Brandon's Buzz

Another relatively light week is on tap, although if you’re feeling nostalgic, you’ll find a pair of touchstones — one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s — in the pipeline as you do your shopping this Tuesday. Behold:

After an endless wait, one of television’s smartest and most beloved situation comedies finally began making its way to DVD last year, and the latest release arrives this week. The Fourth Season of Family Ties was a watershed one for the series; having been paired with “The Cosby Show” on Thursday nights, the show was finally a ratings bonanza after several years of flying below the radar, and thanks to box office smash Back to the Future, its young star Michael J. Fox had just become a bona fide superstar. Season four also introduced to the series two of its funniest and most memorable ancillary characters, as the oldest Keaton kids both found true love: Alex, with fellow co-ed Ellen Reed (the terrific Tracy Pollan), and Mallory, with dropout sculptor Nick Moore (the hilarious Scott Valentine). The resulting complications — Alex deciding to take up ballet, or the riotous family dinner in which Mallory introduced Nick to the mortified Keaton clan, to name but two — rank among the show’s most remarkable moments.

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“This… inferiority complex that daytime [television] has with regard to prime time, I think, is hurting it, especially because, ironically, prime time has become so much more like daytime! It’s almost like soap operas lost the battle and won the war, because, with the exception of a few police procedural-type shows, I can’t think of a single prime time or cable show that doesn’t have soap opera elements.”

— former “Young and the Restless” writer Sara Bibel, discussing daytime’s woes on the BlogTalkRadio show “In the Zone”

Sure, it’s not in the same league as the impeccably rendered coffee table scrapbook that Gary Warner assembled for the soap’s 30th anniversary in 1998, but considering the sorry state of affairs that is daytime television these days, I gratefully choose to appreciate the fact that we get even this much.

In The “One Life to Live” 40th Anniversary Trivia Book, longtime soap journalist Gerald Waggett delves into the legendary soap opera’s rich history and, alongside the standard year-by-year plot recaps, character bios, and Emmy data, manages to dig up a few kernels that even I didn’t know (and I pride myself on knowing everything about this show!), including the revelation that executive producer Paul Rauch, despite his vehement protestations to the contrary back then, was trying to lure Robin Strasser (who had left the show on bad terms with Rauch a few years prior) back to her signature role as Dorian Lord in 1990 but was instead forced to recast with Elaine Princi after Strasser turned him down flat, or that the passionate objections of my forever fave Hillary B. Smith convinced head writer Michael Malone to change the ending of his spectacular 1993 gang rape storyline (the trial was originally slated to conclude with a not guilty verdict, but after Smith — who played Nora Gannon, the attorney defending the rapists — intervened, Malone had Nora realize her clients’ guilt and deliberately throw the case during summation, thereby causing a mistrial).

As is typical with Waggett’s soap-related books (of which I own four, including this one), this one contains some frustrating factual errors (Claire Labine didn’t replace Malone as head writer, but rather the disastrous team of Peggy Sloane and Leah Laiman; Sloan Carpenter wrote Lord of the Banner in 1993, not 1992) that a true daytime expert wouldn’t have allowed, but all things considered, this is a nice way for both new viewers to get a crash course on the show’s history and for freakish devotees like myself to take a lazy stroll down mem’ry lane.