by Adam Ferenz
This is going to be difficult. By its nature, there’s a lot of history to this soap opera. There was over a decade of material that aired before this author was born, much of which no longer exists thanks to a vault fire, and will be going largely off memories of the series, some of which comprise his earliest memories of television. Therefore, if this seems rambling, bear with me. This is a work of memory, passion and pain, since when it was good, it was great, and when it was off, it hurt, because it could be so great when it wanted to give a hoot. I will be leaving a lot of characters out, and giving short shrift to many more. For that, I apologize, or this thing could easily become a book.
There have been dozens of daytime serials in the history of American television. There are, currently, only four of them. The genre has lost a lot of audience, with the advent of the internet, expanded cable and satellite options, as well as the fact that people just do not stay home to watch television during the day, the way they once did. Especially women, to whom the earliest series were pointedly marketed.
Soaps, as they were called-because Procter and Gamble was a major sponsor of a goodly portion of the serials on air, at one point-have always been a generational deal, handed down from family member to family member, or passed along between friends. These were “our” or “my” stories for generations of people-men and women. The typical soap opera, in 1968-the year One Life to Live arrived on the air-was largely a very slow moving half hour about the love life of winsome rich white women in fictional or even nameless small towns. There had been some exceptions-including the rise of ABC’s Dark Shadows, which was extremely fast paced, and full of supernatural doings, but had indeed started its life as a series concerning the mysterious arrival of a governess in a small Maine seaport.
One Life To Live was different. This was a series that creator Agnes Nixon intended to explore social issues with, while never forgetting the romance that kept audiences tuning in. To this end, she had the Lord family, with father Victor, who owned and published the local paper, The Banner, and his two daughters, Meredith and Victoria. Now, Victoria was a very bold character indeed. But we shall return to why in a moment. Meredith would become involved with the Wolek family, a Polish-American family that had worked its way up to respectability and had a son, Larry, who was a doctor. Larry, of course, was torn between Meredith and the gorgeous, sophisticated yet hard-to-know Carla Grey.
One day, Carla went home. Where she was greeted by a large, smiling black woman in a maid’s outfit, who said she was finally back from work. To which Carla replied “Oh, Mama, we have to talk”
Carla was passing for white, and the story caused several ABC affiliates in the south to drop the series in protest. But Nixon would not be deterred. She had not only the catholic Wolek family, and the protestant Lords, but she introduced Jewish characters too, alongside her African American characters-including a detective on the Llanview police department, who would one day rise to commissioner. This was bold storytelling. Yet that was not all. Remember how I said Victoria was a bold character? That is because she had Disassociative Identity Disorder. Many explanations were given over the years. Finally, one day, the head writer of the series at the time-Michael Malone, an award winning mystery author-revealed the truth.
Victoria had been repeatedly raped by her father, Victor, when she was a child. Instead of two personalities-Vicky, and her alter, Nicky-we discovered there was Princess, the shattered young girl that Victoria had once been, and there was Jean, who acted as a gatekeeper. There was also Tommy, an angry young man who represented the son Victoria always knew Victor had wanted, and Tori, who was pure rage against the injustice of it all. Connected to this revelation was the fact that Victoria’s stepmother-though she became such when Victoria was a grown woman-Dorian, had not in fact, killed Victor twenty years prior. It had been Victoria, as one of her alters, who had smothered Victor with a pillow, not Dorian injecting something into his IV.
Storylines would indeed last a long time. Rarely drawn out, they instead became detailed examinations of lives. This does not always mean they were equally well written, nor consistent from era to era, due to changes in actors, producers and especially writers. One Life to Live was rather fortunate in some regards, because while being an ensemble, what former cast-member Stephen Markle (who played reporter Mel Hayes from 1997 to 1999) once referred to as “a daytime repertory company”, the series also rarely had to recast major parts.
Ok. Except for Kevin and Joey, but we won’t talk about that right now. We will talk instead about Erika Slezak, who took over the role of main heroine Victoria Lord in 1971 and played the part until the end of the brief Hulu-broadcast revival in 2013. (more on that, later) The part had been originated by Gillian Spencer, who left in 1970 to take a major role in OLTL creator Agnes Nixon’s newest series, All My Children. When Joanne Dorian, her replacement, who arrived a few months after Spencer left-Victoria went on a long vacation-proved unequal to the task, she was sent packing after only a couple months herself. Victoria left town for a few weeks, and when she returned, she once again had a new face, played by an actress who would win the Daytime Emmy for Lead Actress six times out of nine nominations, the record for a female and, briefly, the record, period, until Anthony Geary of General Hospital fame somehow managed to best her record. I will stop there because I want to keep this positive.
One Life was also fortunate in its ability to keep producers. In daytime drama, it is not uncommon for producers to be gone after only a year or two. During its original run, OLTL only had that happen four times, and one of those producers-Gary Tomlin-managed to take the series to its only Emmy win for Best Daytime Drama. The writers, of course, are another matter, though several had lengthy runs.
Originally written by Agnes Nixon, she handed the majority of her duties to Gordon Russell, shortly after All My Children premiered, and then left the series-except as a very occasional consultant-after the series fifth anniversary. After a five year solo run, Russell would be joined by his former Dark Shadows cohort, Sam Hall, for his final two years, for a total of a decade at the helm. During this period, Russell and Hall penned one of the great scenes in Daytime history when Karen Wolek, a housewife played by Judith Light-in the role that rocketed her to fame and won her a daytime Emmy for lead actress-was broken down on a witness stand, admitting that she was also a prostitute, a truth that destroyed her but set Victoria-who had been accused of killing Karen’s pimp-free.
Other notable runs included that by Michael Malone, who from 1991 through 1996, came up with perhaps the most literate era of the series ever. He won an Emmy in 1994, for the 1993 gang rape story of Marty Saybrooke, a young woman with lupus. Her main attacker, Todd Manning, would eventually be revealed to be the half brother of Victoria, and would face a long and controversial semi-redemption in which the character was never quite accepted by the community. Todd, played by Roger Howarth, was a complex person with incredible depths of self loathing. Marty, initially a party girl, became a sympathetic figure as she worked to be believed and find a way to reclaim her life after the brutal attack Todd led.
Malone also wrote a story about a young gay man being counseled by a reverend, whose own brother had been gay and died from AIDs. Eventually, the boy’s father found out and accused the reverend, Andrew Carpenter, of molesting his son. This lead to Andrew being beat up in a gay bashing by a bigot who “had heard about what you did to that boy” despite nothing having taken place. Andrew’s father, a stern army officer, had refused to accept that his younger son had died of AIDS or been homosexual. As Andrew, bruised from his attack, made his way to a clearing where the AIDS quilt had come to town, he found his father. Together, the two men found a spot and put a section there to commemorate Andrew’s brother, signifying his father’s acceptance of what had happened.
Oh, that young gay kid? He was played by a pre-Hollywood Ryan Phillipe, and was written out shortly after the storyline concluded, because ABC got cold feet about having a regular gay character. That character had been invented, in fact, after Malone’s initial pitch of having Victoria’s youngest son, Joey, come out of the closet, was refused. These two storylines were followed by Victoria’s returned DID-earlier mentioned-and, sadly, his tenure ended with a rather convoluted storyline about Irish terrorists, money laundering and the return from the dead of a mob boss named Carlo Hesser. While elements in that storyline worked wonderfully, and it gave Todd an excellent exit-Howarth would return a year later-and introduced a fan favorite in Irish heartthrob Patrick Thornhart, Malone’s final months of frustration under new and too network friendly producer Susan Bedsow Horgan, who had been one of his subordinates only months before, pushed him to not renew his contract. In the opinion of this author, while the show was never the worst thing on the air, the series never fully recovered, either, even during the year it won Best Drama, which happened six years later.
No discussion of OLTL can be complete without family, and chief among the families, aside from the Lords, were the Buchanens. Introduced by Russell and Hall in a bid by ABC to cash in on the Dallas craze, the Bukes, as they were affectionately known, arrived first in the form of Clint, a reporter who hailed from Texas and came to work at The Banner. He was hired by Joe Riley, Victoria’s husband, who was dying. In Clint, he saw a lot of himself, and he wanted Victoria to have a new managing editor who would fight her the way he would, and who would also be able to be a friend to her. As Joe lay dying, he saw the obvious affection growing between his wife and Clint, and he brought them together and told them that once he was gone, he wished them all the happiness he knew they could be capable of. Clint and Vicky would be one of OLTL’s most popular on again/off again couples for the next three decades.
Clint’s brother, Bo, a former military man that Clint had left behind to tend to their father’s business empire, followed Clint to Llanview and soon set up shop, first as an entrepreneur, involved in various forms of entertainment, and later, drawing on his experience in the military, as commissioner of police, taking over from the great Ed Hall. Clint and Bo’s father, Asa, arrived shortly after Bo. Played by former film star Phil Carey, with a vicious twinkle in his eye, Asa was, to be blunt, a jerk. But he cared about his sons. He also cared that his sons did as he wanted. He was controlling, emotionally manipulative and sometimes an outright villain, but he was never less than entertaining. His lowest moment, of course, came during one of the series strangest periods, a year where everything was either great or terrible, and in this case, his storyline contained great production values and acting but absolutely dreadful writing, as he allowed his grown adoptive-grandson Kevin’s fiancé, Grace, to drown on his property, because he did not approve of her family. This marked a turning point from which the character never fully recovered. Asa was not best suited to being a villain we loved hating because he was bad, but whom we loved to hate and occasionally loved. That other characters began trying to forget or gloss over his actions, within months of this incident, only proved that the post-Malone era was not always pretty.
In 2011, OLTL was cancelled by ABC, along with AMC. Both series would be revived in 2013, for a short period, by a new production company called Prospect Park and distributed to two platforms, one being Hulu and another being something called The Online Network. This author only viewed the series on Hulu during its few months. In an interesting turn, OLTL managed to be nominated for best series for its single month of footage in 2012, and again for the online revival in 2013, meaning that three years after it was cancelled it was still being honored.
Yes, this was a soap. Yes, it had its ups and downs, and many of those during its final sixteen years of existence. If pressed to identify a glory period, I could not. I could, however, point to different “types” of show that OLTL became. Under Nixon, it was a series focused on family, which tackled social issues and even went so far as to send its characters to Odyssey House, a real place-look it up-and break barriers in terms of race and gender. Under Russell, and later, Hall, the series became a classic soap about different classes of people, less interested in social justice but still focused on family and daily, class-type struggles.
In the 80s, mainly under producer Paul Rauch, the series became a bit of a fantasy, featuring outlandish plots like a young heroine surviving giving birth as she went over a waterfall, or another character discovering a lost civilization under a mountain, travelling to the old west or even, briefly, winding up in Heaven. During the 90s, under Malone, it became the best of these three, in my opinion, as Malone renewed the interest in social justice that had long been dormant, but kept the class distinctions and romance of the Russell and Hall era, while never forgetting that the series could do outlandish plots, as happened under Rauch, although never to the extend Rauch and his writers, Peggy O’Shea and, later, S.Michael Schnessel, took them.
The post Malone years were largely without identity, although the series final writer (prior to Hulu), Ron Carlivati (he wrote the series from 2007-2012), became known among fans as ReRon, due to his penchant for regurgitating old plots, in what he called “mining history” but many fans considered being too lazy to create his own plots. Still, he at least knew how to write humorous sequences, something the show typically had going for it during its best periods, where it blended romance and humor to great affect amidst class struggles.
It was not perfect. But it was our show, damn it. Even now, there are times where it turns 2pm and I wish it were still there, sandwiched between AMC and the (never a personal favorite, sorry folks) General Hospital, in what I always considered the true heart of the ABC lineup. It is my firm belief that no daytime drama, on balance, had more guts, more brains and more heart, than this one. These, of course, were just some memories of the show. Erika Slezak is a treasure, and it is a shame some prime-time series or online project hasn’t snapped her up. Same with her counterpart, the great Robin Strasser, who played the acidic Dorian, a disgraced former doctor that eventually found her way to the US Senate. So many character, so many memories. But only one life to live and enjoy them all.
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