Love is a Many Splendored Thing
| U.S. soap operas |
| Currently on the air: |
| All My Children |
| As the World Turns |
| The Bold and the Beautiful |
| Days of Our Lives |
| General Hospital |
| Guiding Light |
| One Life to Live |
| Passions |
| The Young and the Restless |
| Important cancelled soaps: |
| Port Charles (cancelled 2003) |
| Another World (1999) |
| The City (1997) |
| Loving (1995) |
| Santa Barbara (1993) |
| Dallas (1991) |
| Generations (1991) |
| Dynasty (1989) |
| Ryan's Hope (1989) |
| Capitol (1987) |
| Search for Tomorrow (1986) |
| The Edge of Night (1984) |
| The Doctors (1982) |
| Love of Life (1980) |
| The Secret Storm (1974) |
| Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1973) |
| Dark Shadows (1971) |
| Peyton Place (1969) |
| Edit this box (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:AmericanSoaps&action=edit) |
Love is a Many Splendored Thing was a soap opera which aired on CBS from September 18, 1967 to March 23, 1973. The show was a spin off from the original 1955 20th Century Fox movie. The title of the show was sans the hyphen used in the movie's title.
Soap writer and creator Irna Phillips was hired to adapt the movie for television, picking up the story some years after the end of the film. When the network censors balked at an interracial love story between a white man, Paul Bradley (and later, Dr. Jim Abbott) and an Amerasian woman (Mia Elliott, the daughter of Korean War veteran Mark Elliott and Dr. Han Suyin, and born out of their love affair from the original movie), Phillips quit the show. The controversial story was dropped and the show focused on lives and loves in San Francisco. The opening sequence of the show, in fact, was the title of the show superimposed over a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, with a slightly reworked organ music rendition of the movie's signature hit.
This is not to say that the serial did not court controversy after Phillips' departure. One of the characters, Sister Laura Donnelly (played by Donna Mills), tried to fight off carnal desires she had for a man, a move that proved to be very controversial and ended up necessitating the woman to leave the church due to this conflict.
Stars of the show included Donna Mills, Beverlee McKinsey, Michael Zaslow, and Leslie Charleson. In the beginning, the star of the show was Nancy Hsueh, but since her character was deemed too controversial, she was phased out gradually.
When Love is a Many Splendored Thing was canceled in early 1973 to make room on the schedule for The Young and the Restless, the writers of the serial did something rare for the genre: all of the ongoing storylines were wrapped up and resolved in the final episodes.
Only a handful of episodes of the serial are said to still exist, albeit in kinescope form. In August 2004, the website The World of Soap Themes, which has been dedicated to showing classic daytime material which, for the most part, has not been seen in decades, uploaded one of the Love is a Many Splendored Thing episodes known to survive; the episode first aired in April 1970. Another 1970 episode was added in November 2004.
External link
- Love is a Many Splendored Thing multimedia (http://www.wost.org/400.html)
- The April 1970 episode, from WoST (http://www.wost.org/bonus3.html)
- The second 1970 episode, from WoST (http://www.wost.org/bonus29.html)