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I'd watch Another World no matter what period, but yes, the Lemay period sounds like it would have been fascinating to watch.
Knots Landing holds up just fine after all this time, much more than any of the other nighttime soaps. I grew up watching it and loving every minute.
As popular as The Golden Girls is in syndication, it surprises me that its spin-off/lead-out series, Empty Nest, doesn't air anywhere. Sure, it's a very different show, but the tone and writing are a lot alike, and the characters memorable.
Benson seems a lot more dated, but every time I stumble across an episode on youtube, I remember why I looked forward to it every Friday night.
Laugh In, Sonny & Cher, The Carol Burnett Show, Hee Haw, The Smothers Brothers Show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, This is Tom Jones, American Bandstand, Soul Train, ShaNaNa, The Andy Williams Show----I loved the variety show format!
Jay and Daniel, what was different about Another World when Lemay was involved? I don't know anything about this.
Unfortunately, YaMo, I never saw it, so I can't describe it from memory. It is simply said to be the most sophisticated writing any daytime soap ever featured; it was compared in its time to Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night.
There's so much to be said, he wrote a book about it, now available again on Kindle. If you don't have a Kindle, you may be able to find it at your library. If not, just type in "harding lemay another world" when you have time to fall down a googlehole.
Harding Lemay was a playwright more than a scriptwriter when he was hired. He wrote the show in a style that made daily episodes more like three-act plays. Scenes were five/six minutes long in most cases, with dialogue that drew from characters' own flaws and strengths, rather than just plot-based conversations. I think the best way to describe AW in the mid-1970s is "a group of well-drawn characters whose interactions came from realistic reactions to each other".
AW had been the first show to go from live performances to tape. They did this to allow for longer, more complicated scenes to be edited together. Live TV meant a lot more choppy, static scenes since actors could not really do lengthy scenes without encountering problems with memorizing so much dialogue. Going to tape allowed them more freedoms with longer scenes via editing. Lemay and his exec producer later came up with the idea of expanding the show from 30 minutes (the standard length for soaps in the early 1970s) to an hour because Lemay felt the hour-long format would allow him to write sufficiently long scenes that would build up a conflict and provide a pay off for the viewer in the span of an episode, rather than having to chop up the story by having it air over two (or three) days of episodes. From what people say about this period, the dialogue was often filled with sophisticated, literary references and characters were actually intelligent and well-read. Lemay didn't seem willing to write common-denominator type stuff traditional melodramas on daytime were writing. They won many Emmys and were typically #2 in ratings (occasionally #1) behind As the World Turns, which had been the #1 soap for over fifteen years and would not get knocked off the top spot until General Hospital and Luke/Laura came along. GH was many things, but 'literary' and 'intelligent' are not readily associated with what they were doing. And once soaps went toward what GH was doing, Lemay's style of soap writing did not come back into favor. Even AW went through a period in the early 1980s (after Lemay had departed the series) when they tried doing action/adventure type stories and it was not pretty.
Another show I miss: Cybill.
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