The Edge of Night
| The Edge of Night | |
|---|---|
 The Edge of Night title card from 1956-67. | |
| Created by | Irving Vendig |
| Starring | Ann Flood Forrest Compton Joel Crothers Lois Kibbee Sharon Gabet |
| Country of origin |  United States |
| No. of episodes | 7420 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 30 Minutes |
| Original release | |
| Network | CBS (1956-1975) ABC (1975-1984) |
| Release | April 2, 1956 – December 28, 1984 |
The Edge of Night was a long-running American television soap opera. It was produced by Procter & Gamble and debuted on CBS on April 2 1956. It ran on that network until November 28 1975 and aired on ABC from December 1 1975 until December 28 1984. 7420 episodes were produced, with some 1800 available for syndication.
Format
Edge was the second of the two original half-hour soaps; As the World Turns also premiered in this format earlier the same day. These two programs were the last two American soap operas generally to be aired live, which they were into the 1970s and which also accounts why only about one-fourth of the episodes of The Edge of Night are available for syndication.
The last live episode aired just prior to its change of networks in 1975. The last CBS episode on November 28, 1975 ended with the discovery that Nicole Travis Drake was alive, after she was presumed dead in an explosion a year and a half earlier while on a boating trip with her husband Adam Drake. On December 1 1975, ABC aired a special 90-minute episode which picked up where the last CBS episode left off, with Geraldine Whitney still in a coma from an attempted murder by her daughter-in-law Tiffany's second husband Noel Douglas; Nicole, with the help of Geraldine's adopted "son" Kevin Jamison, remembered who she was after suffering from amnesia since the explosion; the final scene of that day's episode was an exciting climax in which Serena Faraday shot her husband on the steps of the courthouse.
The show was originally conceived as the daytime version of Perry Mason, which was popular in novel and radio formats at the time. Erle Stanley Gardner was to create and write the show, but a last-minute tiff between him and the network caused Gardner to pull his support from the idea. A writer from the Perry Mason radio show, Irving Vendig, created a retooled idea and the show as we know it was born. Crime fiction writer Henry Slesar, who had written extensively for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was story editor for the series for many years. Gardner would eventually patch up his differences with CBS and Perry Mason would debut in prime time the next year. Unlike Mason, whose adventures took place in Southern California, Monticello, the city of The Edge of Night, was somewhere in a generic state in the Midwest — a state so generic that its capital city was "Capital City". It was admitted that the city skyline seen in the opening credits until 1980 was that of Cincinnati, Ohio, where the show's sponsor, Procter & Gamble, was based. The Los Angeles skyline was used later.
The Edge of Night was unique among daytime soap operas in focusing on crime, rather than domestic and romantic matters. The police, district attorneys and medical examiners of fictional Monticello, USA, dealt with a steady onslaught of gangsters, drug dealers, blackmailers, cultists, international spies, corrupt politicians, psychopaths and murderous debutantes while coping with more usual soap opera problems such as courtship, marriage, divorce, child custody battles and amnesia. The show's particular focus on crime was recognized in 1980, when, in honor of its 25 years on the air, The Edge of Night was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
The series hired many stage performers. Among those who appeared on the show in the 1960s and early 1970s were Kay Campbell, Tony Roberts, Keith Charles, Milette Alexander, Larry Hagman, Lester Rawlings, Irene Dailey, Anne Revere, John Collum, Scott Glenn, Richard Thomas, James Mitchell, Barbara Berjer, Ernest Graves, Jane White, and Kate Wilkinson.
Among its stars on ABC were Tony Craig, Terry Davis, Frances Fisher, Joe Lambie, Lori Cardille, Denny Albee, Irving Allen Lee, John Driver, Ernest Townsend, Dan Hamilton, Lee Goodart, and Kiel Martin — who were helped by guest stars Kim Hunter, Alfred Drake, Frank Gorshin, and stage director Jerry Saks. Schuyler Whitney and his wife Raven (Sharon Gabet, who had replaced the late Juanin Clay) became private detectives and were the new hero and heroine of the show. Edge of Night also provided Dixie Carter with one of her first significant roles, as assistant district attorney Brandy Henderson, 1974 - 76.
Ratings
Through the 1960s, The Edge of Night was consistently one of the top six-rated soaps, alongside the rest of CBS' daytime lineup. It peaked at #2 and held a top four spot up until 1972.
The change in timeslot saw Edge's position fall to 10th, a position it held until 1975 when the show moved to ABC. The ratings decline continued and by the end of the 1970s, it was in the ratings basement, losing especially to NBC's The Doctors. Although it never recovered its lost ground, during the period from 1980 to 1982 it held down 10th-11th place and 5.0 in the ratings, putting it above Another World, Texas and The Doctors at that stage. However, from 1982, ratings would fall even further as more affiliates dropped the show altogether, largely due to its 4/3 p.m. timeslot, a popular one for stations to place more lucrative syndicated programming in, instead of network offerings.
Due to the show's crime format, and its late start time of 4:30 p.m. Eastern/3:30 Central Time (after schools let out for the day and after early work shifts ended), Edge had an audience which was estimated, at one time, to be more than 50% male. In 1964, the show was moved to the 3:30/2:30 p.m. time slot, which it dominated. When the show moved to 2:30/1:30 p.m. in 1972 at P&G's insistence, the show slid from a solid #2 in the Nielsen ratings to near the bottom of the pack, and it has been hypothesized that this drop was due to the exodus of many male viewers who could not make it home from work earlier in the afternoon to watch.
While CBS decided to cancel Edge in 1975, due both to the ratings slide, and because As the World Turns was expanding to an hour in length (thus necessitating the freeing up of a half hour of time in its afternoon schedule, since all its other daytime shows performed better than Edge), ABC, the only network at the time that did not have a Procter & Gamble property, picked the show up. CBS wanted to offer its affiliates a different half hour for local programming, but the affiliates protested it. CBS planned to have the hour long ATWT premiere in September 1975. However, ABC still had a contractual obligation to its some of its programs, meaning Edge would have had to take a two-month hiatus, something P&G desperately did not want to happen. Therefore, P&G made a deal with both networks, for CBS to postpone the ATWT expansion and ABC to begin airing Edge immediately after departing CBS in late November.
Despite ABC's decision to move Edge back to a late afternoon time slot (4/3 p.m.) when it debuted on the network on December 1, 1975, the serial never recovered from its steep drop, and stayed close to the bottom until its cancellation. As the show moved into the 1980s, more and more ABC affiliates either moved Edge to morning or late-night timeslots or chose not to air the show at all, causing the show's sponsor to lose more money with each passing year. The disastrous hiring of Lee Sheldon as headwriter and an announcement that many ABC affiliates would drop The Edge of Night starting the week of January 7, 1985 caused P&G to pull the plug as a pre-emptive strike, despite the network's desire to keep the show going. After Edge ended its 28-year run on December 28, 1984, ABC returned the 4/3 p.m. timeslot to its affiliates, something NBC did back in 1979 and CBS finally did in 1986.
Plot
For the show's entire duration, the stories either revolved around or had much to do with Monticello lawyer Mike Karr. As the show began, Mike Karr's relationship with his secretary Sarah Lane essentially reproduced the radio serial's Perry Mason/Della Street relationship. The added complication for Mike Karr was that Sarah Lane's family was involved in organized crime; her younger brother was slowly being drawn into the criminal world in the early years of the show. Nevertheless, Mike and Sarah eventually married. Their happiness was shortlived, however, when Sarah was written out of the show as being killed as she saved the life of their daughter Laurie Ann, who had run into the street into the path of an automobile. By the 1960s, Laurie Ann was a teenager, supplying many plots for the show, and a young wife and mother by the 1970s.
Mike later married Nancy Pollock who was a journalist and helped in many of his cases. Other important characters were Police Chief Bill Marceau, who was one of Karr's best friends and with whom was shared a tremendous mutual respect, rare between a defense attorney and a chief of police, Marceau's wife Martha, who battled alcoholism, fellow lawyer Adam Drake, television personality Nicole Travis, and wealthy socialite Geraldine Whitney, whose fall down a flight of stairs (which put her into a coma for several months) provided one of the show's more memorable mysteries.
Nicole had the most interesting history, as she was married to Adam Drake, feared dead in a boating accident, came back to life, and when her marriage to Adam was finished for good, the character was replaced with a new actress and was subsequently de-aged a decade, a rarity for an adult character in the genre. Now younger and more vibrant, Nicole was suitable for a relationship with young doctor Miles Cavanaugh. She was eventually killed off when her makeup powder was poisoned.
Another important relationship was that between Nancy and her younger sister Cookie, who was married first to Malcom Thomas and later to Ron Christopher, whose dealings with loan sharks affected Mike's good friends Louise and Philip Capice. In the show's later years, the Karrs' beautiful daughter Laurie Ann, by now a young adult, was an important character. Her relationship with Jonah Lockwood, a cult leader very much in the style of Charles Manson, almost cost her her life, but he was revealed to be an alternate persona of Keith Whitney, scion of the weatlhy Whitney family, nemesis of the Karrs and Marceau! One of the later major story arcs was about a train wreck and a prisoner who had been unjustly convicted escaping from it, much in the style of Richard Kimble of The Fugitive.
Surviving episodes
In addition to the 1,800 episodes available for syndication, a handful of CBS episodes from the 1950s and 1960s also survive, some in kinescope form, others in film and television archives in their original videotape format. Some classic episodes have been seen on The World of Soap Themes web site.
The 1989 Oscar-winning film Driving Miss Daisy contains a clip from a 1960s classic episode which dealt with the aftermath of the murder of the character Victor Carlson.
In the late 1980s, reruns of Edge aired in a nightly late-night timeslot on cable's USA Network, most episodes of which were from the early-1980s timeframe from ABC.
In 2006, Procter & Gamble began making several of its soaps available, a few episodes at a time, through AOL Video Service, downloadable free of charge. Reruns of The Edge of Night began from the middle of 1979.
External links
- Soap operas
- CBS network shows
- ABC network shows
- 1956 television program debuts
- 1984 television program cancellations
- 1950s American television series
- 1960s American television series
- 1970s American television series
- 1980s American television series
- Television series by Procter & Gamble Productions
- USA Network shows
- Edgar Award winning works