Hi everyone,
It's Monday, and you know what that means:
Marland Monday!
I am here today to remember Douglas Marland, one of the GOATS of daytime television. Today I remember something that took place 40 years ago this summer: the debut of the soap opera Loving.
We need to go back to December 1982. After a nasty feud with then-executive producer Alan Potter, Marland left Guiding Light. He created the first cable soap, A New Day in Eden, on Showtime. The week before Christmas, good news came: he would write for a new soap. Even better news: He was writing it with Agnes Nixon, another GOAT of the soap opera genre.
Nixon was a woman who poked at the glass ceiling and then broke it. She was the first writer for Search for Tomorrow, then went on to write for Guiding Light and Another World. In 1968, she created One Life to Live, a soap opera that explored social/political topics: drug use in teenagers; a working-class woman marrying a wealthy man and how people reacted to them as a couple; an African-American woman who passed for white. The show's heroine was Victoria Lord (played the longest by Erika Slezak), one of the first characters on soaps to have an ongoing mental issue: dissociative identity disorder. Slezak won several Emmys for her role and played Victoria until the show’s cancellation in 2013.
She then created All My Children, which had a character that became well-known to people who didn't even watch soap operas: Erica Kane, played by Susan Lucci for the entire run of the show – 43 years. Nixon was also responsible for the super couples Greg and Jenny, Tara and Phil, and the first African-American super couple, Jesse and Angie.
Nixon was set to create a new show with writer Dan Wakefield, but he had to step aside. Enter our Mr. Marland. The two had met when she was a consultant at General Hospital. Marland told columnist Gary Deeb: “She was always there with the writer’s point of view… We learned there (on GH) that we think a lot alike about daytime television.” The new show received a two-year guarantee from ABC, regardless of the ratings or reviews. It was decided it would be in the mid-morning. Little clues were revealed about the show: it would be set in a college town back East. They didn’t give the state, but Nixon set All My Children and One Life to Live in Pennsylvania (Pine Valley and Llanview), so it was a good guess this show would be set in the Quaker state.
Marland was excited about writing a brand new show. “Starting from scratch with all new characters is much more exciting than taking over somebody else’s mistakes,” he told Deeb. Indeed. When a writer starts a new project, it is like stepping into fresh snow or the smell of crayons when opening the box. It is the excitement, the feeling that this will be great. I’m going to make something out of nothing.
The pilot episode was on prime time: Sunday, June 19, 1983, as a TV movie with Lloyd Bridges and Geraldine Page starring and setting up a mystery of why co-eds were being murdered. They cast several soap veterans (Ann Williams as June Slater, Augusta Dabney as Isabelle Alden, Teri Keane as Rose Donovan) plus newcomers (Perry Stephens as Jack Forbes, Susan Walters as Lorna Forbes, Jennifer Ashe as Lily Slater, Patricia Kalember as Merrill Vochek, and some unknown guy named Bryan Cranston as Douglas Donovan)
So let's review:
It had a great cast of new and familiar faces.
It had two GOATS behind it.
Marland and Patrick Mulcahy wrote the pilot script.
Lloyd Bridges and Geraldine Page in the pilot. A veteran actor of more than 150 feature films. Bridges became the head of an acting dynasty. And Page? F. Murray Abraham once called Page "...the greatest actress in the English language."
This show was going to soar to new heights!
But it didn't.
what went wrong?
Trigger warning: mentions of sexual abuse
Network interference: One of the big storylines Marland wanted to tell was about incest. Garth Slater tended to be a little too protective of his daughter Lily, Why? Garth was sexually abusing Lily. This was supposed to be big. Huge. Unfortunately, ABC had a TV movie about incest coming in January 1984 called Something About Amelia. They couldn’t have some daytime soap opera tell an incest story first. As a result, Marland was told to wrap up the storyline right away. He did, but wasn’t happy about it.
A Mean Producer: Joseph Stuart produced Loving at the beginning. Bryan Cranston wrote in his memoir that “Agnes Nixon was a nice person. Douglas Marland was a nice person. Stuart wasn’t a nice person.” According to many actresses, he would have been a member of the #metoo club if one had existed. He told actress Noelle Beck (Trisha Alden) they would have to break her nose so it wouldn’t look pointed. He pretty much bullied many of the actresses, making them feel awful. Two left before the show turned one: Shannon Eubanks (Ann Forbes) and Patricia Kalember (Merrill Vochek). Other exits, including Susan Walters (Lorna), followed. A producer/writer relationship is like a writer/editor relationship. When it works, it’s beautiful. When it doesn’t, everything goes kerflooey. You can see the actresses talk about it here:
Some people aren’t meant to collaborate. Douglas Marland and Agnes Nixon were both great writers. However, they had their own visions of character development. . Marland and Nixon were both alpha personalities. They wanted it their way. Collaboration is supposed to be a dance. When one wants to do the foxtrot and the other wants to do the Charleston, and neither of them will bend, it won’t work. There are no good guys or bad guys here. It wasn’t a good match.
Time switch: In September 1984, Loving was switched to a “better” time slot. However, it knocked Ryan’s Hope out of its time slot, then it went down in the ratings. RH was canceled four years later, causing resentment among RH fans. Whenever Rosie O’Donnell had an RH performer on her talk show in the 1990s, she complained about Loving and how it took over the prime spot. When you tick off loyal viewers of one show, they won’t be in a hurry to watch the one that bumped your show into oblivion.
We just don’t know: The early days of Loving had good storylines: A storyline concerning a Vietnam Vet's PTSD was considered excellent, and soap opera columnist Connie Passalaqua compared James Kiberd to a young Brando. A storyline about a nurse caring for AIDS patients was a first on television. It seemed like there were possible moments of greatness.
Once his contract ended in June 1985, Marland left. A month later, he was announced as the head writer for As The World Turns. Agnes Nixon never mentioned Marland or the show Loving in her memoir, My Life to Live: How I Became the Queen of Soaps When Men Ruled the Airwaves. Sometimes we just don’t know why something doesn’t work. It could be all the reasons I mentioned above. Or it could be a simple fact: We will don’t know why it didn’t work. I hate this. I always want to figure out how a piece of art works or doesn’t work. However, this time I am left with more questions than answers.
Loving limped along until November 10, 1995, for a total of 3,169 episodes. It ended with the serial killings of many long-time characters, and those remaining characters were spun off into The City, which lasted until March 1997.
However, any show that helped make these people stars cannot be considered a complete failure: Linden Ashby, Noelle Beck, Julie Bowen, Bryan Cranston, Michael Cullen, Rebecca Gayheart, Hallee Hirsh, Judith Hoag, Patricia Kalember, John O’Hurley, Burke Moses, Elise Neal, Luke Perry, Teri Polo, Sebastian Roche, and Rebecca Staab.
What can I say? I tend to look on the bright side.
Tune in next time…
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