I’ve been gradually collecting Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s category romances. The most recent one I’ve found is 1994's Again, which I enjoyed hugely and read in a single evening. Others seem to have enjoyed it, too, as it won a RITA award in 1995.
I like books with heroes and/or heroines who are artists, actors, or writers, and this one featured an actor hero with a television writer heroine. The setting was also particularly cool: a daytime soap opera. In fact, one of my favorite things about the novel was all the details about how the soap was conceived, written, and produced. My other favorite thing about the novel was how the romance and action plots intertwined in that setting; some of the romance happens, at one remove, in the plot of the soap.
Soap operas seem to be constantly being canceled these days, or relocating to the internet, but in the world of Again, in the mid-1990s, they’re still vibrant. Heroine Jenny Cotton, fan of Georgette Heyer, is the creator and chief writer of a half-hour soap set in the Regency period and titled “My Lady’s Chamber.” There was one detail that really made me laugh:
Jenny did the longterm story outlines; she also wrote the “breakdowns,” detailed scene-by-scene summaries of each show. From those breakdowns her staff of five script writers—former Regency romance novelists, all of whom worked out of their homes—wrote the actual scripts.
The ratings for last night’s premiere of TNT’s Dallas (a continuation of the popular 1980s nighttime soap) are in, and with 6.8 million viewers, it looks like a lot of people were eager to get see the Ewing family again.
Time was when summer TV meant reruns and sporting events—and sometimes even reruns of sporting events. But nowadays, there’s original programming to fill those dog days, some of it even eminently watchable and most of it coming to us from our friends in basic and premium cable. Here, a heads up on even more of June’s forthcoming premieres, some of them offering up the birth of brand new series, others returning favorites back for another (non-ratings) season.
The Klingons have always said that revenge is best served cold—and in the case of ABC’s gloriously entertaining new hit, Revenge, it’s better to serve it chilled, in a martini glass, in the Hamptons during one fateful summer.
They don’t call it “Love in the Afternoon” for nothing. Soap operas are chock full of passionate romances, steamy hook-ups and lifelong love stories. Through years of marriages and divorces, affairs and schemes, faked deaths and secret pregnancies, these soap duos have kept us tuning in day after day. Here’s a list of our all-time favorite soap opera supercouples…
