Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week in February is from a “first Black something” or a TV project that was created or helmed by a Black writer or filmmaker.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Fame and Terms of Endearment composer Michael Gore’s 1989 main title theme from Generations, a show that had nothing to do with Star Trek.

Back when I used to watch linear TV, there were hundreds of TV shows I had zero interest in, but their main title themes were so beautifully written that I stopped to hear the whole damn thing before I bounced. One of those shows was Generations, the first daytime soap on American network TV with a predominantly Black cast and, fortunately, not the last, now that CBS is about to premiere on February 24 former Generations writer Michele Val Jean’s Beyond the Gates, a daytime soap starring Law & Order: Special Victims Unit alum Tamara Tunie as Anita Dupree, the matriarch of one of Maryland’s wealthiest Black families.

Generations was created by Sally Sussman, a white writer who later became the head writer for Days of Our Lives. Sussman was most recently the head writer for The Young and the Restless. Generations revolved around the Marshalls, a Black family experiencing success from a Chicago chain of ice cream shops founded by patriarch Henry Marshall, and the Whitmores, a white family whose former housekeeper is the mother of Ruth Marshall, Henry’s wife and business partner.

“I knew that I wanted a black [sic] family on the show where [they could play] some of the iconic soap characters like the ‘rich bitch’ or the ‘devious businessman’ or the ‘young guy who sleeps with a married woman.’ The characters didn’t have to be perfect, which is how they’d often been portrayed on other shows. I wasn’t hamstrung in that way,” said Sussman to Soap Hub in 2021.

Dozens of Generations episodes have been archived in their entirety on YouTube. They include the 1989 series premiere (which features, in the role of an enthusiastic nurse, Nancy Cartwright, who, at the time, was voicing Bart Simpson in the animated Tracey Ullman Show shorts that later spawned The Simpsons) and the secret paternity arc that culminated in a brutal catfight between Doreen Jackson and Maya Reubens, played by, respectively, Jonelle Allen and a young Vivica A. Fox, who both refused to use stunt doubles and added a couple of unscripted bits of realism like removing their earrings before the brawl.

In Entertainment Weekly’s 2024 oral history about the brawl, which EW writer Kristen Baldwin called “one of the best TV catfights of all time,” Sussman pointed out that Maya’s “I wanna wipe this floor with you!” line was Val Jean’s idea. One of the two men Doreen and Maya fought over was played by a future daytime soap legend.

“Before he was Neil Winters on The Young and the Restless, Kristoff St. John, got his start playing Adam Marshall, the handsome, mischievous, college student who was carefree and a bit of a playboy,” wrote Megan Beauchamp in her 2019 retrospective on Generations for A Hot Set, a site that covers the latest projects from people of color in showbiz. “Here were black [sic] characters that got to enjoy the spotlight and have nuance, not just passing story lines. Before this show, black [sic] characters in soaps existed in somewhat of an aside, or an accessory to the other leads.”

It’s bizarre to me that it has taken this long for daytime TV to launch another sudser like Generations, especially after the successes of Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Empire, Greenleaf, Queen Sugar, and the Power shows as nighttime soaps have proven that viewers of any color want to watch big-budget sudsers where Black characters are at the center of the action, the scheming, and the backstabbing. However, as someone who grew up listening to hip-hop, I find Empire to be unrewatchable. Terrence Howard’s rapping skills are as terrific as his multiplication skills.

When I was a teen, I had a bit of a crush on Dixie Cousins, the chanteuse on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (while I was crazy about the naked woman who traveled through time to help Brisco defeat the evil John Bly in “Bye Bly”). Dixie was played by Kelly Rutherford, who got her big break on Generations as Sam Whitmore, Adam’s childhood friend and college roommate, as well as a character who, in one episode, tried to make out with Adam, but he wasn’t romantically interested in her. I never watched Generations. The only Black soap I liked was The Bold, the Black, the Beautiful.

Anne-Marie Johnson’s memorable delivery of “Stay away from my Mexican gardener!” and her evil laugh after “Who told you about Pepe?” are examples of why, after her roles in Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Townsend’s Partners in Crime specials, she was a great addition to the In Living Color cast during the sketch show’s crappy final season.

I’m not into daytime soaps, but I’m a fan of the Bold, the Black, the Beautiful sketches and Soap. Susan Harris’s farcical creation took a bunch of lurid daytime soap storylines, played them out in front of a live studio audience, jacked up the pace (daytime soaps were, before producer Gloria Monty’s revolutionary changes to General Hospital‘s storytelling, slow-moving and stodgy in the ’70s), and occasionally took the storylines seriously whenever Harris wanted to hit pause on the slapstick and expose that these broadly played characters, whether they were Burt Campbell or Elaine Lefkowitz Dallas, his abrasive Jewish American Princess daughter-in-law, were human beings.

After getting hooked on Soap reruns on Comedy Central in the early ’90s, I wanted to recreate the spirit of Soap if I ever became a screenwriter, so in the late ’90s, I wrote a character bible for a single-camera comedy series idea I called Suds. Several of the characters I came up with were riffs on characters from the General Hospital shared universe. When I was into the first six seasons of ER on NBC, I also watched a few ER clones, and one of those ER clones was the General Hospital spinoff Port Charles.

Like the Bond movies, the General Hospital franchise copies whatever is the most popular thing in pop culture at the time. (Cubby Broccoli wanted to attract the blaxploitation audience, hence the very loose adaptation of Live and Let Die. Moonraker was Broccoli’s answer to Star Wars. Octopussy was his answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Barbara Broccoli and her regime wanted the Daniel Craig era to be like the Bourne movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman flicks, and, ugh, 24.) When ER was the most popular hour-long nighttime drama, the General Hospital franchise wanted to go back to its roots as a medical drama (the original show was spending more time away from the titular hospital), so it came up with the ER-style Port Charles. (And when The Sopranos became a massive hit, bipolar gangster Sonny Corinthos, who existed long before Tony Soprano and his panic disorder, and his family became the central clan on General Hospital.)

Port Charles wasn’t a good show, and the mentor character Generations alum Debbi Morgan played, Dr. Ellen Burgess, was really just Dr. Benton if he were a petite Black woman, but Morgan was great as Dr. Burgess. The arc in which Dr. Burgess learns to improve her bedside manner and romances paraplegic surgical intern Matt Harmon (played by an actual paraplegic actor, Mitch Longley) was where I first learned about Black women’s hair issues in the workplace. Dr. Burgess wore a wig to work, but as she became a more compassionate doctor and supervisor, she transitioned from wigs to her natural hair.

I lost the Microsoft Word file that contained the Suds character bible a long time ago. There wasn’t a character based on Dr. Burgess, but there were a lot of characters based on the Quartermaines and the Scorpios. One of the only things I remember from my character bible is a note where I said, “The opening title sequence should be shot in a single take at a dinner party, and every time the camera pauses on a regular, that regular throws their drink in the face of the next regular.” The titles were supposed to end with the entire cast being hysterical and wet like Gene Wilder in The Producers. I wanted to take the premise of the 1991 John Candy movie Delirious—the head writer for a cheesy daytime soap wakes up in the universe of his own soap—and turn it into “Asian American guy who never sees himself represented in his girlfriend’s favorite daytime soap gets struck by lightning while trying to fix his rooftop TV antenna and wakes up in the universe of her soap.”

In the ’90s, daytime soaps were really, really white, were really, really, really, really white, especially behind the scenes. Val Jean and the late Judi Ann Mason, who co-wrote both “Ms. Understanding,” A Different World’s funny riff on the controversy surrounding the divisive 1989 book The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, were the only two Black writers in the Generations writers’ room. When the late St. John looked back on his run as Adam to Soap Opera Digest in 1996, he pointed to the lack of diversity behind the scenes of Generations as a factor that hurt the show.

“Generations was a great idea, but it was badly executed,” said St. John to the magazine. “There was no black [sic] influence behind the camera, and you can’t, in my opinion, do a show with a major black [sic] cast like that and not have a black [sic] writer, producer or director on board. You’re going to miss the culture, you’re going to miss the essence and the flavor.”

St. John’s comments remind me of the frustrations Jean Yoon and Simu Liu experienced as regulars on Kim’s Convenience, whose predominantly white writing staff was meaner than Mrs. Park, Mrs. Kim’s nemesis at the Korean church. When Yoon pointed out to that writing staff that her matriarch character’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis is highly unlikely in real life because Koreans hardly ever get MS, the staff’s response to her input was to ignore her. For some Kim’s Convenience viewers who are Korean, the worst offense by the crew of dipshits in the writers’ room was the show’s depiction of Nayoung, Jung and Janet’s red-haired, short-skirted cousin from South Korea. Those viewers complained that Nayoung was proof that none of the writers knew anybody from present-day South Korea. But for me, an Asian American viewer who’s not Korean, the staff’s worst offense was never allowing Yoon, who had some playwriting experience, and Indian Canadian semi-regular Sugith Varughese, a former Fraggle Rock staff writer, to become staff writers.

When a show with a predominantly non-white cast is controlled by a predominantly white writers’ room, the Caucacity that’s evident in some of the writing stinks up almost every episode. Aside from the catfight episode that Val Jean co-wrote and an MLK Day episode that took place during Chicago celebrations of Dr. King—and was better than the awkwardly written MLK Day episode the show did the following year—Generations is, like St. John pointed out, another example of that. The superior MLK Day episode, which I watched on YouTube earlier this week, was co-written by Mason, while all the writers who were listed at the end of the MLK Day episode I dislike, which I also watched earlier this week, were white, including the late Meg Bennett, the ex-actress wife of longtime General Hospital head writer Robert Guza Jr. Had there been a predominantly Black writing staff behind Generations, the soap wouldn’t have had that interminable and out-of-place arc where Kyle Masters, Sam’s cop boyfriend—played by Robert Torti, who looked like he was embroiled in a battle with Wiseguy star Ken Wahl over who could grow the longest Italian mullet in 1990—mourns the death of his cop ex-girlfriend’s husband, who was also a cop, to the tune of the Alan Parsons Project’s 1981 song “Time” and vows to find his killer. The arc is straight out of Blue Bloods. Reservation Dogs and Atlanta, two shows where not a single writer was white, never had this problem, and whenever Atlanta had an underwhelming episode—boy, there were a lot of them in that season in Europe—it was for different reasons.

However, one thing the predominantly white Generations writing staff did well was the dialogue for Ruth Marshall, Adam’s mom. You know the show is doing something right when Ruth’s most emotional dialogue during the secret paternity arc makes you say, “Damn.” If you’re a Gen X-er who remembers Joan Pringle as Sybil Buchanan, a Black vice principal and the skeptical foil to Coach Reeves’s untrained approach to education on The White Shadow, Ruth was a juicier role for Pringle. She got to do everything an actress who nabs Daytime Emmys for playing a lead matriarch gets to do, whether it was scorching the earth after being betrayed by her best friend—the 30-something Doreen, who had a secret baby with Adam—playing the complex emotions of experiencing such a betrayal, or hiding her own secret: Chantal Marshall, Ruth’s prosecutor daughter, is the product of a one-night stand between Ruth and the nightclub owner father of Sam, which means that Chantal is Sam’s half-sister. Unfortunately, barely anybody—outside of Generations fans who either discovered the soap overseas or first watched it on YouTube over 30 years after its run—saw Pringle doing her best work.

Despite a few casting coups—the late Richard Roundtree, a.k.a. Shaft, joined the cast as Dr. Reubens, Maya’s father, and that was followed by the show’s biggest recast, which had Morgan, immensely popular in the ’80s because of her run on All My Children as Angie Hubbard, half of daytime TV’s first Black supercouple, taking over the role of Chantal—Generations was canceled by NBC in 1991 and replaced with the Donahue-style A Closer Look with Faith Daniels. That talk show is most famous today for an episode where a 10-year-old RWNJ smugly complained about Batman Returns in front of a studio audience full of kids who wanted to take him to Crime Alley and pay Joe Chill to pop a cap in his ass. Daytime soaps usually take three to five years to coalesce creatively and build an audience. NBC said, “Nah, fuck that. Generations had two years to make an impact. Let’s pull the plug.”

Never mind that Santa Barbara—the soap that’s most famous for fridging a character by tipping over a giant letter “C” so that it fell on top of her, a scene American Dad! memorably referenced in its first season—struggled in the ratings against General Hospital and Guiding Light in its first three years. NBC took a chance on Santa Barbara before its ratings shot up in 1987 and it nabbed the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series three years in a row.

“GENERATIONS’s departure from NBC’s airwaves was the result of a combination of many factors: a poor time slot, a network in need of plugging up financial holes, and a faltering economy,” wrote Roberta Caploe in her 1991 Soap Opera Digest article “Ratings or Racism: Why Did Generations Fail?”

The soap Generations competed against was a giant: CBS’s second half of The Young and the Restless, the most-watched daytime soap during Generations’s run. Sussman’s show was toast from the start.

Sussman said to Caploe, “The key here is that when NBC put the show on, they didn’t give us a soap opera lead-in like DAYS OF OUR LIVES or ANOTHER WORLD. Even with attrition, we would have had a stronger sampling to begin with. So forget being opposite Y&R. The fact is, you need a soap opera lead-in and, in most of the country, our lead-in was news. Right off the bat, we weren’t able to deliver a high enough number.”

Beauchamp’s retrospective on Generations brought up that its low ratings were due to Black viewers’ lack of interest in NBC’s daytime lineup. Only 11% of Days of Our Lives’s viewers were Black, and only 21% of Generations’s were Black.

She added, “[Black historian] Gerald Horne told the L.A. Times that [the Black family on] Generations was a black [sic] family that wasn’t exactly relatable. ‘They either portray the extreme underclass or the very wealthy blacks,’ he said. ‘Most blacks are somewhere in between.’… Who knows what could have been if the show had more people of color writing, and longevity?”

BET reran Generations after its demise. I often flipped to BET to watch one of the following shows: Rap City, Video Soul with Donnie Simpson and Sherry Carter, Video LP with Madelyne Woods, or, because I was a 16-year-old boy with hormones, Caribbean Rhythms with Rachel Stuart, who often hosted the show in a bikini. Video LP is noteworthy these days because it was one of the only two shows in TV history that contained an original theme composed by Prince, whose smooth Video LP theme was an instrumental version of the tune that later became “Pheromone.” (The other show Prince contributed an original theme to was Tamron Hall’s afternoon news show when she was an MSNBC anchor.) The late, great Phife Dawg referenced Video LP when he said, “Hon, you got the goods like Madelyne Woods,” during “Electric Relaxation.” Woods and the other early ’90s BET VJs were more likable than most of the ones over on MTV at the time, but their shows always had ugly transition graphics straight out of The Gerry Todd Show from SCTV, and the shoddiness of things like those early ’80s Gerry Todd graphics was one of the many reasons why Aaron McGruder always loved to rip apart BET in the Boondocks comic strip. My visits to BET to see what music videos were surfacing on Video LP or Video Soul were how I first stumbled into the Generations opening titles.

The opening title theme Michael Gore, the late Lesley Gore’s composer brother, wrote for Generations was an instrumental I paused to listen to every time my remote landed on Generations on BET. It’s very late ’80s, right down to the saxophone solo, but its primary melody—it represents the intertwined history of the Marshalls and the Whitmores—is timeless and affecting in a Randy Newman Ragtime soundtrack kind of way.

My sister studied the piano, and the Generations theme is the type of instrumental her piano teacher would have trained her to play. (When I was a kid, my sister loved to play on the piano Angelo Badalamenti’s love theme from Joel Schumacher’s Cousins. My sister and I have always been film score nerds.) Gore’s Fame and Terms of Endearment themes were massive radio hits in the early ’80s, but my favorite Gore works are lesser-known ones: his score from Albert Brooks’s hilarious Defending Your Life—a flop during its 1991 release, but as Brooks said to Rolling Stone, he received thousands of letters from Defending Your Life fans who thanked him because the film, beautifully scored by Gore with great orchestrations by the late Shirley Walker, got them through a difficult time and presented “some possibility [regarding the afterlife] that doesn’t involve clouds and ghostly images”—and his Generations theme.

I wonder if Val Jean’s new creation on CBS will last longer than Generations. Beyond the Gates arrives at a time when the daytime TV audience is mostly old folks, and there are a lot less daytime soaps than there were when Generations was in production (Days of Our Lives, NBC’s last remaining daytime soap for 15 years, left NBC to become a Peacock original). However, it’s attached to the most-watched network in daytime TV instead of “a network in need of plugging up financial holes,” the powerful NAACP is co-producing it, and its arrival comes with a lot of fanfare: CBS Sunday Morning did a seven-minute behind-the-scenes segment on Beyond the Gates and its all-Black crew—from the production design department to the hair department—a couple of weeks ago.

“[These stories for daytime about Black families are important] because they haven’t been told before. Black people go through the same thing that white people go through. We get betrayed, we betray, we tell secrets, we keep secrets, we love, we hate. That’s the kind of mess that I really like to get into,” said Val Jean in the Sunday Morning segment.

St. John lamented that Generations wasn’t Black enough behind the scenes. I wonder how he would have reacted to seeing in that Sunday Morning segment the massive amount of Black folks who make up the crew behind Beyond the Gates.

In the meantime, Brisco—another ’90s show that was stuck in a poor time slot when it first aired and was Kelly Rutherford’s second post-Generations show after a stint as a sultry ’40s bartender on Homefront (ABC’s critically acclaimed nighttime soap about America after World War II)—will be a future Original TV Score Selection of the Week entry because Brisco and its Randy Edelman main title theme (repurposed by NBC as music for its Olympics coverage from 1996 to 2016) ruled. This leads me to today’s prompt: Which one- or two-season wonder are you proud to own on DVD or Blu-ray? (I’m glad I have in my physical media collection Police Squad!, Sledge Hammer!, Profit, Freaks and Geeks, Miracles, The Middleman, and Star Trek: Prodigy.) I used to keep kicking myself for never picking up Brisco’s only season on DVD, but now, that entire season is on Internet Archive, so I can relive every “anachronism” Brisco and Bowler encountered in the Wild West, from “rain baths” (now known today as showers) to “cow pies” (now known today as burgers).