Love of Life
Love of Life | |
---|---|
Created by | Roy Winsor |
Starring | Audrey Peters Ron Tomme |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 29 |
No. of episodes | 7,315 |
Production | |
Running time | 15 minutes (1951–1958) 30 minutes (1958–1962, 1969–1973, 1979–1980) 25 minutes (1962–1969, 1973–1979) |
Original release | |
Network | CBS |
Release | September 24, 1951 February 1, 1980 | –
Love of Life is an American soap opera televised on CBS from September 24, 1951, to February 1, 1980.[1] It was created by Roy Winsor, whose previous creation Search for Tomorrow premiered three weeks before Love of Life; he created The Secret Storm two and a half years later.
Production
Love of Life originally came from
Format
Unlike most other soap operas, Love of Life was originally not split up into segments dictated by commercial breaks. Because the show was owned by packaged-goods giant
Broadcast history
Love of Life began, as most other television serials of that era, as a 15-minute program, airing at 12:15 pm Eastern (11:15 am Central). The program became so popular, CBS expanded it to 30 minutes on April 14, 1958, moving it to noon/11:00. During that period, Love of Life generally placed in the ratings among the top six soaps in the 1950s and 1960s.
Starting on October 1, 1962, the episode duration was reduced by five minutes to accommodate a newscast.
To accommodate the new in-house serial Where the Heart Is, starting on September 8, 1969, CBS moved Love of Life ahead 30 minutes to 11:30/10:30, which put it against the highly popular Hollywood Squares. As such, Love of Life's audience share dropped from fifth place in the 1968/1969 Nielsen's to 11th in the 1969/1970 season. This led to a major win for NBC in 1971 by having Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy!, and the serial Days of Our Lives reach the top five of all daytime programs. From this date, episodes again had a full 30-minute duration. On March 26, 1973, episodes were again reduced to fit a 25-minute slot to accommodate a newscast. By this time, CBS had assumed production from the original packager, AHP, as it had with The Secret Storm.
CBS canceled its in-house soaps Love is a Many Splendored Thing and Where the Heart Is in 1973, and The Secret Storm in early 1974. Love of Life managed to escape cancellation due to a brief rise in the ratings in the mid-1970s, which was due to Meg's return to the storyline. The show's ratings climbed as high as ninth, above General Hospital and One Life to Live, in the 1975–1976 television season.
On April 23, 1979, CBS moved Love of Life to the 4:00/3:00 pm slot that had opened when Match Game was canceled. For this slot, episodes again had a full 30-minute duration, accommodating the whole slot. However, ratings plummeted upon relocating; an increasing number of CBS affiliates pre-empted the serial to show more profitable syndicated programming in the same manner ABC affiliates did to Love of Life's former CBS sister soap The Edge of Night, which had been airing on ABC for the last four years, also in the 4PM time slot after being cancelled by CBS four years earlier due to the expansion of As the World Turns to a full hour in December of 1975. In September 1979, a new, daily, syndicated version of Match Game was introduced; in some markets, the show was aired against or, on CBS affiliates, in place of Love of Life.
Despite CBS moving the show to the 4:00/3:00 timeslot, some affiliates chose to air it at earlier timeslots in pattern with the other soaps. For example, in
Within 10 months, CBS realized that the 4:00 slot did not work for Love of Life in light of affiliate tape-delays and pre-emptions, and subsequently cancelled the show. Its final episode aired on February 1, 1980. The following Monday, The Young and the Restless expanded to an hour, with One Day at a Time moving into the 4:00/3:00 timeslot airing in most markets following Guiding Light. According to rumors, once CBS cancelled Love of Life, they intended to use the show's New York studio space for the 1980 Winter Olympics, which took place later that month in Lake Placid, New York.
Director Larry Auerbach said that he lamented the network's 4:00/3:00 slot choice on the CBS Evening News the day Love of Life finished airing, feeling that the slot was better suited to airing shows that appealed to kids after school.
Storyline
1951–1960
The original story was a morality play of
The show changed directions when the character of Meg was phased out and the show changed locales; first set in the fictional town of Barrowsville, it moved to Rosehill, where it remained for the rest of the show's run.
The actress who originated the role of Van (Peggy McCay) left the show in 1955, and was replaced by actress Bonnie Bartlett (1955–1959). Bartlett was subsequently replaced by Audrey Peters, who played Van for the rest of the run (1959–1980). Peters had an unusual debut – Bartlett had played the role of Vanessa up to Vanessa's wedding day. The next day, when Vanessa walked down the aisle, Bruce Sterling raised Vanessa's veil and revealed Audrey Peters. Peters admitted that, during the wedding reception scenes afterward, she did not know the names of all the characters who were interacting with Vanessa, so she called everyone "dear".
1960–1973
In the 1960s, most of the drama was focused on Van and her new marriage to Bruce Sterling (played by Ron Tomme). The late 1960s involved attempts to shake up the somewhat staid atmosphere through campus unrest and a return of Vanessa's first husband, who had been killed off in the mid-1950s. Her ex-husband was an amnesiac going by the name of Matt Corby.[4] Vanessa divorced Bruce to reunite with her first husband, outraging many in the audience who could not accept their heroine getting a divorce.
The other major story of the late 1960s involved Tess Krakauer and Bill Prentiss, played by real-life couple Toni Bull Bua and Gene Bua. Tess and Bill had the perfunctory tortured love story, including separations, children, and murder trials, until Bill died of a "rare blood disease" in 1972 and Tess left town in 1973.
1973–1980
As ratings began to slide in the 1970s, Meg and her son Ben Harper were reintroduced. Meg was played by Tudi Wiggins from 1974 to 1980. Ben, now an adult, was most notably played by Christopher Reeve from 1974 to 1976 and later recast and played by Chandler Hill Harben from 1976 to 1980. Under the reins of Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer, the show returned to the original "good Vanessa, bad Meg" theme. In one episode, Meg called her son's newborn daughter Suzanne a "bastard", one of the first times the word was spoken on daytime television.
However, Labine and Mayer left, and the show lost the original intended focus. Emphasis was increased on gritty story lines (for example, Ben, now played by Chandler Hill Harben, was nearly raped while in prison serving time for bigamy), but these were not warmly received by the audience, and the ratings dropped. The show occupied a vulnerable timeslot. Since the beginning, Love of Life had aired in the late morning – and few soaps had been successful when airing before noon. The show's ratings had been respectable but middling in the 1950s and 1960s, but dropped sharply in the early 1970s. In 1976, Rick Latimer (Jerry Lacy) and his wife Cal (Roxanne Gregory) welcomed a young vet Michael Blake (Richard E. Council) into their garage apartment. Michael's secret "crush" on Cal led to a vacation rendezvous and a fatal boating accident resulting from Blake's failed attempt to save Cal's son (Hank) from a sudden lake squall. Their son survived, but Blake drowned. Rick, Cal, and their son left Rosehill for Montreal to start a new life.
On April 23, 1979, in a last-ditch effort to save Love of Life, CBS moved the show to 4:00 pm. Head writers Jean Holloway and Ann Marcus' stories did not catch on with the audience.
Love of Life ended its run with a cliffhanger on February 1, 1980. After testifying in a trial, Betsy Crawford (Margo McKenna) collapsed while leaving the stand. No other networks picked up the show, and the cliffhanger remained unresolved. The final shot of the series was of longtime director Larry Auerbach, portfolio in hand, walking through the empty sets and out the CBS Broadcast Center Studio 41 gate, as Tony Bennett's "We'll Be Together Again" played.
Cast
Actor | Character | Duration |
---|---|---|
John Aniston | Eddie Aleata | 1975-1978 |
Tirell Barbery | Carol Raven | 1954-1957 |
Bonnie Bartlett | Vanessa Dale #2 | 1955-1959 |
Richard Coogan | Paul Raven | |
Deborah Courtney | Cal Aleata | 1974-1975 |
Tom Fitzsimmons | Price Madden | |
Steven Gethers | Hal Craig | |
Chandler Hill Harben | Ben Harper | 1976-1980 |
Elizabeth Kemp | Betsy Crawford Harper | 1973-1977 |
Ann Loring | Tammy Forrest | |
Jean McBride | Meg Dale | 1951-1958 |
Peggy McCay | Vanessa Dale #1 | 1951-1955 |
Audrey Peters | Vanessa Dale #3 | 1959-1980 |
Nina Reader | Barbara Sterling | |
Christopher Reeve | Ben Harper | 1973 |
Paul Savior | Rick Latimer | |
John Straub | Guy Latimer | |
Birgitta Tolksdorf | Arlene Lovett Harper | 1974-1980 |
Ron Tomme | Bruce Sterlling | 1959-1980 |
Tudi Wiggins | Meg Dale | 1974-1980 |
Main Crew
- Larry Auerbach
- Heather Hill (unknown episodes)
- Robert Myhrum (unknown episodes)
- Robert Scinto (unknown episodes)
- Art Wolff (unknown episodes)
- Loring Mandel (1970–1972)
- Paul Avila Mayer (1973–1975)
- Claire Labine (1973–1975)
- Don Ettlinger (unknown episodes)
- John D. Hess (unknown episodes)
- Harry W. Junkin (unknown episodes)
- John Pickard (unknown episodes)
- Frank Provo (unknown episodes)
- Phyllis White (unknown episodes)
- Roy Winsor
- Louis Ringwald
References
- ISBN 0-345-35344-7.
- ISBN 978-0823083152. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
- ISBN 0-88176-933-9.
- ^ LaGuardia, Robert (1974). The Wonderful World of TV Soap Operas. Ballantine Books. p. 290.
External links
- Love of Life at IMDb
- A film clip of an episode of "Love of Life" aired 22 May 1953 is available for viewing at the Internet Archive
- An incomplete copy of the 22 August 1960 episode of "Love of Life" at the Internet Archive