TVSquad

As we've told you before, this is the 60th anniversary of the Emmy Awards. The September 21 show, telecast on ABC, will not only celebrate the Best Actresses and Best Dramas of the current prime time lineup, it will also celebrate the many stars and characters and shows of 10, 20, 40, 60 years ago.

ABC has created an ad that features a lot of those stars. A lot of the stars are easy to find and it's a no-brainer that they were included (Marge and Homer, Rod Serling, Dick Van Dyke, Stewie, the South Park guys, etc), but I'm happy to also see some people I didn't think would be in such an ad: Guy Williams as Zorro, Robert Culp from I Spy, Mike Connors from Mannix, Tim Daly from Wings, Wally Cox from Mr. Peepers, among others.

For the first time in a long time, something was different about the Daytime Emmys. No, it's not that they're on in primetime; that happened years ago. What was different was the 35th Daytime Emmys opted to forgo the theater setting and seat the stars at round tables. As co-host (with All My Children's Cameron Mathison) Sherri Shepherd told the AP days before the AP, "Usually everyone is sitting in a row. This year, it'll be like a wedding. We're also going to do something so that fans will be able to get a view of what's going on at the different tables." That would be web video created by the actors at every table - table cam. Perfect for hams. The vids are at SOAPnet. For details about the show from the winners backstage, check out AOL.

So did the seating arrangements make a difference? Well, it depends. Those who were there probably had a better time because there was an open bar, just like the Golden Globes. For viewers, it still looked like the Daytime Emmys, including many familiar faces winning. After a strained attempt at comedy for the opening -- blending All My Children fictional characters with The View's real hosts -- the show commenced.

Did you know that baseball players are big-time soap opera fans? It's true. All that time they spend hanging out in the clubhouse during the day, they have the soaps playing in the background. Not all, but a lot. That said, it'll be interesting to see if the same things that sell soaps -- the drama, the relationships, the never-ending stories -- work for ESPN in selling their Fantasy Baseball League. They're calling the series of commercials "Endless Drama."

If shows that are shown only once a week and have around 22 episodes a year are affected by the strike, then the soaps, which have new shows five days a week, 52 weeks a year must be even more affected, right? Right?

For some reason, not yet. The shows haven't divulged how many scripts they have stockpiled and how long they will last, but the soaps haven't gone into reruns, "classic episodes" or other programming yet. Most soaps have anywhere from six to a dozen a writers or more, and most of those writers are on the picket line. A few writers (though not all) on four of the soaps, CBS' The Young and the Restless and ABC's All My Children, One Life To Live, and General Hospital, have crossed the picket lines and returned to work on the show because of something called "financial core," which means financial need, another example of how I don't quite understand what's going on with this strike.

A roundup of TV people from in front of the camera and behind the scenes who have passed away.

• Mala Powers: She was probably best known for playing Roxanne in the 1950 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac, but she also made a ton of guest appearances on TV shows, including Murder, She Wrote, Perry Mason, Ironside, Charlie's Angels, Here Come The Brides, Bewitched, Mission: Impossible, The Wild, Wild West, Rawhide, Thriller, 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, and many more. She died of leukemia at age 76 in Santa Monica.

What made me think of this is the news that the Today Show is expanding to a fourth hour in September.

Yeah, that's exactly what's missing from my TV schedule: another hour of Today. Hey, let's add three more hours to Good Morning, America. Maybe The View can be an all-day thing, and ABC can show All My Children at 2 in the morning?

I haven't seen a minute of General Hospital in over 10 years. In the 80s when everyone was talking about how great this soap was, I was busy watching Guiding Light, which I guarantee you was a better show (even though I only saw a few episodes of General Hospital). But Stuart Damon is a fairly well-known actor, and it's interesting to see he's being let go from the show in February (click here if you want to see how his Alan Quartermaine character will vanish from the show).

Damon has been with the show since 1977 (!) but he's been acting in TV and movies for a really long time, way back to the mid-60s. He's been in episodes of The Saint, UFO, Thriller, Space: 1999, Mike Hammer, Fantasy Island, Diagnosis Murder, and Strong Medicine, as well as movies like Star 80, so I'm sure he won't be looking for work for long. I bet he shows up on another soap.

I have been watching Guiding Light for 26 years.

Now, I know that I'm a guy, but you really have to blame my mother for all this. When I was around 14 or 15, I would come home from school and want to watch television. My mom would be watching her "stories," which were All My Children, One Life To Live, and Guiding Light (it used to be on in the afternoon). She wouldn't let me watch anything, so I was stuck watching Guiding Light when I got out of school...and I became hooked. I became addicted to the show, and watched it all for years, through the Philip/Beth/Rick/Mindy saga, the devious schemes of Alan Spaulding and Roger Thorpe, that bizarre story with the infected mouse that killed a bunch of characters off, Quint and Nola, Ross and Josh turning from bad to heroes, and the more recent storylines like that whole Richard and Jeffrey island kingdom stuff and Harley and Gus and Jonathan.

Have you ever noticed that many TV characters don't say goodbye when they're done with a phone call? I find that this happens the most on action/adventure shows, where the evil boss or hero just doesn't have time to say goodbye, he just says something to the person on the other end and hangs up, and on soaps, where you'll see it happen almost every episode. I think writers and directors think it adds more drama to a scene. Personally I think it would be funny if the person the character was talking to would call back a minute later and say, "did you hang up or something?"

I'll often be watching a show and a character will just hang up the phone without saying goodbye and I'll make the joke in my head, "um, goodbye?"

This blogger agrees, and uses 24 as an example.

[via Metafilter]