Created in 1937 by Irna Phillips, The Guiding Light ran successfully for fifteen years on the CBS radio network, detailing the lives and loves of Reverend Rutledge and his daughter, Mary. The show’s title came from the Friendship Lamp Reverend Rutledge left in his window as a sign to his parishoners that his doorstep was open for advice and counsel. By the late forties, though, the reverend and his daughter gave way to the Baum family, renamed the Bauers, who would go on to become the show’s main core family for decades to come.
One of the controversial stories involving the Bauers was that of Meta, eldest daughter of Papa Frederick Bauer, a German emigre. Meta got involved with a wealthy man, bore his child, gave it up for adoption, then sought custody of her young son years later by marrying his father. The marriage was an unhappy one, leading Meta to shoot and kill husband Ted White, whom she blamed for the death of their only child. Meta was tried for murder. In a marketing move, the show’s producers asked the fans to decide Meta’s fate: the jury ruled her not guilty. Meta went on to marry Joe Roberts, the reporter who covered her case, and to become the stepmother of Joe’s children, Kathy and Joey. By the time the show went to the television, Kathy Roberts’ romantic tribulations were the source of the show’s drama. Kathy was likewise tried for the accidental death of her secret husband. Her fiancee, then played by Inside the Actor’s Studio’s host James Lipton, broke off their engagement when he learned of Kathy’s duplicity.
Though the transition to television was successful, The Guiding Light continued to be broadcast on radio for a number years. The cast had to race down the street from the CBS television studio, where they shot the live broadcast, to the radio station where they broadcast the same program later that day. By the mid-fifties, the radio broadcast of The Guiding Light was canceled, but the television version continued.
The show’s location was originally set in Five Points, a suburb in Chicago, but over the years that changed to Selby Flats, a suburb in Los Angeles, then again to Springfield, a small town in Illinois. Though the show was shot in black and white, it did broadcast one episode in the new color technology. But creater Irna Phillips, who ruled the show with an iron thumb, fought against this development. Making certain that the day’s episode was shot on the white hospital set and that all the actors wore white, thus blanching out the color on the TV screen, she convinced the studio executives to nix the idea of shooting in color. By the mid-fifties, Phillips left headwriting duties at The Guiding Light to helm her other creation As the World Turns. One of her many protegees, legendary headwriter Agnes Nixon, took over in 1958. Nixon brought social commentary to the show, scripting one of The Guiding Light’s most celebrated stories in which Bert undergoes surgery for cancer.
During the sixties, when the civil rights movement was at its height, Nixon cast one of the first African American actors in contract roles. Billy Dee Williams and Ruby Dee played Dr. Jim and Martha Frazier. They were later replaced by James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. The show’s main focus remained with the Bauer family, though, telling the lives and loves of second generation Bauers, Mike and Ed, sons of Bill and Bert Bauer.
By the late sixties, the show expanded to a half-hour to meet with programming challenges. During the 1970s, “Bauer Power,” coined by then executive producer Lucy Rittenberg, took on even greater meaning as the premiere family weathered the changing times. At the start of the decade, Papa Bauer’s protrayer, Theo Goetz, passed away. The character likewise was killed off, thus making Bert Bauer the matriarch of the show. Papa Bauer’s death wasn’t the only one the Bauer family faced as Bill Bauer was killed in a plane accident. He would later be brought back to life, living in Canada with his commonlaw wife and daughter, Hilary. Marital discord dominated the majority of stories on the show as alcoholic Ed Bauer lost his wife, Leslie, to his brother, Mike, but not before she married Stan Norris, a domineering businessman, whose family-ex-wife Barbara and children, Ken, Andy, and Holly-would go on to dominate the stories during this period. After Ed loses Leslie and gets involved in various disastrous relationships, all the while struggling to deal with his alcoholism, he marries Holly while drunk. His marriage to the young and neurotic Holly created three decades-worth of stories as Holly is drawn between good guy Ed and her villainous lover, Roger Thorpe. The triangle culminates in the birth of Roger and Holly’s daughter, Chrissy, an eventual marriage between the two and the infamous rape. By the end of the 1970s, the dastardly Roger had fallen off a cliff, while Ed struggled to work on his rocky marriage to the equally neurotic and troubled Rita Stapleton, who would go on to have a number of affairs, including Roger and businessman Alan Spaulding.
In 1977, Guiding Light expanded to an hour and dropped the “The” from its title to make it hipper for younger audiences. Added to the cast to fill the extra half-hour were the Spauldings, a wealthy industrial family headed by the mercurial and domineering Alan. Alan’s wife, Elizabeth, and his son Phillip created a roundelay of stories that also involved Mike Bauer, who had fallen in love with Alan’s fragile and long-suffering wife, and Dr. Justin Marler and his ex-wife Jackie, who was Phillip’s biological mother. Each of these characters either hid or eventually learned of Phillip’s true parentage, creating more stories and drama for the show.
When the eighties came along, Guiding Light won an Emmy for Best Daytime Drama, a recognition that was justly earned through the talents of writer Douglas Marland, who took over headwriting duties in 1980. Marland scripted Roger’s downfall and created the Reardon family, who would go on to become as beloved a family on the show as the Bauers. One of the Reardons, Nola, began on the show as a vixen who tried to come between the show’s young lovers, Kelly and Morgan. Nola eventually faced comeuppance for her machinations, then underwent a stunning metamorphosis when she fell in love with the mysterious and enigmatic anthropologist, Quinton McCord. Quint and Nola became a supercouple on the show that was rivaled in popularity only by General Hospital’s Luke and Laura. During Marland’s tenure, the show focused on young love, corporate intrigue, adventure, mystery, and gothic romance. By 1982, Guiding Light’s opening featured disco music over scenes of the show’s more exciting, thrilling, and sexier scenes.
By the mid-eighties though, Marland had a falling out with then executive producer Allen Potter, when Marland wanted to play out the multiple personality story he had scripted for actress Jane Elliot (Carrie Marler). After the show went through a few headwriters, it finally settled on actress Pamela K. Long, who previously acted on and written for the defunct NBC soap Texas. Long brought glamor and a heightened sense of romance to Guiding Light. She concentrated on the Lewis family, who were previously created by Marland though kept largely off-screen, and created Reva Shayne as one half of the popular supercouple Josh and Reva. Though the couple had an extensive backstory, much of it was never seen on the show, yet has become as much a part of the show’s history as what was seen on-screen. While the Lewises and the Spauldings, with the young love stories of Phillip and Beth and later Lujack and Beth, took center stage, the Bauers were slowly phased out of the show. Mike Bauer was written off the show, while sister Hilary was killed off. Actress Charita Bauer, who played Bert the longest on the show, passed away in 1985, thus effectively ending a long and cherished Guiding Light history. Longterm fans hated the focus away from the show’s signature family, but newer fans fell in love with Long’s heightened romanticism and became ardent fans of couples Josh and Reva, Phillip and Beth, Billy and Vanessa, and Tony and Annabelle.
Though the show stumbled through the mid-eighties with outlandish and implausible storylines (i.e., The Dreaming Death and Infinity storylines), the show returned to its roots by the late eighties, focusing stories on mystery, romance, and familial and corporate relationships. In 1990 and 1991, Guiding Light lost several signature actors, Kim Zimmer (Reva Shayne), Grant Aleksander (Phillip Spaulding), Michael O’Leary (Rick Bauer), Beth Chamberlin (Beth Raines Spaulding), Robert Newman (Josh Lewis), and earlier in 1998 had lost actor Chris Bernau (Alan Spaulding) who passed away. But these losses forced the show’s writers to focus on characters who had otherwise been ignored in the past, creating an ensemble that was unenviable of any daytime soap opera. With the return of Michael Zaslow and Maureen Garrett (Roger Thorpe and Holly Lindsey), Guiding Light became a powerhouse, with stories focused on neurotic relationships, divorce, starcrossed loves, infidelity, and corporate intrigue. A new family, The Coopers, comprising of brother/sister Harley and Frank, joined the cast, bringing a blue-collar presence to the primarily wealth and upper-middle class denizens of Springfield. The show also brought on actors Vince Williams (Hampton Speakes), Amelia Marshall (Gilly Grant), Nia Long (Kat Speakes), and Monti Sharp (David Grant), creating a strong Black presense on the show.
By the mid-nineties, Guiding Light distinguished itself with the return of Zimmer, who, along with Newman, and newcomer Cynthia Watros (Annie Dutton), creating some of the more memorable moments on the show during this period with the Josh/Reva/Annie triangle. But the soap by 1994, no doubt influenced by ratings champ Days Of Our Lives, had turned to more fantastic and outlandish storylines, often to the detriment of the naturalism and authenticity Phillips brought to The Guiding Light. Zimmer returned as a ghost on the show, only to wake up in the middle of Amish country. Later, her “missing years” were revised to include a stint as a princess on a Caribbean isle. Vixen Blake Thorpe Marler gave birth to twins, each one ostensibly fathered by two different men, though the show would reverse this decision by making Blake’s husband, Ross Marler, the father of both twins. These stories became the slippery-slope which allowed later writers to pen stories in which Reva was cloned and in which she jumped through paintings to travel to the past. By decades’ end, the show was forced into a strange form of compartmentalization as the soap’s setting was splintered between Springfield and San Cristobel, the isle where Reva was once a princess and many of the show’s intrigues took place. Added to this mix was a new family, the Cuban Santos, a mafia clan whose leader, Danny, fell in love with the stalwart Bauer daughter, Michelle, a story no doubt inspired by HBO’s Sopranos which premiered around the same time. While some fans loved the show’s focus on the romantic love stories of Danny and Michelle and Prince Richard and Cassie, Reva’s sister, many fans tolerated these stories or outright hated them because they ignored the show’s premiere characters, history, identity as a character-driven, family-based drama.
As ratings began to dwindle during this period, all soaps were looking for stories that were ratings-grabbers. Then head of CBS daytime Mary Alice Dwyer Dobbin was forceful proponent for this new direction of Guiding Light, often using focus groups, fan polls and 1-800 numbers to elicit interest in the show’s fans. But the focus on fan-based storytelling, which appealed to narrow subsets of the show’s fans but often alienated general fans, and a turn toward capturing youthful demographics, not to mention the importance of the internet to fan bases, created a splintering of the show’s identity from which it has never recovered. Dwyer Dobbin, notorious among fans for her rigid micromanagement of both Guiding Light and As the World Turns, earned the acronym M.A.D.D. from fans. This became even more true when actor Michael Zaslow was stricken with A.L.S. and was let go from the show. At the time, Dwyer Dobbin explained her letting Zaslow go by stating that the show needed Roger to be a sexy villain and not a “wizened old man.” Guiding Light fans were outraged and demanded that Dwyer Dobbins be fired. They were equally upset when Fiona Hutchinson (Jenna Bradshaw) was allegedly punished for defending Zaslow in the press. Hutchinson was fired from the show and her character killed off.
By the millenium, the Bauer family, who had become so identified with the show, was completely decimated. Actor Peter Simon, who had played Dr. Ed Bauer, had left the show several years later, leaving only Rick and Michelle to represent the Bauers. But Michelle’s romance pulled her more in the direction of the Santos family. The stories now focused mainly on the Coopers, the Spauldings, and the Lewises. During this period, the headwriting duties had been a revolving door of writers who each brought their own style and vision to the show. But this created a schism that took the show further away from Phillips’ original vision. In 2002, Millee Taggart took over as headwriter and tried to bring Guiding Light back to its roots, much to the cheers of the show’s fans. Simon was brought to the show and given a promising romance with veteran Garrett (Holly), while Reva Lewis, after suffering through one bad storyline after the next, was given a meaty scene-chewer in which she pulls the plug on Prince Richard’s life machine. But by years end, Taggart was out after Paul Rauch (Another World) took over executive producing duties, and was replaced by Ellen Weston as headwriter.
While Rauch made Guiding Light more visually attractive, Weston’s writing style left much to be desired. The show was written with a schizophrenic nature in which stories started and were dropped or completely revised the show’s history, such as the Carrie Carruthers story that posited five of the show’s veteran males knew each other as young men, though nothing on the show’s history could bear this out. Popular veteran actresses Maureen Garrett and Liz Kiefer (Holly and Blake) were dropped to recurring, while actor Bradley Cole, who played Prince Richard of San Cristobel, was brought back to the show after his character was killed off the year before. While Cole’s fans fell in love with his new character, Jeffrey O’Neill, many of the show’s regular fans despised the character. Online fans began calling him the derogatory “Empty Sack” to express their distaste for his character. Meanwhile, longtime fan favorite Ben Reade, a character who grew up on the show, was inexplicably made into a serial killer and summarily killed off. Reva Lewis developed psychic abilities which, through the entire year of Weston’s reign, went around in circles until finding its purpose in the ghostly Carruthers storyline. The indomitable grande dame Alexandra Spaulding was turned into a drug dealer, though for no real discernible reason other than it fit with Weston’s incomprehensible plotline. Other longtime fan favorites were shoved so far on the backburner that actors would not be seen or heard from for months on end while Rauch focused the majority of stories on his favorites, Richard O’Neill and Eden Aitoro.
Just when Guiding Light fans were about to throw in the towel, Rauch was dropped as executive producer. He was replaced by Emmy-winning actress Ellen Wheeler, who brought on the young and untried headwriter David Kreizman. Both Wheeler and Kreizman promised to bring Guiding Light back to its roots and focus on family, romance, and mystery. The early plot ideas sounded promising. During the beginning of Wheeler’s tenure, she focused on bringing shape and focus to many of Weston’s stories, including Phillip Spaulding’s stay in a mental institution, which, under Weston, seemed to go nowhere. It seemed the show was headed for a “War of the Roses” storyline with Spaulding and wife Olivia. Meanwhile, the drug storyline, which had also seemed to go in circles, was wrapping up. But by the end of summer, fans got a taste of things to come when Aleksander, who had played Phillip off-and-on for over twenty years, was fired. The character was later killed off for a meandering murder mystery that placed Harley Cooper and boyfriend Gus Aitoro front and center, while again ignoring many other long term characters. The show finally addressed the death of Zaslow, when Roger Thorpe was killed off. Wheeler brought on character actor Doug Hutchinson to flesh out the story as Thorpe’s long lost son, but again, the story meandered and eventually petered out when Hutchinson left the show a year later. Stories began in starts and fits or were dropped altogether, while other stories were dragged out ad nauseum. When the show’s ratings continued to plummet, CBS slashed its budget, forcing Wheeler to drop many of the show’s cast members down to recurring or fire them outright. The budget cuts were immediately noticable in the show’s production values. The scenes were shot practically in the dark and the sets were whittled down to one or two after the show moved its production to the much smaller CBS studio.
During this period, Kreizman’s stories turned darker and more cynical, a complete departure from Phillips’ original vision of the show. One of the more popular couples he created, Jonathan and Tammy, began as a revenge tale in which Jonathan slept with the naive and unsuspecting Tammy, his cousin, to get back at his mother, Reva, then tortured her over the fact for several months later until he decided he was in love with her. Villain Edmund Winslow, in an effort to hold onto wife Cassie, who was being drawn back into a relationship with Richard-look-alike Jeffrey O’Neill, used murderess and Cassie rival Dinah Marler as a surrogate mother so he and Cassie can have a child. When Dinah lost the baby (off-screen, which was an increasingly annoying tactic of Kreizman’s), Edmund decided to steal Michelle Bauer’s child with Danny Santos. By 2005, along with longtime veteran Jerry Ver Dorn, who was dropped to recurring and left the show for greener pastures at One Life to Live, actors David Andrew MacDonald (Edmund), Nancy St. Albans (Michelle), and Paul Anthony Stewart (Danny) were gone. Actress Laura Wright (Cassie) rejected a new contract offer and joined the cast of General Hospital as a recast Carly Benson. Actress Nicole Forester was recast in the role of Cassie. NuCassie would go on to form the show’s most controversial storylines in which Cassie began an affair with brother-in-law Josh while her sister was dying from cancer. What made the story controversial in the minds of Josh and Reva fans was that neither Josh nor Cassie were written to be troubled or apologetic about their actions, while Reva, who hid her cancer, has. Another controversial story that has many fans up in arms is the blossoming romance between Olivia Spencer and Jeffrey O’Neill. The show has already established a backstory between the two in which O’Neill raped a teenaged Olivia years ago.
While some fans are enjoying the Josh and Cassie and Olivia and Jeffrey storylines, many do not, as now reflected in the show’s ratings. As of late, Guiding Light has posted some of its lowest ratings (two weeks straight the show earned a 1.8 and 1.9 in weekly ratings).
Though Guiding Light’s glory days are long behind it, the show continues to chug along. Today, Guiding Light is the longest running drama in television history. This year it turned seventy years old. Recently, it won Emmys for Best Writing and shared a Best Drama award with the Young and the Restless. Many online fans decried these recent wins, fearing that this will only validate the production and writing choices of both Wheeler and Kreizman.
Regardless of what state Guiding Light is currently in, Guiding Light is an institution that is deserving of its recognition.
