The Edge of Night (or known informally as
Edge or
EON, by fans) was a long-running American
television mystery series/
soap opera
produced by
Procter &
Gamble. It debuted on
CBS on April 2, 1956,
and ran on that network until November 28, 1975; the series then
moved to
ABC, where it
aired from December 1, 1975, until December 28, 1984. There were
7,420 episodes, with some 1,800 available for
syndication.
Format
The Edge of Night (the working title of the show was
The Edge of Darkness) premiered on April 2, 1956 as one of
the first two half-hour soaps on television—the other being
As The World Turns
(fifteen-minute-long shows had been the standard to that point).
Both shows were aired on CBS and sponsored by
Procter and Gamble.
The show was originally conceived as the daytime version of
Perry Mason, which was
popular in
novel and
radio formats at the time. Mason's creator
Erle Stanley Gardner was to create and
write the show, but a last-minute tiff between him and the CBS
network caused Gardner to pull his support from the idea.
CBS insisted that Mason be given a love interest to
placate daytime soap opera audiences, but Gardner flatly refused to
take Mason in that direction. Gardner would eventually patch up his
differences with CBS and
Perry Mason would debut in
prime time in 1957.
It was in 1956, however, that a writer from the
Perry
Mason radio show,
Irving Vendig,
created a retooled idea for daytime—and
The Edge of Night
was born. "John Larkin, radio's best identified Perry Mason, was
cast as the protagonist-star, initially as a detective, eventually
as an attorney, in a thinly veiled copy of (
Perry
Mason)."
Unlike
Perry Mason,
which took place in
Southern
California, the daytime series was set in the fictional
Midwestern city of Monticello.
This setting was presumably modeled after
Cincinnati
, home base of sponsor Procter and Gamble, whose skyline served
as the show's logo until 1980. A frequent backdrop for the
show's early scenes was a restaurant called the Ho-Hi-Ho. The state
capital, however, was known generically as "Capital City."
In later
years, the jazzier Los Angeles skyline replaced that of Cincinnati. (according to the website, The Edge of
Night Homepage, the city of Monticello had grown from an average
sized city to the size of a major metropolitan area) The skyline
was eventually eliminated in the final two years of the show, as
was the word, "the". The title was then called "Edge of Night" for
the final years of the show.
During most of the show's run, the show's fans were treated to an
announcer enthusiastically and energetically announcing the show's
title,
"Theee Eeeeeeeedge...of Night!". Bob Dixon was the
first announcer in 1956, followed by Herbert Duncan. The two voices
most synonymous with the show, however, were those of Harry Kramer
(1957-'72) and Hal Simms who announced the show until the series
ended in 1984.
The Edge of Night played on more artistic levels than
probably any other soap of its time. It was unique among daytime
soap operas in that it focused 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. It also must be stated that
Edge had stronger
and more believable male characters than most soaps, and included
genuine humor in its scripts to balance the heaviness of the
storylines.
Finally, while most soaps centered on extended families or large
hospitals that tended to be insular in their scope,
Edge
was probably the only daytime serial to truly capture the dynamics
of a medium-sized city. Indeed, the city of Monticello—for all of
its longtime friendships, age-old family vendettas, and insidiously
cut-throat DA's and bad cops in the proverbial pockets of
white-collar mobsters—was as vital a "character" as any human being
depicted on the show.
Cast
The show's protagonist was Mike Karr. A tireless crime-fighter,
Karr was introduced as a cop who was finishing law school. This
character evolved from the earlier
Perry Mason character on radio. He then
progressed to the District Attorney's office as an ADA, hung his
own shingle as a defense attorney for several years, then became DA
of Monticello. Karr was played by three stellar actors:
John Larkin, (radio's
Perry Mason), from 1956 to 1962,
Laurence Hugo from 1962 to 1970, then
Forrest Compton from 1971 to the end of the
series.
The series hired many revered stage performers. Among those who
appeared on the show in the 1960s and early 1970s were
Kay Campbell,
Tony
Roberts,
Keith Charles,
Millette Alexander (who was
unique in that she played three different characters; that of Gail
Armstrong; Laura Hillyer and Julie Jamison),
Larry Hagman,
Bill
Macy,
Lester Rawlins,
Irene Dailey,
Alice
Hirson,
Anne Revere,
John Cullum,
Scott
Glenn,
Richard Thomas,
James Mitchell,
Barbara Berjer,
Bernard Barrow,
Mari
Gorman;
Dan Resin,
Ernest Graves,
Jane
White and
Kate Wilkinson.
Among its stars on ABC were
Tony Craig,
Terry Davis,
Frances Fisher,
Joel
Crothers,
Dennis Parker,
Charles Flohe,
Lori
Loughlin,
Leah Ayres,
Irving Allen Lee,
Denny Albee,
Lori
Cardille,
Stephanie Braxton,
Mariann Aalda,
David Froman,
Lee
Godart,
Holland Taylor,
Marcia Cross, and
Kiel
Martin — who were helped by guest stars
Kim Hunter,
Farley
Granger,
Alfred Drake,
Frank Gorshin,
Amanda
Blake and stage director
Jerry Zaks.
Schuyler Whitney (
Larkin Malloy) and
his indefatigable wife Raven (
Sharon
Gabet) became private detectives and were the new hero and
heroine of the show.
The Edge of Night also provided
Dixie Carter with one of her first
significant TV roles, playing strong-willed assistant district
attorney Brandy Henderson from 1974-1976. (She was with the show
when it moved from CBS to ABC) Also, actress
Dorothy Lyman played the memorably evil Elly
Jo Jamison in the early 1970s.
Storylines
For the show's entire duration, the stories either revolved around
or had much to do with Monticello lawyer (and former Monticello
police officer) Mike Karr. As the show began, Mike Karr's
relationship with Sara Lane (Teal Ames) essentially reproduced the
radio serial's Perry Mason/Della Street relationship. The added
complication for Mike Karr was that Sara's family was involved in
organized crime; her younger brother (Don Hastings) slowly being
drawn into the criminal world in the early years of the show
through corrupt uncle Harry Lane (Lauren Gilbert). Nevertheless,
Mike and Sara eventually married. Their happiness was short-lived,
however, when Sara 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 (
Ann
Flood) who was a
journalist and
helped in many of his cases. Other important characters were
Police Chief Bill Marceau (Mandel
Kramer), 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 (perhaps due to the
fact that Mike had once been a police officer himself), Marceau's
secretary (and later on wife) Martha (Teri Keane), fellow lawyer
Adam Drake (
Donald May), his client (and
later on, his wife)
television
personality Nicole Travis (
Maeve
McGuire;
Jayne Bentzen; Lisa
Sloan), and wealthy socialite Geraldine Whitney (
Lois Kibbee), 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. Nancy had two siblings: Lee, who
eventually married Geri McGrath, and Elaine nicknamed
"Cookie."
Nicole Travis Drake has had a most interesting and bizarre history.
An early storyline had her victimized by two different women who
wanted her dead. She romanced and later married Adam Drake, who was
later feared dead in a boating accident but came back to life. Her
subsequent marriage to Adam was finished for good after Adam was
murdered. And in one of the foremost startling moments in this
television serial's history, 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
sociopath, almost cost her
her life, but he was revealed to be an alternate persona of Keith
Whitney, scion of the wealthy Whitney family, nemesis of the Karrs
and Marceau! One of the later major story arcs was about a train
wreck and a prisoner, Draper Scott, who had been unjustly convicted
of murder, escaping from the train accident, much in the style of
Richard Kimble of
The Fugitive. Although in
Draper's case, he also had amnesia, for quite a few months! There
was also an interesting storyline in the mid-1970s involving a
troubled woman (Adam's cousin, Serena Faraday) who would change her
personality as she donned a frizzy, black wig in perhaps a nod to
One Life to Live's popular
Victoria Lord/
Niki Smith storyline.
Near the end of the series run, came an unusual story where Mike
and Nancy, after having slept in twin beds for nearly their whole
married life, finally decided to "go all out, and buy a double
bed", thereby retiring their twin beds for good and all. It was one
of the more unusual moments of the show.
Broadcast history
See:
Ratings:
1956-1984
Unlike most soap operas which build a solid audience slowly over
many years,
The Edge of Night was an instant hit with
daytime viewers, amassing an audience of nine million its first
year, in some respects because the public did in fact perceive it
as a daytime
Perry Mason, as the producers had intended.
Through the 1960s, the show continued to flourish, consistently
ranking as one of the top six rated soap operas, alongside the rest
of CBS' daytime lineup. It peaked at #2 (behind
As the World
Turns) in the 1966–1967 season and came in at #2 between 1969
and 1971.
Due to the show's crime format, and its late start time of 4:30 PM
(3:30 Central),
Edge had an audience which was estimated,
at one time, to be more than 50% male. In July 1963, the show was
moved to the 3:30/2:30 time period (the 4:30/3:30 slot was given
back to the affiliates), which it dominated, even over
otherwise-hit programs like NBC's
You
Don't Say and ABC's
Dark
Shadows and
One Life to
Live. When the show moved to 2:30 PM (1:30 Central) in
1972 at
Procter and Gamble'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 and teenagers who could not make it
home from work or school earlier in the afternoon to watch. (This
would also not be the only time that P&G's insistence on a
certain timeslot for one of their soap operas would cause a
catastrophic drop in ratings, with the same problem plaguing the
long-running
Search for
Tomorrow a decade later.)
By Summer 1975, CBS prepared to make its first-ever expansion of a
serial to 60 minutes daily, in response to NBC's lengthening of
both
Another
World and
Days of our
Lives some months earlier. Not surprisingly, daytime
executives chose the ratings-leading
As the World Turns, which faced
Days directly at 1:30/12:30. Since the network's
affiliates would not cede the 1:00/Noon access slot (or allow it to
be moved to an earlier time) because they usually aired newscasts
there, and affiliates also would pre-empt
Edge if it
returned to 4:30/3:30, CBS had no vacant time slot to expand into,
meaning the network had to cancel an existing show.
Switch to ABC (1975)
Edge's audience, meanwhile, had eroded so much that it
became CBS' lowest-rated afternoon program; NBC's
The Doctors had been
easily defeating it in the Nielsens for some time. Because of this,
CBS informed P&G that it would have to let
Edge go.
Meanwhile, ABC had experienced success with bringing other
networks' daytime cancellations onto its schedule, namely
Let's Make a Deal and the
$10,000 Pyramid. It also
was the only network to have never had a P&G-packaged program
on its schedule. Thus, ABC responded positively when P&G
approached it about moving the program there, but officials
informed the company that contractual obligations to other programs
would not permit the network to admit
Edge onto the lineup
until December.
This raised a serious problem because CBS wanted to begin an
expanded
ATWT in September, meaning that
Edge
would have to leave the air for at least two months. Had this
happened, it is likely that ABC would have rescinded its decision
to acquire
Edge due to near-certain loss of viewer
interest caused by the interruption. Fortunately, P&G
negotiated with CBS to delay the
ATWT expansion until ABC
had an available slot for
Edge. On December 1,
Edge moved to ABC in a 90-minute one-day special and, on
CBS,
ATWT began occupying the 1:30-2:30 block with
Guiding Light moving down one
half-hour to
Edge's old place.
The last CBS episode on November 28, 1975 ended with the discovery
that Nicole Travis Drake was alive, after she had been presumed
dead in an explosion eighteen months earlier while on a boating
trip with her husband Adam Drake. On December 1, ABC aired a
special 90-minute episode which picked up where CBS 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, in her "Josie" split-personality, shot her husband on the
steps of the courthouse.
Initially,
Edge showed promise when it changed networks,
the first serial to do so (the only other one was the
P&G-packaged
Search for
Tomorrow from CBS to NBC in 1982), in a late afternoon
time slot of 4/3 p.m. for ABC affiliates in the Eastern and Central
time zones, and 12 noon for ABC affiliates in the Pacific time zone
because of a different scheduling pattern for ABC's West Coast
feed. At first,
Edge's overall ratings declined because
fewer homes had access to it, a situation caused by ABC affiliates
who had, for years, opted for local or
syndicated programs at the 4/3 slot
instead of the network feed and decided not to abandon the
practice. Still others tape-delayed the program for broadcast in
morning slots, anywhere from one day to two weeks later.
Nevertheless,
Edge was typically either first (or a close
second) in its timeslot for markets that cleared it in its network
feed of 4/3 p.m., due mainly to the weakness of competing programs
on CBS and NBC. Also,
Edge's demographics were significantly better on ABC;
thus, the network was actually able to charge higher ad rates for
it than several more popular series with higher audience
ratings.
Although it never recovered the ground it lost from its CBS days
(in fact, sliding into the lowest third in the ratings by 1977), as
the 1980s began
Edge's ratings improved slightly. While
the numbers were not as solid,
Edge still pulled in
ratings in the 5.0 range and improved its position on the ratings
list, peaking at 11th in both 1981 and 1982. However, from 1982 on,
ratings would fall even further as even more affiliates dropped the
show in favor of the aforementioned syndicated offerings. At the
end of the 1981-1982 season
Edge pulled in a 5.0 rating,
but with the resulting pre-emptions was down to a 3.8 in 1983. This
caused P&G to lose more money on the program with each passing
year.
In May 1983, P&G replaced the show's headwriter
Henry Slesar, whose 15-year stint with the soap
was at that time the longest in daytime serial history. New
headwriter Lee Sheldon accelerated the pace of the plot, focused on
younger characters, and added humor in efforts to capture a new
audience for the ailing serial. However, more and more ABC
affiliates continued to drop the show.
By Fall 1984,
Edge was airing on less than 62% of ABC's
affiliates, and over two dozen more had announced their intention
to drop the series in the first quarter of 1985. Although ABC was
committed to continuing
Edge, even offering to move it to
a mid-morning timeslot, P&G could no longer afford to produce
the show due to the continued loss of revenue from the preemptions.
On October 26, 1984, ABC and P&G made a joint announcement that
Edge's December 28 broadcast would be its finale. At this
point
Edge's ratings were less than half of what they had
been at the beginning of the decade (
Edge finished the
1984-85 season with a 2.6 rating in only four months of episodes).
Edge was the last ABC program to air in the 4 PM timeslot
as the network followed NBC in giving back the timeslot to its
affiliates (NBC had done this in 1979). (CBS, which was still
programming the 4 PM timeslot with
Body Language at the time,
joined the other two major networks in returning the slot to its
stations in September 1986 following the cancellation of
Press Your Luck.)
Episode status
Most CBS episodes no longer exist, despite the network ceasing its
wiping practice in September 1972. Many
monochrome and some color episodes were kinescoped (the color
kinescopes survive in black-and-white). 45 episodes of the CBS era
are known to exist, the best-known of which include the
Christmas Day 1974 episode and a September
1975 episode depicting the attempted murder of Geraldine. The first
two years of the ABC run also followed this practice, which ceased
in 1978 for ABC and all Proctor & Gamble shows.
From August 5, 1985 to January 19, 1989, reruns aired in a daily
late-night timeslot on cable's
USA
Network, transmitting episodes from June 1981 up to the series
finale.
In August 2006, Procter & Gamble made several of its classic
soap operas available, a few episodes at a time, through
AOL Video Service, downloadable free of
charge. AOL downloads of
The Edge of Night commenced with
episode #6051 from July 17, 1979.
See also
References
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
