The show's most famous character is the beautiful, spoiled, and vindictive Erica Kane, played with an almost vampy flourish by soap queen Susan Lucci (perennially nominated for an Emmy but, as of the late 1990s, holding the record for most nominations without a win). Despite being little more than caricatures rather than characters, they provided the audience with welcome comic relief from the earnestness of the show's young lovers and the stability of its tent-pole characters. Another was the gum-chewing Opal Gardner, Jenny's meddling mother. Among them was the matriarch Phoebe Tyler who, in her obsession with social propriety, bullied her family into almost hypocritical submission as they sought to achieve their fantasies out of sight of her all-observing eyes. This was followed in succeeding years by a parade of almost unbelievable characters who, in their flamboyance and eccentricity, overcame some rather formulaic and often saccharine story lines. This conflict drove the series for many years until it was supplanted in 1980 by a romance between Greg Nelson and Jenny Gardner, which was beset by interference from his controlling mother a devious young flame, Liza and ultimately Greg's own paralysis. While the stories are mainly romantic and triangular, what makes the show unique is its outright celebration of young lovers and their loves.Ĭhuck Tyler and Phil Brent were teenagers when their rivalry for the affections of Tara Martin split apart their friendship and pitted the Martins against the Tylers. The structure of the program has been the traditional battling families concept with the wealthy, dysfunctional Tyler family of Pine Valley pitted against the morally upright but decidedly middle-class Martins. From its January 5, 1970, debut, soap opera All My Children, with its emphasis on young love and such topical issues as abortion, the Vietnam War, and the environment, attracted college students in unusually high numbers, suddenly expanding the traditional market and changing the focus of the genre forever.
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