I was listening to the 1986 close at WoST, and I noticed the announcer was mentioning the New Orleans Morning Program. Did Capitol not air at 2:30 everywhere?

From what I gather, almost everyone hated the ending Capitol had. Can anyone explain to me why? The gist I get is that CBS gave the shaft to John Conboy and told him to wrap up three months of storylines in one month's worth of taping time, so he made Sloane go up against a firing squad...then never revealed the ending. Is that it?

That's pretty much it, and yet, it's not.

Conboy and Lipton ran Capitol straight into the ground the last year and then, with the end clearly in sight, made absolutely no attempt to provide an ending to ANY of the existing storylines and even had the gall to start NEW ones in the final weeks. If anyone really cared whether Sloane survived the firing squad it was probably to hope the poor woman died and thus was spared another horrible s/l. Beyond Prince Ali there was Trey's mother who escaped from the mental hospital and got hired as her grandson's nanny, BUT NOBODY RECOGNIZED HER. Sen. Mark Denning was revealed to be the local Godfather but I can't remember if anyone found out.

I need to stop now. The memories are making me nauseous. Suffice it to say it was a insult to everyone who stuck w/the show.

I was fairly young when this was on. I remember that it had pretty people on it.

Weren't people really pissed that Search For Tomorrow was canceled because of Capitol? I mean, I know about the whole "P&G wanted the 12:30 slot" story, but still, CBS did stop airing it.

Since this came pretty close on the heels of CBS dumping Edge of Night (and ABC picking it up) I don't know how much fan outrage there was. SFT was limping pretty badly by that time, too many different headwriters in too short a time, the usual kiss of death. I don't know the specifics of why CBS dropped SFT, but if it's anything like things are today, CBS (any net) prefers to have a lineup with a consistent audience. It's easier to sell to advertisers. SFT, this I do know, had a slightly older audience than the rest of the CBS soaps plus Dallas and Dynasty had tapped into the glamour soap motherlode. Capitol actually premiered at night, a one-hour episode before or after Dallas. CBS really pushed it.

Capitol had a couple of good years, under the Corringtons, for example, then Peggy O'Shea and finally Henry Slesar (of many a great EON year.) James Lipton was a nightmare worthy of Guza & Pratt. The only good thing that came of this is that I'm fairly sure it was his last time at the helm.

I'm not a big believer in the "this show was cancelled to provide a slot for that show" brand of conspiracy theory. Soaps are expensive to develop. No network is going to put the money into development unless they already have a patient on the critical list. I remember watching SFT back in the day (it had alot of first, including the first abortion by a married woman) and it was good, but when it got bad it was really bad.

SFT was consistently #4 in the soap ratings from 1974 or so up until 1980. When they moved it to 2:30 in 1981, the ratings halved. From what I understand, P&G didn't want to inconvenience viewers, a lot of whom had followed Jo's exploits at 12:30 PM since 1951. CBS refused to move it, so they dropped it in favor of Capitol. At least, that's what my understanding of the situation is.

I thought you guys might want to know that World of Soap Themes has an episode of Capitol up.

(Hi, JD! How are you?)

(Alynn, my peeps! So long, too long. I'll email you.)

Sadly, the Capitol episode is not one of the show's best. But at least there's no Prince Ali in sight. Lovely to look at, not a horrible actor but egads, the story!

Capitol was a field day for "mature actors." Constance Towers, Marj Dusay, Julie Adams, Rory Calhoun, etc. Good stuff. And nary a one gets their due in this episode.

The Corringtons - weren't they the ones who brought in the Coronal/Crown mob story and the O'Neills on OLTL (along with the return of Carla Hall in a SL that Ellen Holly called "silly little sex games") , and were then fired by Rauch?

I am very curious about Capitol, since it's set in my town. Did it actually give off a realistic D.C. vibe, or was it merely Conboy and Dynasty-type stuff transposed onto the city? Conboy is not a favorite given his horrid work on GL - it's obviously been a long time since Y&R for him - but I do wonder when it was good, and what SLs worked. Can you tell us more, Jane? What was Slesar's stuff? He was so brilliant.

ETA:Weird...this ep at WoST is supposedly from '86, but according to some of the stuff in the ep I wonder if this isn't in fact from late '85, and thus part of Slesar's run.

I spent a lot of years in DC jase, but only watched probably a year of Capitol. FWIW, here's my take on the DC angle. I think they did a decent job. Most of the time you felt like they could be anywhere - I don't remember a lot of insider street, location type info although I watched the show years before I lived in DC. But occasionally, they really pulled out the stops. I seem to recall a wedding at the Jefferson memorial that was fairly spectacular. Either that or I hallucinated it.

In the last segment, they advertised the mini-series "If Tomorrow Comes" as "coming soon!" I checked IMDb and it aired in 1986, so I don't know one way or the other.

What ever happened to Brenda and Wally at the end. Together or apart. Loved the first couple of years when Brenda had the huge crush on Wally. Didn't really like the recasts later though.

Lisa Ann--Watching that episode, I flashed back to the original Brenda. For some reason, I really liked her. Maybe it was her chubby face. Sadly, she (Leslie Graves) died in 1989 of an AIDS-related illness. The actor who played Wally also died of AIDS in 1992.

Anyhow, I found a site that says:

Out of town, out of touch .... you know how it is ... but I shall attempt to catch up:


Jase-Bot asked (sorta):



The Corringtons were, I believe, the second headwriters of Capitol. The ones who realized that the Romeo & Juliet storyline of Julie & Tyler was so lame Jerry Lewis considered making it a poster child (I know, very unPC of me.) The leads were wooden beyond comedy, I think a few truly committed activists attempted to climb David Mason and live in his hair so the loggers wouldn't cut him down but I digress. They introduced the Kelly & Trey story, added more political backstabbing, etc. I remember one s/l that was pretty much a lift from Godfather Part 2 (politician framed for murdering a prostitute), decent stuff.
The Corringtons wrote The Omega Man, one of the heavy on the cheese early 70s Charleton Heston scifi flicks that yours truly still drops everything to watch, hence I give them the benefit of the doubt.

Next came Peggy O'Shea who did many great things on OLTL prior to joining Capitol but seemed to pretty much tread water on Capitol. I vaguely remember some nonsense about Sam Clegg having an illegitimate daughter. Ok, but not memorable.

Then Harry Slesar. Sigh. Paula Denning murdering her housekeeper because she found out Paula wasn't really agoraphobic. Paula shooting Clarissa at a New Year's party. Zed Diamond's nutso obsessions. Kelly accidentally killing her blackmailer. Paula just being Paula. I could go into truly insane levels of detail w/the slightest provocation.

James Lipton killed it all. I don't know WTF the man was trying for. If he was trying to cause me extreme mental pain every M-F from 2:30 pm to 3pm, he succeeded.

The show's vibe: very Dynasty overall but that I suspect was the John Conboy influence. From the Corringtons through Slesar the show also had a dark edge to it that was more EON than Dynasty. Every character, except Clarissa, had a dark side and serious flaws. Even Julie had a spoiled rich-girl sense of entitlement that made her interesting.



Leslie Graves was great. She had the same sort of vulnerable but way too tough for her age vibe that Genie Francis did in her early years as Laura (pre-Luke). You really believed she could go right over the edge w/o a second thought and, sadly, apparently in real life that was the case. I remember reading that Leslie was very close to Carolyn Jones and was devastated when she died.

Soap daisy chain trivia: Carolyn Jones (first Myrna Clegg) was married to Aaron Spelling.

I dunno which Brenda it is in the ep at WoST (she cries horribly unconvincingly and dumps freaky Wally because he is jealous of Dylan) , but I hated her. Sorry, I'm awful.

It's weird, because according to the Capitol site I was looking at, the WoST ep (where Julie is still under suspicion for shooting Mark, while Jenny and Zeb are hiding out) should be from Slesar's tenure, but instead the credits say Lipton. I don't get it. The blue-screen footage of DC and a bridge over the Beltway (I think) was funny, but the show seems too Dynasty. I wasn't expecting gritty realism and truth from Conboy, but I dunno, it's my town and I love it.

The airdate for that episode is February 26, 1986. The episode was probably written in December 1985 and taped in mid-January 1986 or so. It's probably the very beginning of the Lipton tenure.

That is not Leslie Graves, I can't remember who it is but your hate is righteous.



IIRC, Lipton was control freak who insisted on TOTAL control. It would not surprise me in the least that the man put his name on someone else's work. That whole Julie/Jenny thing was Lipton and not Slesar. Slesar had Jenny murdered on her wedding night, contributing to Zed's overall weirdness (and possibly his pompadour too) and making him obsessed w/Julie. Lipton went for the el cheezo "Jenny wasn't really dead", which made Zed seem thick as two short planks since he'd supposedly spent hours holding Jenny's dead body in his arms.

Did I mention that Lipton sucked? Alot.

Capitol was no more realistic about politics than B&B is about the fashion industry. But then, who watches a soap for realism? Not moi.

I thought Slesar brought in Jenny at the end of '85, before he left around 2/86. Sorry to be anal, I just am very curious about all things Henry Slesar. But it would not surprise me either if Lipton put his name on somebody else's run.

I dunno, I'm not looking for realism per se but the whole Dynasty thing bugs. The only thing that interested me about Capitol was the locale and the potential of working with that and the city and politics. It had so many possibilities.

IMDB says it's Brenda Clegg #3, played by Karen Kelly from 1985 to 1987. Since then she's directed some TV (among which is the Brit soap "EastEnders") and from there she went on to write some straight-to-video porn. Great career, sweets.

Slesar is worthy of detailed attention, as were most of his stories.  I STILL get the chills thinking about some of his storylines on EON.  (I'd kill to have the Keith Whitney saga on DVD, but alas ...)

My memory is a bit faulty on this as I was overseas at the time but I distinctly remember coming home at Xmas and watching the tapes my Grandmother had thoughtfully saved for me and there was a very noticeable change in the quality of the writing starting in December 1985.  Is it possible that either Conboy was inteferring or that Slesar was really already out the door?  It seems likely to me because the Slesar who wrote Keith Whitney on EON wouldn't have doled out the dreck on display in the WOST episode.  Maybe Slesar did bring Jenny back (the name of the ship she was on, The Southern Cross, seems like classic Slesar) but I can't help believing that Slesar would have made it all make sense.  His plots were perfect little jigsaw puzzles.  Everything ultimately fit together. 

Slesar, imho, ranks right up there w/Marland, Nixon, Philips, LeMay and Labine as one of the true geniuses of the industry.



Twas the time of Dynasty, even Ryan's Hope got glammed up in the mid-1980s. I remember at the time the Washington Post pointed out that Capitol was the whitest soap on the air. When they did get around to adding a little "color", it was in the form of Lola Falana. That's right, direct from Vegas.

JaneDigby, do you still have those Capitol tapes?



That went over well, too. Everyone hated it, labeled it "Kirkland's Hope," and eventually they all went away.

Glam works in some arenas -- original Y&R, the Dobsons and Santa Barbara, '70s Bell stuff, Lemay AW, Bev McKinsey, etc. But when it comes to a soap set in DC I don't want Conboy runway models strutting about. I dunno. What did Slesar do for Capitol overall? I read all about the Baxter story.

As for Keith Whitney, I would love to see it among other things -- every time I see a new EON ep I cherish it -- but I've heard that most EON from around that period no longer exists.

Jase-Bot:



I had to look up who was writing when to get this right and I should start out by saying that Peggy O'Shea's stuff was better than I remembered. She started some of the storylines that Slesar made blossom beautifully. That doesn't surprise me - O'Shea did great, great stuff on OLTL.

Back to Slesar. What he did for Capitol (and EON and Somerset) was create a world in which very few characters where either all good or all bad and there was a sense that happiness was a fragile thing. Something waited in the shadows for every character: the past, the jealousy of someone else, their own weaknesses, etc. Slesar used this to make even the smallest scene count.

The Baxter story was good because, classic Slesar, it was a mystery that had a strong emotional impact on many characters. Overall Slesar made good use of the entire cast. So wacko Paula Denning who only wanted to keep her husband Mark (who loved Clarissa) teamed up bitchy Myrna Clegg to torment Clarissa but continued to spar over other things - mainly Paula's daughter's marriage to Myrna's step-son. Paula seemed to want her daughter to be happy but also was weirdly jealous of her. That sort of thing. The other big stories were a triangle between Trey/Kelly/Sloane, Myrna trying to control her wild daughter Brenda, Tyler heading up a crime commission while Julie fell apart, a baby-selling ring which Julie got in the middle of, etc. There were both umbrella stories that involved most of the cast and smaller stories that linked smaller but unexpected groups of characters.

I think Slesar tried not to write 80s glam but no matter what the story, Conboy had the characters dressed for the runway.

Josette: Thanks for the information on Brenda and Wally. I can't believe Leslie Graves only played Brenda from 1982-1984..it seemed longer. I do recall that right around the time they were finally getting together they recasted or replaced(whatever). Brenda just wasn't the same without Leslie!! I do remember Leslie dying and leaving behind a husband and children but I can't believe it was that long ago...1989. The site you referenced was excellent. Doesn't seem like much happened between Brenda and Wally in 1987 !! Also, can you believe Capital was cancelled pulling in 5.2% ratings!!

Not only that, but B&B didn't pull out of the middle of the pack (where Capitol was the whole time) until about 1992 or 1993, so it's not like they won anything on the deal, at least not in the short-term.

Just thought I'd give it a bump..no posts since 2004!!

This may not be the right place to ask, but does anyone have any Capitol episodes on tape, particularly of Clarissa's storylines? I'm a big fan of Constance Towers and I have parts of her storylines, but there are still a lot of gaps in what I have. I wish one of the cable channels or even the internet would re-air the series; I was just a kid when it aired and only discovered it after becoming a fan of Ms. Towers on General Hospital, so I haven't seen the series in its entirety.