CBS Has Cancelled The Guiding Light After 72 Years

[sandik]

Lost interest in soaps when it began to bother me that they never (as I recal anyway) made reference to outside events...

I watched quite a lot of these shows when I was in grad school, and was struggling with my thesis, but yes, I remember thinking it odd that they never seemed to watch television!

[Dale]

I actually liked that strange stage feeling, it reminded me of Masterpiece Theater of the late 70s and 80s, as if I was watching a stage play on TV. I haven't watched it in a long time, ever since it moved to the mornings rather than at 3pm. When I was in grade school, I watched the ABC soaps mainly because I loved Edge of Night. An actor who had been on Edge, Larkin Malloy, was playing Kyle Sampson on Guiding Light, so I started watching. I loved the Spauldings and Roger and Holly. I bought these magazines they had then, about the history of a certain soap, so I could catch up. After I was done, I knew the whole background about Roger and Ed and the other Bauers. I liked both Alans, but favored Christopher Bernau (who died) - he was very seductive and it was believable that Reva would fall in love with him (for a period of time, of course, before going back - and back and back - to Josh). India was also one of my favorite characters. I had always wanted her to stay with Phillip rather than Beth

[Helene]

IWhen I was in grade school, I watched the ABC soaps mainly because I loved Edge of Night. An actor who had been on Edge, Larkin Malloy, was playing Kyle Sampson on Guiding Light, so I started watching.

I loved Larkin Malloy on Edge of Night! He had genuine, Level 4 nostril flare.

[bart]

This is a fascinating thread.

I was one of those grade kids who was allowed to listen (on the radio) to Our Gal Sunday and The Romance of Helen Trent on sick days. The plots were hard to penetrate, but they gave me a lasting sense of how complex and bewildering adult life could be.

I confess that I haven't followed any soaps since then, but I am truly amazed at both the longevity and the adaptability of The Guiding Light. Obviously, it resonates deeply with many fans.

Does anyone know of a serious history of American soaps -- one that tries to put them in the context of larger social or political trends?

[Helene]

Lynn Johnston started to re-work her comic strip "For Better or Worse" from the beginning, and this week's "new" storyline is about soap operas, namely main character Elly's decision to withdraw from the addiction, because, as she notes in today's strip, "I spend an hour every day watching inane, repetitive drivel" (panel 2) and "Soap operas are impossibly depressing, insulting, and a waste of time" (panel 3), and "They're also fattening" (panel 4, as she sits turns on the TV carrying coffee and a plate of cookies).

I love soap operas!

I wonder if they'd be in healthier financial condition if they went back to the radio. I can't watch TV and write specs at the same time, but I can listen to the radio and write.

[miliosr]

Oh Dale -- I loved India von Halkien too! The scenes between her and her stepmother the Baroness von Halkein (a.k.a. Alexandra Spaulding, played by the late, great Beverlee McKinsey) could peel paint. My all-time favorite Alexandra/India scene occurred moments after a jury erroneously found Alexandra's son Lujack guilty of murder (in part because of a frame job by India and Phillip Spaulding.) Alexandra turns to India and (in that quietly deadly way which only Beverlee McKinsey could do) said: "It's too bad someone didn't kill you. That would have been a case of justifiable homicide!"

Several great actresses played the part of Alexandra -- Beverlee McKinsey, Marj Dusay (who replaced McKinsey and specialized in replacing other grand soap actresses -- she replaced the late, great Carolyn Jones as Myrna Clegg on Capitol) and (gasp!) Joan Collins. But Beverlee McKinsey was the best Alexandra (as one would expect from the actress who brought the character of Iris Cory Carrington Delaney Bancroft Wheeler on Another World and its spinoff Texas to such memorable life.)

[Helene]

Beverly McKinsey was fantastic as Iris.

This thread is making me relive my chlldhood

[perky]

Okay, here's another Guiding Light actress I always loved, Cindy Pickett!

I remember when Jackie and Alan Spaulding first came to Springfield and how her vulnerable womanliness contrasted so sharply with his arrogant menace.

Her look was also rather unsual in that era of BIG HAIR. I think she was the only actress on soaps I had ever seen at that point with that very short pixie bob haircut. It really accented her soulful eyes.

[Gina Ness]

I watched Guiding Light for fifteen years! My mother got me hooked. She loved Cindy Pickett, too. I was a true faithful...recording and watching every episode. Seriously, while I was still dancing... Balanchine's Symphony in C Fourth Movement: 10:30 p.m.; GL, a glass of wine: 11:45 p.m... At some point during the mid-to-late 90s, a gangster plot took over (neither one of us cared for it), and both my Mom and I eventually gave up watching. Some of our favorite characters (Roger and the original Alan) were no longer on the show. I have an autographed "To Gina" photo of Grant Aleksander... I can't believe I watched the soap for so many years...So long, GL, and thanks for the memories...

[sandik]

the character of Iris Cory Carrington Delaney Bancroft Wheeler

And people think that standard geneology is difficult. Not for those of us who cut our teeth on soap operas!

[Helene]

Only in soap operas do the "good" girls, like Victoria on "One Life to Live", get to marry a dozen times in three decades (and most of them were when she was Vicky, not one of her other personalities).

And forget about the men: good, bad, indifferent, for all but a few select patriarchs, they marry so often that if they changed their names, they'd have their own dozen. (Except when they accidentally marry their long-lost relative.)

[miliosr]

The interesting thing about the character of Iris was that none of her relationships with her four husbands was particularly interesting. What WAS interesting were her relationships with her father (Mac Cory) and her son (Dennis Carrington). Her strange, incestuous love for her father made life miserable for her stepmother Rachel on Another World and her strange, incestuous love for her son made life miserable for her daughter-in-law Paige on the Another World spinoff Texas.

[Helene]

Rachel was a very interesting character. She started out with the exact same trajectory as Erica Kane on "All My Children": raised by a working class single mother, and determined to marry out of her class into money. In both cases, they married interns who adored them, but neither realized how long it would be before the husbands would be wealthy and have the time of day for them. Then Rachel went after entrepreneur Steve Frame, who did have the bucks, much to the chagrin of the long-suffering blond woman whose name I can't remember.

By the time the older Iris Carrington showed up to terrorize her prospective step-mother, Rachel was turning into a sympathetic character, and not from a typical, contrived soap opera situation (coma, plastic surgery, amnesia). Instead, they just let her grow up and stop being so needy. That she had discovered artistic talent as a sculptor, a rather solitary pursuit, helped develop her character.

It always helped that "Another World" had a terrific core of adult actors on the show who carried the main storylines. It wasn't a show of kids. Morgan Freeman and Joe Morton were also on that show, the latter in dual roles playing a straight-laced doctor and his cousin. Jackee was also on the show. "Another World" had one of the deepest sets of story lines for black actors on soaps, and there was more than one token family, although they pulled the Joe Morton one abruptly and seemingly inexplicably.

[sandik]

Morgan Freeman and Joe Morton were also on that show, the latter in dual roles playing a straight-laced doctor and his cousin. Jackee was also on the show. "Another World" had one of the deepest sets of story lines for black actors on soaps, and there was more than one token family, although they pulled the Joe Morton one abruptly and seemingly inexplicably.

Oh, I remember Jackee (and how interested I was to see her break out from soaps into other work later on) but I'd forgotten Morton and Freeman (I think I was away from home and television during their tenure). It amazes my son now when I tell him that there were whole years when I didn't really watch any television at all.

[carbro]

I've never heard the expression "tentpole character." What does it mean?

Great term! I never heard it before, either, but I would assume it's one of the central characters who supports major plot lines.

Audience tastes are changing, and the daytime drama numbers have declined as women headed out into the workforce.

Women -- moms in particular -- have been heading into the workforce in large numbers since the '70s, so I don't think that's a big part of the audience fall-off. The economic climate may have sent some at-home moms back into the labor market if the family's primary breadwinner's job has disappeared. I suspect the show's cancellation is more a reflection of the growth of the internet and other alternative entertainment than the Working Woman phenomenon.

(Off topic. Countless sketches were ruined or damaged on on the Burnett show because the cast couldn't stop laughing (or were encouraged to break up, I began to suspect). I used to watch with my father and he'd say, "I hate it when they do that." )

"Ruined" is a matter of taste and opinion. I loved the crack-ups.

I loved Larkin Malloy on Edge of Night! He had genuine, Level 4 nostril flare.

Great image!

I can't watch TV and write specs at the same time, but I can listen to the radio and write.

Just the opposite here. My attention is pretty well focused on the radio (NPR) when it's on. At night, the tv goes on, and I usually give it about 30% of my attention, with occasional exceptions.

[Helene]

Just to veer off for a minute, one of the great things about radio is that the actors need to have great voices, but it doesn't matter what they look like.

I remember watching an episode of ER in which Mark Green's first wife told him that she'd found a job in Milwaukee clerking for a judge at the time his initial residency was up. Watching the show, and thinking he was a great guy, and loving him from "Revenge of the Nerds", I thought she was being selfish -- she was already being set up to be uptight and status-conscious, as opposed to our hero working in a city hospital. When the re-run was on, I was on a work trip, in my hotel room at my computer, and the layout of the room had the desk facing the wall, and the TV behind. I could only listen, and that time, I actually listened to the conversation, even though I was on work email at the time: they had made a deal that she'd go to law school in Chicago because his residency was there, but as soon as law school and the residency were over, they'd move to whereever she needed to start her career, and he was being the selfish one. I never would have come to that conclusion with the visual, but just listening to the dialogue, it was very clear.

[dirac]

“Ruined" is a matter of taste and opinion.

I don’t believe anyone said it wasn’t. We’re all about taste and opinions here.

I’ll say that I don’t care for it when the performers think the gags are more funny than I do, but it could be me. I think that in general the view of professionals is that certain kinds of comedy are more effective when the pans stay dead. I had a drama teacher who cited the constant corpsing of the Burnett cast as a good example of What Not to Do. Laurence Olivier used to tell a story about Noel Coward becoming annoyed with Olivier when the latter, still a relative neophyte, was playing with him in Private Lives and having trouble stifling his giggles at the antics of Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, and Coward didn’t quit getting after him until Olivier was cured of the habit. I’m sure Noel and Gertie really were hilarious, but on the Burnett show it would happen even when the sketch wasn’t wildly funny, and for me it had the same irksome effect of turning up the laugh track– it’s saying to the audience, “Look, this is funny. Really.”

She started out with the exact same trajectory as Erica Kane on "All My Children": raised by a working class single mother, and determined to marry out of her class into money. In both cases, they married interns who adored them, but neither realized how long it would be before the husbands would be wealthy and have the time of day for them.

Ah, yes, Erica Kane and Jeff Martin, that star-crossed union. Jeff was played by John James, who later showed up as another Jeff on Dynasty. My brain is filled with such essential information. No wonder I can't make any money.....

[dirac]

Just to veer off for a minute, one of the great things about radio is that the actors need to have great voices, but it doesn't matter what they look like.

Yes. A classic example being William Conrad, who was a great sounding Marshal Dillon on the radio but when the time came to move Gunsmoke to television the network wouldn't have him.

[miliosr]

The sinking boat the soap operas find themselves in 2009 didn't happen overnight and happened in successive stages (or waves, to stick w/ the nautical analogy.)

The first great dent in the audience was the entry of more and more women into the non-homebound workforce during the 1970s and the 1980s. Since the soaps then and now are geared primarily toward women (and female heterosexual romantic fantasy), the gradual transition of women from working in the home during the day to working outside the home during the day dented the size of the audience. The dent wasn't fatal and, actually, even though the erosion was occurring, most soap fans remember the 1970s and the 1980s as the 'Golden Age'.

The second great blow was the OJ Simpson trial because all three networks more or less suspended their soaps while the trial was happening in real time on TV. What happened during the Simpson interruption is that a lot of people who were reasonably hardcore viewers (either live or through VCR) found that they could live without the soaps and never returned once the Simpson trial concluded and the soaps resumed. Once again, the audience dropped.

The third great hit on the industry occurred during the late-1990s and 00s. With the advent of alternative viewing technologies like YouTube, people no longer needed to watch a show in its entirety. You could watch clips of your favorites on the Internet and never have to bother with the stories and characters you didn't like. Great for fans of individual characters but bad for the shows as a whole because the financial underpinning of the soap industry -- people watching the entire show and, hopefully, watching the commercials that made the show possible -- collapsed. (I freely admit to doing this. I watch As the World Turns for the gay supercouple Luke and Noah. But I only watch the Luke and Noah clips that a dedicated fan posts on YouTube every time they appear. Unfortunately, As the World Turns makes no money off of people like me because the YouTube clips have no commercials.)

The first three blows were unavoidable but the fourth and final blow was self-induced. As the great masters and innovators of the soap genre retired or died (Agnes Nixon, the Bells, Doug Marland), the industry couldn't find comparable new talents and, worse still, endlessly recycled the same mediocre talents between shows rather than keep searching for innovative new talent. The last ten years or so have been a sad story of marginally talented writers and producers running the shows into the ground (Example A being The Guiding Light.)

I'm to the point now that I think the soaps will go one by one. Even the mighty The Young and the Restless will most likely become financially unfeasible at a certain point. Sad but true . . .

[dirac]

Thanks, miliosr. I had forgotten about the OJ trial.

[papeetepatrick]

"Ruined" is a matter of taste and opinion. I loved the crack-ups.

I loved some of them too. There was one in the Eunice Higgins series, in which Vicki Lawrence as 'Mama', startled rattling off this laundry list of Eunice's faults, ending with 'Eunice, you not playin' with fuhhhllll deck'. The look on Lawrence's face was itself so deadpan that that is probably why Burnett could not control herself. I can't say I liked all of the crackups, but in this case, with Carol (who was older than Lawrence but playing someone younger, and thoroughly Bible-belt hysterical), was herself hilarious when she completely lost it. I also thought Harvey Korman was funny when he cracked up. In 'The Player', there are some inside jokes that are left in, of a more subtle nature, as when Tim Robbins is being interrogated by Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett. Whoopi's uncanny delivery, short-circuiting the otherwise straightforward questioning, 'Did you ---- 'er?' and Tim tries to deliver his lines about 'What is this, ------' Iran?' and he does do it pretty well under the circumstances, but then Whoopi is in gales of laughter, and howling to Lyle 'Did you see his FACE!!!??? and Altman left all of it in, it is truly a hilarious thing, because Whoopi's delivery was indeed irresistible--mentioned this because that could have been easily edited out, but Altman left in lots of 'insider stuff', since he was always trotting out his big star-name friends.)

I was talking about Joan Collins in 'Dynasty' with someone the other day, and sometimes her acting seemed dervied from Eileen Fulton's in 'As the World Turns.' Resembled her too.

What bart said was interesting, but it would take an intellectual who also knew all the soaps, or at least some of them, to really see how they were socially mediated--and these would have to do with industry economics and probably difficult to research, though possible by the dedicated. The reason I don't like them for leaving out all current events is because they are not quite saying 'this is fantasy, not reality'. Of course, it's extremely mundane fantasy, but I suspect the only thing you'd find that was always contemporary was an adherence to whatever fashion was prevalent at any given time. While they do exist outside time and really outside any kind of economy, they pretend not to. I think the serial form improved probably from the daytime soaps, first into the nighttime ones like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty', although I never liked those that much either, till the hour-long series like 'Hill Street Blues' and the other Bochco series had continuing plots, which previous crime shows did not, always circumscribed by the one hour. By the time of 'The Sopranos'. you were getting still a lot more, although the need to continue week after week does even then flatten the effect, e.g., I watched the old Gena Rowlands film 'Gloria', when I was finally catching up with about 30 episodes of 'The Sopranos', both about Mafia up this way, and the movie is light-years beyond even the best moments in the TV show IMO.

[dirac]

The first three blows were unavoidable but the fourth and final blow was self-induced. As the great masters and innovators of the soap genre retired or died (Agnes Nixon, the Bells, Doug Marland), the industry couldn't find comparable new talents and, worse still, endlessly recycled the same mediocre talents between shows rather than keep searching for innovative new talent. The last ten years or so have been a sad story of marginally talented writers and producers running the shows into the ground (Example A being The Guiding Light.)

I wonder, upon further thought, if the talent drain and changing times aren’t related – the soaps gradually start fading and promising writers and producers look to other fields to make their names?

Ryan’s Hope was another favorite of mine, although it was never one of the major soaps.

[Helene]

Marg Helgenberger cut her teeth as Siobhan Ryan in "Ryan's Hope".

An assistant dean at my college, Lorraine Broderick, left to become a writer on "All My Children" while I was still in school and eventually became Head Writer for a few years in the mid-late 90's. The theater people thought this was great, because it was show biz and a well-paid position, but I thought it was the absolute coolest thing in the world in itself, having been a soap opera lover my whole life.

[miliosr]

I'm of two minds, dirac, as to why the level of creative talent behind the cameras disappeared.

My first thought is that, with the advent of cable television in the 1980s, more and more opportunites became available to talented writers and producers to work on scripted shows; thereby diluting the talent pool that had existed up to that time. Furthermore, the advent of more channels and scripted shows meant that writers could find work which didn't carry the "stigma" of a "women's genre" (sort of like the "stigma" which applied to the "women's pictures" of the 1950s.) (Curiously, as the major networks move further and further away from scripted shows in favor of reality shows, game shows and variety shows, you would think that enterprising agents in New York and Hollywood would try to find work for unemployed and underemployed writing clients with the soaps. Talk about a win-win situation -- the soaps get new blood and the writers get employment!)

My second thought is that writing a soap is -- like making a dance -- a very particular thing and only a handful of people have a gift for it. Unfortunately, the soaps appear to be in the same boat the dance world is in. Just as, say, Balanchine's heirs and successors continue to make inferior and watered-down copies of the master's originals, so too do the current crop of soap writers and producers churn out inferior riffs on prior work done by such masters as Agnes Nixon, Doug Marland and Pam Long.

[perky]

Ah the great Douglas Marland! The creative mind behind so many of my favorite Guiding Light and later at As The World Turns story-lines. He really wrote so magnificently for the women characters. Women with multi-layered and multi-shaded nuances that recalled the movie heroines and vixens of the 1930's and 40's.