Marland Monday: Let’s Party for Wonderful Stuff!
Oh Monday Monday, you can’t trust that day, but you can trust…
Marland Monday!
Ah yes, Mondays are when I reflect on the career of writer Douglas Marland, who is considered one of the GOATS of Daytime television. Come along with me, we’re going back to the eighties!
Ah, Summer of 1987. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd was a sleeper hit. We wanted to call CPS to help Luka, then remembered he wasn’t real, it was a Suzanne Vega song. And Oliver North prempted soaps with the Iran Contra hearings. Oh, Ollie!
Last week I wrote about the 1986 Daytime Emmy Awards. ATWT had doubled their nominations but took home one Emmy for John Wesley Shipp’s performance. In 1987, they were nominated for twenty awards.
Here’s the deal: Marland wasn’t nominated.
I was shocked. I thought for sure he had been nominated in 1987. After all, he was on fire from the Summer of 1986 to the Spring of 1987. That was when he wrote about Chris Hughes the first dying, which was heartbreaking and beautiful. Kim gave birth to Chris Hughes the second. We had the Sabrina storyline when Kim and Bob found out that congratulations! You have a twenty-one-year-old girl! There was so much fallout from that, so much tension.
We also had John and Lucinda getting married, Andy starting to drink, and Craig and Sierra’s simmering romance. Not to mention Anthony Herrera’s return as James Stenbeck, where he terrified ex-wife Barbara with two words: “Hello, Barbara.”
Did I mention Margo Hughes’ heartbreaking miscarriage, and how she and Tom were having problems? But before that Tom had a delicious confrontation with Barbara when Babs lied and said she slept with Tom when he was drunk. Oh and Tom’s mother Lisa was going through menopause with hot flashes. That didn’t stop her from falling in love with Earl Mitchell (Farley Granger) Did I mention the May-December romance of Lyla Montgomery and Casey Peretti? Plus the ongoing stress Lucinda and Iva were going through keeping Lily in the dark that oh yeah, Iva was Lily’s biological mother?
As you can see, it was a bit of a head-scratcher that Marland wasn’t nominated for Best Writing that year. But onward and upward!
First, we have Best Younger Actress. Martha Byrne (Lily) was up for this one, and yay! She won! She jumped out of her seat, She hugged Lisa Brown. The excitement she had when she ran up to the podium was electric. The first words out of her mouth were thanking Marland, saying he wrote “wonderful stuff.” She then thanked executive producer Robert Calhoun, Brown, and Elizabeth Hubbard, then she thanked Jon Hensley and Brian Bloom, her love interests. “This is great! Let’s party!” she said, jumping up and down again. Man, she was a Debbie Downer. I don’t think she was excited at all about winning.
We then had Best Supporting Actor. Gregg Marx (Tom) was nominated. The clip of him confronting Barbara was shown. One of the actors competing against him was Justin Deas from Santa Barbara, who was the previous Tom. You can’t make this up. The winner was Gregg Marx! (Don’t worry, Deas won next year. And he won several Emmys for his work on Guiding Light) Gregg gave a lovely speech about the work they did was a collaboration, then thanked Calhoun, the cast, Marland (which got a cheer from the audience) and last but definitely not least, Hillary Bailey Smith who played his wife Margo.
Here’s the ironic part: Marx had left the show six months before. There were rumors he was going to come back, but he didn’t. Instead he now has a cabaret career as a singer, plus you can hear his voiceovers on commericals for Acura and Ross. Also he’s the big brother to one of my favorite writers, Francesca Lia Block. Ah, if only FLB could’ve written for ATWT…
The show lost for Best Supporting Actress. I truly wish Lisa Brown could’ve won that one. Both Brian Bloom and Jon Hensley lost to Michael E. Knight, who won the second year in a row Outstanding Younger Man. They lost to Young and Restless for Best Director. It also lost to Best Guest Performer (all it says it was it was a Jester played by Terrance Mann) Who did the Jester lose to? John Wesley Shipp, who did a guest spot on Santa Barbara.
Now we had Best Actor. Two ATWT actors were up in this category. Scott Bryce’s Craig pining over Sierra, and Larry Bryggman’s John threatening Lucinda, with him saying ‘When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas!” Bryggman won. He remarked he was “grateful for people over 40” He proceeded to thank “the factory on 57th Street (where ATWT was filmed) and the cast, then his family.
With Best Actress, we had Elizabeth Hubbard’s Lucinda. Her clip was amazing; it was challenging an unknown person about Lily’s true parentage. But alas, she lost to Kim Zimmer’s Reva on Guiding Light. I understand why; Zimmer had an up and down storyline (this was during the backstage drama when they had three different headwriters in one year) where Reva took up photography, finally dumped Kyle Sampson (Larkin Malloy)when he became borderline abusive, then got pregnant by old flame Josh Lewis (Robert Newman) But was Josh the father? Oh and she played another character in Phillip Spaulding’s novel, a 1920s flapper who sang “How come you do me like you do” to a speakeasy. David Canary looked bummed; Susan Lucci had lost. Again.
Finally, it was time for Best Soap. Wait, Best Daytime Drama Series. Zimmer and Bryggman presented, then Bryggman’s face lit up. “As the World Turns!” I can’t find the clip, but I know Robert Calhoun said something gracious about the cast, and Marland. Then the show ended for another year.
So yeah: it is ironic the show had a fantastic year, but oops! Oh yeah, the writer who helped make it responsible wasn’t nominated. Sometimes, life can be utterly odd. So what can you do? Keep going. And if you win at something, be as happy as Martha Byrne was when she won her Emmy.
Turn in next week…
