lynn liccardo's Blog
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May.06.2013
During a recent interview, those crazy kids at over at Soap Opera Network threw Senior Vice President of CBS Daytime, Angelica McDaniel, a real curve ball, asking (hypothetically, of course) if she would have canceled Guiding Light and As the World Turns had she been in charge at the time....
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Apr.27.2013
the excerpt below is from an article in The Hollywood Reporter, and speaks volumes about the questions I raised in my piece considering why Prospect Park filed suit against ABC last week.
ABC sources say the network was willing to accept ads within GH because of the licensing relationship, but on...
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Apr.26.2013
and the law firm of Lavely & Singer for distracting me with some much needed levity at the end of a difficult and frightening week ...
I live just outside Boston, and as I passed last Friday "sheltered in place" (my town wasn't one of those officially shut down, but since there was no...
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Apr.24.2013
and I don't have time to go into a lot of detail about my growing disappointment with Mad Men.
But, of all the commentary on MM's sixth season thus far (and there's been plenty:), William Bradley's take at the Huffington Post pretty well sums up why I find myself oddly disengaged from storytelling...
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Apr.11.2013
to henry jenkins and sam ford...
last week, in his introduction to my q&a with sam, "as the world stopped turning: a conversation with lynn liccardo about soap operas," henry noted,
I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate...
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Apr.08.2013
i'm sure their answer would be a resounding "no," but then i think back to what attorney general, john mitchell, said during the first nixon administration: "watch what we do, not what we say."
when cbs moved "the good wife" to sunday night last year, my heart sank. sunday nights were already...
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Mar.31.2013
As the World Turns might never have existed if Procter & Gamble had allowed Irna Phillips to expand Guiding Light from 15 minutes to a half-hour in 1955. Irna didn't want a bigger cast or more story; what she believed was "that better story and characterization could be developed in the half-...
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Dec.20.2012
became a sin of commission...
Back in 2009, I had just begun researching the life of Irna Phillps, soap opera's single mother, when I came across an article about her in the now-defunct publication, The Common Review, titled "Imperial Soap Opera," by Chicago writer, Les White.
Six paragraphs into...
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Dec.15.2012
Officially, this short piece I wrote about Irna Phillips is part of the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine. But, since the issue went online yesterday, here an early look.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/vita-irna-phillips
The article is a compressed version of the preface I wrote for "...
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Oct.19.2012
but it was worth it...
back in march, when i first mentioned that i was collecting some of my essays on "as the world turns" into an ebook, i thought i'd be done before now. but the resulting collection, "as the world stopped turning...the personal, idiosyncratic, often frustrated, sometimes angry...
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Oct.04.2012
on the heels of my post on WIGS yesterday, here's what mike hale had to say in the new york times...
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Oct.03.2012
finally...
she said hopefully...
and while we're at it, let's change serialized storytelling back to...
soap opera...
2011 was a brutal year for serial drama (at least the kind of serial drama I like): Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, Life UneXpected, In Treatment, all gone. My favorite...
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Sep.17.2012
not a verb...
a place to post what i've written rather than something i do on a regular basis.
which is one way of explaining why i've been silent these past several months. back in march, i mentioned that i was collecting some of my essays on as the world turns into an ebook. at the time, i...
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May.01.2012
At the time, I truly believed that my days of watching daytime soaps came to an end when the final episode of As the World Turns aired on September 17th, 2010. Of course, as my mother was so fond of telling me: never say never.
So, when One Life to Live left the air in January, I skipped the...
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Apr.02.2012
For me, the pleasure of watching soaps lies in the quite conversations between characters during which absolutely nothing happens. So, I’ve always found the “shocking secret revealed...” school of soap opera promos over-the-top. However...
As part of its release of “The Story of Lily and Holden” on...
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About lynn
critical observations about soap operas – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them...
I love WomenArts' pithy and succinct description of my work.
I began writing about soaps in 1990, and...
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