Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Spaceopoly Kill this Thread V: the 24 hour version!

M*A*S*H lasted four times longer than the war it was set during, so yeah.

Most shows, if they go on a bit, eventually trip up on their histories.

Well, there's the longevity factor, and the fact that even early in, the writers would get confused about things like the names of off-camera spouses and such. (Mrs. Blake, for instance, started out as "Mildred" but ended up as "Lorraine," I believe.)

Sitcoms...

When I was little, I thought that the next-to-last lyric of the Three's Company theme song was gibberish:

"Da da dodo day doo"

Then, when I grew up, I found out it actually went:

"Down at our rendezvous"

Which did nothing to convince me that I had not wasted many hours of my childhood watching that show.

Even worse than sitcom's continuity problems are those of soap operas.

Soaps have the opposite problem of comic books in that the characters usually age at a rate faster than in real life. This is known as SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome). A character will be born. Two years later, he's in kindergarten. We see him around now and then and then he disappears for two more years and then he's about sixteen. A character will remember things that happened before he was born!

I remember that on GH. Kids born in the late 70s vanished for a few years; by 1990ish they were in college!

I think American soap operas would benefit from adopting the Latin soap opera format of a really long mini-series with a beginning, middle, and end.

OTOH, they tried that in American prime-time in 2006 and it was a ratings disaster.

I think this is where comics got the idea.

American daytime soaps seem like an endangered breed, so who knows? it may become possible.

I don't know if it will help soaps, but that format (common in England and Japan as well) has definitely impacted cab;e and network shows these past few years.

Which is very sad. I lost my show, Guiding Light, last year. As the World Turns ends next month. Most of the others are barely hanging on. It's a part of American pop culture that will be lost.

Rocky, I remember you said you speak a little bit of Spanish. If you become fluent, you could watch Latin soaps. They've still got quite a bit of life left in them.

I can follow Spanish-language TV fairly well if I watch it with the captions on. I may have to try some time.

sounds similar to Quebecois teleromans, essentially episodic novels told over a lengthy but limited run.

I'm sure many nations have their own versions.

They do, but only the US had one that lasted 72 years. I still miss GL.

Thinking about it now, I doubt 72 years will ever be surpassed.

No, it probably won't. It stands as the longest run of a dramatic broadcast series. With ATWT going off next month, General Hospital becomes the longest-running, but it would need to stay on the air another ten years even to reach GL's TV record, let alone its time on the radio. And, honestly, I don't see it lasting another 10 years.

You would think the producers of Law & Order would have kept it on for one more year to pass Gunsmoke's run. But noooooo. Instead they start up a new series Law & Order:LA.

For a long time, I saw it in several references that Gunsmoke was TV's longest running series with continuing characters. Some time around the '80s, someone remembered the soaps and that its 20-year run was great for primetime, but it's not even close to the overall record.

Only two characters, Marshall Matt Dillon and Doc Adams, remained for the entire twenty year run of Gunsmoke. Doc Adams did not receive a first name until the sixteenth season, when the "Dr. G. Adams" outside his office was finally revealed to stand for "Galen".

On the radio show, "Doc Adams" was an alias the character had adopted when he came West fleeing a murder charge.

For some reason, it unnerves me that people who weren't even born when I quit watching L&O are now almost old enough to start choosing colleges.

I quit when The Evil Lizard Woman replaced whoever it was who replaced Jill Hennessey. The magic was gone, y'know?

Angie Harmon is indeed evil.

She did make good fodder for Sandra Bernhard on her tragically short-lived A&E talk show which had the misfortune of premiering a week before September 11, 2001.

...yet Bart Simpson hasn't aged a day.

Jill Hennessey was the best ADA, but Briscoe and Green were the best cop duo, and that came after Hennessey's run.

Bart Simpson and Angie Harmon -- what a couple.

Of course, she'd end up in jail like Mary Kay Letourneau, but, like I said, Angie Harmon is evil.