The Edge Of Night
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Edge Of Night (TEON) was a long-running American television soap opera. It was produced by Procter & Gamble and debuted on CBS on April 2, 1956. It ran on that network until November 28, 1975 and aired on ABC from December 1, 1975 until December 28, 1984. 7420 episodes were produced, with some 1800 available for syndication.
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[edit] Format
TEON was the second of the two original half-hour soaps; As the World Turns also premiered in this format earlier the same day. These two programs were the last two American soap operas generally to be aired live, which they were into the 1970s and which also accounts why only about one-fourth of the episodes of The Edge of Night are available for syndication.
The last live episode aired just prior to its change of networks in 1975. The last CBS episode on November 28, 1975 ended with the discovery that Nicole Travis Drake (Maeve McGuire) was alive, after she was presumed dead in an explosion a year and a half earlier while on a boating trip with her husband Adam Drake (Donald May.) On December 1, 1975, ABC (replacing the canceled game show You Don't Say!) aired a special 90-minute episode which picked up where the last CBS episode left off, with Geraldine Whitney still in a coma from an attempted murder by her daughter-in-law Tiffany's second husband Noel Douglas; Nicole, with the help of Geraldine's adopted "son" Kevin Jamison, remembered who she was after suffering from amnesia since the explosion; the final scene of that day's episode was an exciting climax in which Serena Faraday (Louise Shaffer) shot her husband on the steps of the courthouse.
The show was originally conceived as the daytime version of Perry Mason, which was popular in novel and radio formats at the time. Erle Stanley Gardner was to create and write the show, but a last-minute tiff between him and the network caused Gardner to pull his support from the idea. A writer from the Perry Mason radio show, Irving Vendig, created a retooled idea and the show as we know it was born. Crime fiction writer Henry Slesar, who had written extensively for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was story editor for the series for many years. Gardner would eventually patch up his differences with CBS and Perry Mason would debut in prime time the next year. Unlike Mason, whose adventures took place in Southern California, Monticello, the city of The Edge of Night, was somewhere in a generic state in the Midwest — a state so generic that its capital city was "Capital City". It was admitted that the city skyline seen in the opening credits until 1980 was that of Cincinnati, Ohio, where the show's sponsor, Procter & Gamble, was based. The Los Angeles skyline was used later.
TEON was unique among daytime soap operas in focusing on crime, rather than domestic and romantic matters. The police, district attorneys and medical examiners of fictional Monticello, USA, dealt with a steady onslaught of gangsters, drug dealers, blackmailers, cultists, international spies, corrupt politicians, psychopaths and murderous debutantes while coping with more usual soap opera problems such as courtship, marriage, divorce, child custody battles and amnesia. The show's particular focus on crime was recognized in 1980, when, in honor of its 25 years on the air, The Edge of Night was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
The series hired many stage performers. Among those who appeared on the show in the 1960s and early 1970s were Kay Campbell, Tony Roberts, Keith Charles, Milette Alexander, Lester Rawlings, Irene Dailey, Anne Revere, John Collum, Scott Glenn, Richard Thomas, James Mitchell, Barbara Berjer, Ernest Graves, and Jane White.
Among its stars on ABC were Tony Craig, Terry Davis, Frances Fisher, Joe Lambie, Lori Cardille (who was replaced briefly by actress/writer Stephanie Braxton), Denny Albee, Irving Allen Lee, John Driver, Ernest Townsend, Dan Hamilton, Lee Goodart, and Kiel Martin - who were helped by guest stars Kim Hunter (Nola Patterson), Alfred Drake (Dwight Endicott), Frank Gorshin (Smiley Wilson), and stage director Jerry Saks (Louis Van Dine). Schyler Whitney (Larkin Malloy) and his wife Raven (Sharon Gabet, who had replaced the late Juanin Clay) became private detectives and were the new hero and heroine of the show.
[edit] Ratings History
Through the 1960s, The Edge Of Night was consistently one of the top six-rated soaps alongside the rest of the CBS Daytime lineup. It peaked at #2 and held a top four spot through to 1972.
The change in timeslot saw TEON's position fall to 10th, a position it held until 1975 when the show moved to ABC. The ratings decline continued and by the end of the 1970s it was in the ratings basement. Although it never recovered its lost ground, in the period 1980-82 it held down 10th-11th place and 5.0 in the ratings, putting it above Another World, Texas and The Doctors at that stage. However, from 1982 ratings would fall even further as more affiliates dropped the show altogether.
Due to the show's crime format, and its late start time (the show originally aired at 4:30 in the afternoon, when many men could rush home early from work), Edge had an audience which was estimated, at one time, to be more than 50% male. In 1964, the show was moved to a 3:30 p.m. time slot, which it dominated. When the show moved to 2:30 p.m. in 1972, the show slid from a solid #2 in the Nielsen ratings to near the bottom of the pack, and it has been hypothesized that this drop was due to the exodus of many male viewers who could not watch earlier in the afternoon. While CBS decided to cancel Edge, due to the ratings slide, ABC, the only network at the time that did not have a Procter & Gamble property, picked the show up.
Despite ABC's decision to move TEON back to a late afternoon time slot (4 p.m.) when it debuted on the network in late 1975, the serial never recovered from its steep drop, and stayed close to the bottom until its cancellation. As the show moved into the 1980s, more and more ABC affiliates either moved Edge to morning or late-night timeslots or chose not to air the show at all, causing the show's sponsor to lose more money with each passing year. The disatrous hiring of Lee Sheldon as headwriter (replacing Henry Slesar) and an announcement that many ABC affiliates would drop The Edge of Night starting the week of January 7, 1985 caused P&G to pull the plug as a pre-emptive strike.
[edit] Plot History
For the show's entire duration, the stories either revolved around or had much to do with Monticello lawyer Mike Karr (first played by John Larkin, then by Laurence Hugo and finally Forrest Compton). His first wife was Sarah (Teal Ames) whose character was killed as Sarah saved the life of their daughter Laurie Ann, who had run into the street into the path of an automobile. (Teal Ames wanted to leave the show, and the death of Sarah resulted in such a flood of calls to CBS that the network had her appear at the end of the next day's episode to explain that the actress was alive and well, but just wanted to move on.) Mike later married Nancy Pollock (Ann Flood) who was a journalist and helped in many of his cases. Other important characters were Police Chief Bill Marceau (Mandel Kramer), who was one of Karr's best friends and with whom was shared a tremendous mutual respect, rare between a defense attorney and a chief of police, Marceau's wife Martha, who battled alcoholism, fellow lawyer Adam Drake (Donald May), and television personality Nicole Travis (first played by Maeve McGuire).
Nicole had the most interesting history, as she was married to Adam Drake, feared dead in a boating accident, came back to life, and when her marriage to Adam was finished for good, the character was replaced with a new actress (Jayne Bentzen had assumed the role) and was subsequently de-aged a decade, a rarity for an adult character in the genre. Now younger and more vibrant, Nicole was suitable for a relationship with young doctor Miles Cavanaugh (Joel Crothers). She was eventually killed off when her makeup powder was poisoned.
Another important relationship was that between Nancy and her younger sister Cookie, who was married first to Malcom Thomas (played by her real life husband Edward Kemmer) and later to Ron Christopher, whose dealings with loan sharks affected Mike's good friends Louise and Philip Capice (Ray MacDonnell). In the show's later years, the Karrs' beautiful daughter Laurie Ann, by now a young adult, was an important character. Her relationship with Jonah Lockwood, a cult leader very much in the style of Charles Manson, almost cost her her life, but he was revealed to be an alternate persona of Keith Whitney, scion of the weatlhy Whitney family, nemesis of the Karrs and Marceau! One of the later major story arcs was about a train wreck and a prisoner who had been unjustly convicted escaping from it, much in the style of Dr. Richard Kimble of The Fugitive.
[edit] Surviving episodes
In addition to the 1,800 episodes (from the latter part of the show's run) available for syndication, a handful of CBS episodes from the 1950s and 1960s also survive, some in kinescope form, others in film and television archives in their original videotape format. Some classic episodes have been seen on The World of Soap Themes web site (which showcases rarely seen episodes of soap operas long thought lost).
The 1989 Academy Award-winning film Driving Miss Daisy contains a clip from a 1960s classic episode which dealt with the aftermath of the murder of the character Victor Carlson.
In the late 1980s, reruns of Edge aired in a nightly late-night timeslot on cable's USA Network, most episodes of which were from the early-1980s timeframe from ABC.
In 2006, Procter & Gamble began making several of its soaps available, a few episodes at a time, through America Online's AOL Video service, downloadable free of charge. Reruns of The Edge of Night began from the middle of 1979.
