I vaguely remember this show. I'd watch it when I was like 4, and my mom was taking care of this old lady down the street. I'd just sit there and watch Generations, then Days, then AW with her. Oh, and maybe we'd flip on some Eureeka's Castle.

Pardon my bluntness, but I remember a lot of black people were on this show. Much more than any other show had ever showcased. Was it supposed to be a mostly-black sort of show?

Yup. That was the hook with Generations--the main core family was black. I've never seen an episode--I'd like do though. A quick perusal of the imdb entry says that some pretty fun people were on that show: Jon Lindstrom, Bruce Campbell. Kristoff St. John, James Reynolds, Viviva A. Fox.

[ot] Go Eureeka's Castle! [/ot]

Actually there were two main core families: one white and one black. The show itself though was conscious of giving black characters more substantial roles than other daytime shows. While the writing at times left a lot to be desired I would say no soap has ever come close to keeping black characters in the forefront like this show did.


It was cancelled I believe after two or three years (maybe not that long...perhaps it got just one and a half years) because of low ratings. Funny thing is the ratings it received back in those days (late 80s and perhaps early 90s) would probably place it near the top of the Nielson's for soap operas in 2004. Part or me wonders why it didn't get more time to prove itself; after all Passions gets crappy ratings and has been on forever and the late Port Charles got about four or five seasons at least, right? Then again back during the days of Generations there were higher standards for ratings.

Anyway---Generations trivia: The son of the black family was played by Kristoff St. John's of Y&R fame (Neil). He was one of the spotlight characters. One of his dates in the earliest episodes was played by the the same actress who plays Olivia on Y&R (forgot her name--Tonya Lee Watkins). St. John's character was named Adam Marshall and his main squeeze in the last year was played by Vivaca A Fox of Independence Day fame.

Arguably Adam had the most chemistry with the blonde chick he roomed with, Sam Whitmore. The Whitmores were the main white family on the show. Sam had a brunette cousin named Monique I believe and she lived with Sam and Adam (all three shared an apartment for about a year). . Sam was played by at the time a ridiculously hot Kelly Rutherford who could last be seen on that ABC prime time counter terrorism show. At times it looked as if Sam and Adam would do the deed because it was clear that while they were best of friends and former childhood companions they also, deep down, lusted for one another. But it never happened (surprise!)

Monique had a boyfriend named Jason who was played by Anthony Addabbo, the actor who temporarily played Dimitri on AMC when the original actor was let go (hope that wasn't too confusing). Sam's major boyfriend on Generations was Kyle Masters and he was played by Robert Tori, the same actor who plays the mafia character/enforcer who irritates Bobby on Y&R from time to time (another Y&R connection). The guy looks so different now that I had no idea it was the same person until I read about it in a magazine.

God. I can't believe I remember some of this stuff. My tape collection is so big that I think I may actually have around 70 to 80 episodes of the show still on tape in my basement (that's with commercials included). If I had the right equipment as well as the expertise I would download them onto my computer and put it on the Kazaa web site. I'm gonn ahave to go back and watch those old tapes just to see if I can spot and rember the characters played by Bruce Campbell, Amy Yasbeck, Jon Lindstrom and Patricial Tallman (Of B5 fame).

I do recall Randy Brooks. He was a football player who dated Debbi Morgan (who played Adam's sister. Brooks is also a Y&R alum as well as an AMC and AW alum too. He is best known though for "Reservoir Dogs." Richard Roundtree was on the show but I forgot what his role was. And Smokey Robinson had a short stint as a prisoner who shared a jail cell with Adam. Of course I must mention that Smokey was recently on Y&R too.


(Edited as I went to IMDB to get the names of some of the actors and characters).

prophetreturns, if you did put it on Kazaa (or donated to WoST), that would be the coolest thing ever.

I hearted this show. It was my obsession during the summer of '93 when the single channel in Barbados used to air it. Good times. I remember Ruth and Peter and how they had a romance that Ruth's mom didn't approve. I remember being so scared when she said she'd set Peter's club on fire. I knew the last episode was coming up, so I thought everyone was gonna die. Leave me alone, I was like nine. It's funny, because I don't remember whether the club was set on fire, or if anyone died at all.

Oh, I also remember that Doreen chick who had a drag-queenish flair. She was doing it with some guy (possibly JR's character) and he had a heart attack. And then someone walked in, and the look on Doreen's face was classic. I think that happened in the last episode, but I'm not 100% certain.

Didn't Adam and Doreen have an affair? And somebody poisoned a trifle. I recall that I liked Maya, but that's probably because she got to go out with Adam. Now, I would think she was a drip.

Yes, Adam and Doreen did have an affair. Doreen was Adam's first serious love interest on the show and was married to the corrupt business partner of Adam's dad. Now that I think about it Adam and Dorren was one of the earliest older woman/younger man pairings that I recall seeing on daytime.

TheCustomofLIfe, if my situation changes over the next 6 months and I upgrade my entire computer system then I will definitely send that stuff out into the www.

Oh... I remember this show. I can't even remember the storyline all that well, but we used to watch in back in Nigeria.

There's a now-defunct but popular South African soap by the same name.

This was the first soap I got addicted to on my own. And I was obsessed. I loved the Mia/Adam storyline, especially the whole witness protection angle.

BTW, NBC blamed its affiliates and an old network decision for the failure of Generations. Waaay back in the day, some idiot at NBC gave the affiliates the power to air daytime programming at anytime, instead of following a set schedule the way ABC and CBS affiliates have to do. So instead of following the now-traditional 12:30 to 4:00 E/MT schedule, they could schedule how ever they wanted.

During the last year of Generations where I grew up it was on at 9:30, then Santa Barbara was on at 11am, and then Another World and Days were on at normal times. But Generations got bounced around ALOT here and in other places. Apparently NBC blames the demise of its other soaps on this time freedom issue as well.

My affiliate ran Generations at its normal time, right before Days of Our Lives came on at 1. Speaking of the idiot who gave the affiliates the right to air it whenever, they still do that. In Alabama, DAYS now airs at 11:30 and Passions airs at 12:30. WTF?

This show will always have a place in my heart. I used to watch this show when it was on, and my Grandfather became addicted to this show as well. We would talk about it for a long while. Anyways, when he went to Miami, for his annual trip, I asked him if he was going to watch it, and he said he didn't know. I offered to tape it for him and he said he'd get back into it when he got home. However he passed a couple days after that phone call. I was devestated.

I taped the very first episode, and couldn't wait to get home to watch it. The only thing I remember clearly was someone falling ass over tea kettle down a flight of stairs. Just about wore out the rewind button on that one!

I tried, but this soap just really didn't hook me. I had no idea it ran as long as you all say.

I never watched (although I always loved its credits with that tree), but that was the big selling point at the time - that it was the first completely integrated soap. It seems quaint now to think of integration only in terms of black and white characters and not other groups, but it was a big deal then. IIRC, African American women were over-represented in soap audiences and under-represented on soaps and this was a conscious decision by NBC to try to capitalize on that by creating a show that in theory would be a big draw for black and white women. Even though it failed, other shows did seem to step up integration efforts, I suspect to keep their AA fans from switching. For example, the Wards were introduced in GH in the mid-90s and before that the interracial marriage of Tom Hardy and Simone. Unfortunately, all of the ABC shows seem to even have stopped trying. Y&R has done a nice job, IMO, of creating an integrated canvas. So I think it did have an effect, even if it was only temporary at ABC. Not that I don't love MHN!Justus.[/sarcasm]

They showed the first episode at WoST a while back, and this did happen indeed. I'm not sure if this was in the real world or that soap-inside-a-soap, Tomorrow's Another Day.

ETA: I hope it's okay to reply to something that's months old! I just saw this thread, and didn't look closely enough at the dates.



Close to two. It debuted in March 1989 and was canceled right around the start of the Gulf War, in January 1991. I actually only watched the show in reruns on BET, but I researched it because I wanted to see how long it was going to last.

I did love this show. The writing had ups and downs like all soaps, but it had strong characters and many talented and/or pretty cast members; it could be funny, and what attempts there were to do "topical" stories, like the racism when the Marshalls moved to the North Side, were above average. Another example: We've all seen a thousand "who's the daddy?" storylines involving paternity tests, but there was an ingenious "black-specific" twist in the Adam/Doreen/Martin storyline, involving the possibility of the baby having the sickle-cell trait if one or the other of the men was the real father.

Kelly Rutherford (Sam) and Anthony Addabbo (Jason) had smoking chemistry and were just a beautiful couple to look at. I know we were "supposed" to want Jason and Monique together, but I always wished Sam had been successful in stealing him away when she was pretending to be "Flame" or "Stephanie" or whatever her modeling alias was. Kelly Rutherford's Sam is exactly what, IMO, Carly of GH or Sami of DOOL should be, but never will be, because (1) they're not played by actresses with half of KR's charm, and (2) the writing enables them too much and lets them get away scot-free too often, whereas Sam always got her comeuppance and then some, and so you had more empathy for her. We weren't always being beaten over the head with how "brave and strong" she was. I really loved that character.

Jason's fake death was one of the most convincing fake-outs I've ever seen. He was absent for weeks, and I really didn't see his return coming. Shocked the hell out of me when he turned up alive at that cabin. Maybe I was more soap-naive back then, and didn't have the Internet to ruin everything for me.



He was Maya's doctor father. They'd been on the run or "underground" ever since she was a little girl, and even though he was this brilliant doctor, he was having to work anonymously at a tiny free clinic, because he was wrongly accused of killing someone by causing an explosion at a lab or something. After he was cleared, he started an affair with Doreen Jackson, and she and Maya despised each other (it was kind of a similar dynamic to Kate/Roman/Sami on DOOL), and that resulted in probably the most famous Generations scene ever, the epic catfight between Doreen and Maya. "Come and get me, bitch!"

The credit sequence may be my favorite ever for a soap. It was a great concept, and the visuals and the music were beautiful. I loved how the scoring moved through various 20th century musical styles, to match the pictures of black and white people through various eras of change -- it starting out sounding like turn of the century music, then gradually became more jazzy and modern -- and the shots of the main families were saved for the very end. It was so clever and thoughtful, the way everything in that sequence sprang from the "generations" theme.

BTW, it was Jessica Gardner's evil Aunt Mary, played by the great Mina Kolb (Jeff's mother on Curb Your Enthusiasm), who fed Jason and Monique the poisoned trifle, and also jumped out of a plane with a stolen moose head filled with diamonds. (Or was it cash? Or uranium? Whatever. Something valuable.)

Does anyone have GENERATIONS on tape or GEN related materials(photos,articles,poster etc).Email me.

Oh, how I used to love Generations! It came on when I was 12 years old. I really didn't notice at the time that it was a big deal to have a black family at the core of the show. Maybe because I'm white or maybe because I was used to the Cosby's! I hated how it ended with all cliffhangers. All of my favorite shows have ended that way! NBC didn't even give it 2 years to catch on.
Generations would be the perfect soap to issue out on DVD. By my calculations, there must have been about 500 episodes. Divide that into ten box sets, and you've got 50 thirty-minute episodes per set. Then put 10 episodes on each of 5 DVD's. Perfect! I'd buy them all!

On most soaps, the wealthy family controls an oil empire or one of the top fashion design houses or, at the very least, a vaguely-defined, but powerful, international conglomerate.

Here, the patriarch of the black family was an ice cream magnate. Ice cream? I mean . . . ice cream?

I'm in need of information. If anyone can point me to data showing average total viewers or households for this show during its run, I'll say a special prayer for you!

Oh, this was my soap back in the day! Haha...I loved Sam so much and thought she was beautiful. I was very disappointed when it was canceled.

The songs played on the show were great.

If anyone is interested in Generatios materials or episodes please email me.I'M ALSO LOOKING FOR ANYTHING RELATED TO THE SHOW.I'm in contact with some actors.

Here's my GEN site : www.generations.bloog.pl

You know what I'd LOVE to see on Youtube? The scene with Doreen and Maya fighting....man, talk about a knock-down ghetto fight!

Yes, it never gets old! Watch again, and again ...

eta:

It did. (Starts at about 3:35 mark)