Light fades...

Seventy two years of tradition wraps up this week as Guiding Light airs for the final time; instead of love in the afternoon we're getting a month of "Doctor Oz" followed by Wayne Brady hosting Let's Make a Deal... the journey to oblivion beginning with a single step. My musings on a show I grew up with but haven't watched in ages...:


Different world-- GL's not the first soap to go belly-up... Another World, Texas, Capitol, Ryan's Hope... but it began and thrived in an era long gone. The target demo of the daytime drama in the 50's and 60's was the vacuuming housewife who had three hours to kill after finishing laundry... before she had to begin preparing dinner. Those people are all now in their 70's and 80's living on fixed incomes...and while the boomer generation straddled home and work, GenXers are fully in the workforce--leaving senior citizens and college students the idle midday audience...not exactly what buying power is about.

Groundbreaking-- It was the first soap to cast African American actors (from James Earl Jones to Cicely Tyson to Billy Dee Williams) and seemed to be something more than just a way to put your brain on autopilot for an hour... from the Bert Bauer breast cancer storyline in the 60's to the Roger/Holly spousal rape trial in the 70's to teen alcoholism (with Kevin Bacon front and center)... GL was on the cutting edge.

Love Triangles and Boozing up-- it was thanks to Kevin Bacon I was exposed to my first crush and rationalizing alcoholism. Bacon's character Tim Werner was caught in a love triangle with Kelly Nelson and Morgan Richards (as befitting a soap-- Kelly was the guy and Morgan was the girl). The red-haired freckled Morgan was played to perfection by Kristen Vigard... and over the course of a year both Tim and Kelly (played by the guy who wound up being Dawson's father on Dawson's Creek) vied for Morgan through a runaway story, teen prostitution, and of course a coma. Final result? Kelly wound up with the girl and Tim wound up drunk all the time. As a ten year old I questioned why Tim succumbed to alcoholism, but after recently looking back at episodes on YOUTUBE, if I lost the love of my life to a lunkhead who walked around shirtless and sang Anne Murray songs all the time--I'd be drinking early and often. Of course, I was more heartbroken when Morgan was re-cast.

Say My Name!-- I was curious yet thrilled in the fall of 1985 when the character "David Preston" was introduced as a business manager of the flavor of the month tycoon, Kyle Sampson. Little did I know Preston was a devious industrial spy as a member of a group "INFINITY"... a storyline reaching a boiling point at the wedding of Kurt Corday and Mindy Lewis--where David Preston was shot and killed. The show hasn't been the same since.