Week of April 1: What's With "All My Children"; All of C-SPAN; Remembering Farley Granger On TV

By Sylvia Gurinsky

Susan Lucci is having to pull double duty in promoting her new book, "All My Life." Besides that, she has to defend "All My Children" against cancellation rumors.

Lucci, who has masterfully played Erica Kane throughout the 41-year run of the series, doesn't have anything to prove. But "AMC's" problems are symptomatic of all problems with soap operas: The O.J. Simpson trial of 1994-95, which replaced many soap operas, began to alter viewing habits. The increase of the Internet continued that change.

The soap operas themselves didn't help matters with substandard casting, scripts and plotlines.


"All My Children," created by Agnes Nixon, began in 1970 with a fine collection of veterans of film and television drama such as Kay Campbell, who played Kate Martin; Hugh Franklin, who played Charles Tyler; Ruth Warrick ("Citizen Kane"), who played Phoebe Tyler; Frances Heflin, who played Mona Kane (Erica's mother) and Mary Fickett, who played Ruth Brent (later Martin). Among the young cast members were Charles Frank, who played Jeff Martin; Richard Hatch (the original "Battlestar Gallactica"), who played Phil Brent; Karen Lynn Gorney ("Saturday Night Fever"), who played Tara Martin and Lucci.

The show set standards for writing and acting and broke barriers; Erica became the first daytime soap opera character to have an abortion in 1973. Her younger daughter, Bianca (Christina Bennett Lind), more recently became part of the first gay marriage on a daytime soap. Darnell Williams and Debbi Morgan, who play Jessie and Angie Hubbard, were the first real African-American supercouple of soaps.

More recently, standards have been the exceptions. Most of the cast members with the series through its glory years have either died (Warrick, Heflin, Campbell, Franklin, Eileen Herlie, who played Myrtle Fargate and recently James Mitchell, who played Palmer Cortlandt), retired (Fickett; Ray McDonnell, who played Joe Martin; David Canary, who played Adam and Stuart Chandler) or have been laid off or had hours chopped (Julia Barr, who played Brooke English; Walt Willey, who plays Jackson Montgomery). With the exceptions of Lucci, Williams, Morgan, Michael E. Knight (Tad Martin since the early 1980s) and a few others, most of the current cast looks like it came off an assembly line of models.


Even if "All My Children" survives the immediate future, its years are probably numbered, sadly. At its best, it was special enough to attract the likes of Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor (mentioned last week). It also broke barriers.


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Farley Granger, who died earlier this week, was best known for his film work. But he spent more than 40 years adding television to his resume.

He worked on soaps "As the World Turns," "The Edge of Night" and "One Life To Live." He guest starred on numerous programs, including "Murder She Wrote," "Ironside," "Hawaii Five-O" (the original) and "The Love Boat."


But the gold standard may be the live television drama programs he did during the 1950s and 60s, including "Playhouse 90," "The United States Steel Hour," "The Kraft Theatre" and more. Alas, we are still waiting for DVD releases of even clips of those dramas.


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To all political history junkies out there: C-SPAN now has an extensive online video library that features not only recent programs and archived programs going back to C-SPAN's beginnings more than 30 years ago, but also other archived material.


You can watch President Harry Truman being inaugurated in 1949 or President Richard Nixon resigning in 1974. There are recent congressional hearings or Question Time of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

It will also be of great benefit to students, historians and journalists. Here's the link:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/


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See you next week. Until then, Happy Viewing!