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DallasFanForever

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DallasFanForever

Telly Talk Supreme
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Emelee said:
To me, this is when DAYS jumped the shark. I was embarrassed for the show.
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I’m trying to remember what their reason was for going this route? Certainly I would think in 1994 and still “pre-trial of the century” the ratings still had to be good. Did the devil stuff help or hurt the ratings overall?
 
Daniel Avery

Daniel Avery

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James Reilly (the Head Writer) was trying to push the limits of the genre through assorted crazy stories like this during his Days tenure. There was a feeling of "Wow, that was quite a story...now what do we do to top it?" and the network was egging him on because stories like that DID create short-term buzz. It actually hurt soaps as a whole, since other soaps were soon being pressured to do OTT stuff like that in the name of publicity/ratings. And of course Reilly's wacky reputation led to him creating Passions to take the OTT-ness to spoof/satire levels of ridiculousness.
 
Carrie Fairchild

Carrie Fairchild

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Daniel Avery said:
And of course there was the Good....

View attachment 51898
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Daniel Avery said:
Yes, it was forever known as 'the Henderson Flood'. NBC splashed out (ha!) a lot of money to stage this whole event, complete with actors struggling in giant water tanks and industrial-sized water sprayers blasting everyone from across the room. It allowed them to destroy a lot of old sets to "rebuild the town," also. They never did say where Henderson was, but it was firmly in the interior Midwest, so a tidal wave would certainly have been a "choice".
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I recently watched the episodes surrounding the flood and I have to say, for an 80’s daytime soap that was on its last legs, it was really well done. There was the initial flood, where the entire rain soaked cast came together to secure the flood defences at the riverbank. Then there was the bursting of the dam (which I’m guessing was the tidal wave reference in the above ad), which washed the whole town and its residents to kingdom come. It was all quite dramatic without feeling ridiculously OTT.

My one observation is Mary Stuart’s contribution to proceedings. I haven’t watched much SFT, so maybe it’s just her acting style, but I got a feeling of “I’m going though the motions here because I have to, but I’m above this frivolous nonsense” from her performance. There was a rather half arsed “Oh no!” or something to that effect from her, when the dam burst and they were being engulfed by water and then she just kind of flapped about during her near drowning scene.
 
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