How to Survive a Marriage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| How to Survive a Marriage | |
|---|---|
 Title card for How to Survive a Marriage |
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| Genre | soap opera |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Creator(s) | Anne Howard Bailey |
| Developer(s) | Lin Bolen |
| Starring | Rosemary Prinz, et al |
| Country of origin |  United States |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | January 7, 1974–April 18, 1975 |
| No. of episodes | 335 |
How to Survive a Marriage was a soap opera which aired on the NBC television network from January 7, 1974 to April 18, 1975. The serial was created by Anne Howard Bailey, with much input from then-NBC Vice President Lin Bolen. The show's working title was From This Moment.
Attempting to tell life from the point of view of women in a changing world, the show stirred controversy when the 90-minute opener had the first "nude" scene on American network television (the nudity was only implied, as both of the bodies were under bedsheets) between Larry Kirby and his mistress, Sandra. Larry and his wife Chris (Jennifer Harmon) soon divorced and while battling for custody of their daughter Lori, Chris entered the workforce. On Valentine's Day 1975, Chris and Larry remarried, and she then battled alcoholism.
Initially, the show starred veteran soap actress Rosemary Prinz in the role of Dr. Julie Franklin, a staunch feminist who counseled her friends on the joys of being an independent woman, only to decide that her life was truly complete by marrying a man. Prinz only agreed to stay on the show for a short time (as she had with All My Children several years earlier), and earned top billing, a three-day work week, and supposedly $1,000 a week, which was a big salary for a soap actress to earn in 1974. After six months Julie left town to marry Dr. Tony DeAngelo.
Another major story centered around Fran Bachman (Fran Brill) coping with sudden widowhood. Brill received over a thousand letters of condolence from viewers.
The show did not profit from the large lead-in that the high-rated Another World provided, mostly due to its many attempts to be socially relevant, which usually took the place of traditional storytelling to which American soap viewers at the time were acclimated. How to Survive a Marriage was a distant third in the 3:30 p.m. timeslot, behind Match Game on CBS and One Life to Live on ABC, and was canceled after sixteen months on the air; a move to 1:30 p.m. on January 6, 1975 only brought worse ratings. The next Monday, Days of Our Lives expanded to an hour and assumed the vacant half-hour left in NBC's daytime schedule.
Famous alumni included Dallas star Ken Kercheval (Larry Kirby #2), Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham (Joshua Browne), film actor Armand Assante (Johnny McGhee), and the late film actor Brad Davis (Alexander Kronos).
