in 1993, when ...
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November 12, 2008
- When my cable provider added SOAPNet a couple of years ago, I finally had a chance to see Ryan's Hope. The episodes airing then were from 1980, about five years into the show's 14-year run. I have to confess, the character of Delia Reid Ryan (Ryan Coleridge Crane Coleridge) didn't make much of an impression on me one way or the other. The Delia of the early-1980s, as played by Randall Kennedy, ...
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September 15, 2008
- I generally resist, indeed reject, the term soap opera when it's used as shorthand for those cheap and melodramatic plot twists that define soap opera as an adjective (discussed here ). Of course, if I had a dollar for every time the 2008 election has been described as a soap opera, I'd have a nice little nest egg. And I'm not even talking about the John Edwards affair and Bristol (a soap opera ...
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September 3, 2008
- Like Nelson Branco, I'd been holding off critiquing One Life to Live's recently-wrapped visit to 1968. But, while I've been distracted by the unfolding political drama of the past week, Nelson beat me to the punch, saying pretty much everything I had planned to here - you know what they say about great minds and all... This passage, in particular, resonated: Parts of this storyline ...
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July 16, 2008
- I’ve been trying to keep my soap opera blogs at a minimum because honestly, it depresses me. Now writing about the classic age of soaps, heck get me started and a Bartle and Jaymes in me and I can chat about it for hours until you start to back away and say “Stay away from this girl! Stay far away!” However, I need to write a plea today, to The Young and the Restless. They just hired ...
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June 29, 2008
- Finally: I’ve been hearing from a number of reliable sources for several months now about how much One Life to Live has improved under headwriter Ron Carvaliti. With a break a couple weeks ago in what’s still a jammed schedule, I set aside my innate skepticism and decided to have a look. But I wanted to give the show its due. I noted a back then the SOAPnet scheduling glitch, link, ...
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