Post by jarrodmcdonald on Apr 20, 2017 14:01:18 GMT
A friend of mine worked on GL from 1990 to 2002 and he's biased and thinks those years are the best. Even during those years, there were several regime changes and basically every three years it was reinventing itself. The Guiding Light of 1990 is several versions removed from what it was at the end in 2009. A show shouldn't have to change so much just to keep up. Personally I think 1997 to 2002 under producer Paul Rauch was the last renaissance period. It goes downhill quickly from 2002 to 2005, then with Wheeler for those last few years it was nearly unwatchable.
Mismanagement. That's what it was. After Paul Rauch left at the end of 2002, they hired John Conboy who had never helmed a P&G show, and he did not understand the program's rich history. He was fired a year later, and then they promoted Ellen Wheeler who had been an actress on Another World and All My Children (she was an Emmy winner), and she had been directing for awhile at As the World Turns. And she was okay the first year, but then when her contract was renewed the power went to her head and she decided the show needed to be completely reformatted. Kim Zimmer (ex-Reva) talks about it in her autobiography....Kim details the explosive fights she had with Wheeler because she knew Wheeler was running everything into the ground.
At one point, according to Zimmer, Wheeler wanted to rename the show 'The New Guiding Light' which shows how wacky some of Wheeler's ideas were. Like after 70 years, why would you try to call it 'new.' Zimmer also talks about how Wheeler took over the editing booth and was recutting scenes that had already been filmed and normally wouldn't have been tampered with. The reason for this was because Wheeler's new production model, where they filmed extensively in New Jersey, had such low-budget sound that much of the actors' dialogue was not getting picked up by the cheap boom mics.
Kim says there was a scene where Reva (it was Reva's last pregnancy) was supposed to have an emotional confession and then go into labor. But she says the dialogue was so inaudible that Wheeler re-edited it and threw acoustic music over it to cover up the traffic noises that the mics were picking up instead of the actors. So when the scene aired Reva is having an emotional breakdown and going into labor but you can't even hear what she's saying, you just hear strange guitar music over it. All the preparation Kim had done to make that scene memorable for viewers was lost.
The other performers were not happy with Wheeler but they either didn't have the clout Kim had or the guts to say anything. Kim seems to imply she had at least one fight a week with Wheeler and that Wheeler would turn on the tears (since she was an actress) to get Kim to back down. It only infuriated Kim and left her with the impression that Wheeler was bipolar and going to wreck the show and not take any valid criticism to heart and fix what was wrong. So things only got worse and worse. Kim says her contract was up the last summer the show was on the air, but the cancellation had been announced in April. If it had been renewed another year, her husband told her she needed to quit, because the program no longer had any real integrity and it was reaching a point where it would hurt her career to continue being associated with it.
In Kim's words, the show was "a hot mess" at the end. She says she was glad it was canceled when it could still bow out gracefully, but by that point Wheeler had alienated fans and the cast considerably. There's a reason ratings go down and stay down, and a reason why soaps get cancelled regardless of how much broadcast history they have.