Remembering Ryan's Hope

It's Irish-American Heritage Month!

Anyone following me on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter knows I’m a soap fan. On any given day, you can find me bitching about General Hospital, The Bold and the Beautiful, or Days of Our Lives. I’ve been a soap fan since I was probably too young to be watching them. Like many, I started watching soaps with my grandmother, who only watched CBS. I’m serious; that was the only channel she watched except for Sundays when she switched the channel briefly to watch Lawrence Welk. I’m not sure when I started watching ABC; it might have been when I was home sick with chicken pox, but I was an ABC girl from then on. When I was home from school during Christmas and Spring break, I would watch ABC from Ryan’s Hope at noon to Edge of Night at 4 pm. My parents couldn’t understand my love of soaps; they thought I was wasting my time until they retired and became addicted!¹

Ryan’s Hope was a favorite because it was set in New York, the only soap set in an actual city at the time. In the first episode, the audience sees Mary Ryan strolling down the street in New York before she enters Ryan’s bar. It was also unusual because the core family was Irish-Catholic and proud of it. Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer² created the show after ABC Daytime approached them about creating a new soap opera similar to General Hospital. Maeve³ and Johnny Ryan owned a bar across the street from the fictional Riverside Hospital⁴. The Ryans had five kids: Frank, Kathleen (who was only a minor character), Patrick, Mary, and Siobhan, the baby of the family. The other core family were the Coleridges, lawyer Jillian, and doctors Roger and Faith.

From L to R: Patrick Ryan (Malcolm Groome), Mary Ryan (Kate Mulgrew), Frank Ryan (Michael Hawkins), Helen Gallagher (Maeve Ryan) and Johnny Ryan (Bernie Barrow)

Mary Ryan (played by Kate Mulgrew in her first TV role) was the show’s main heroine. Her romance with the older Jack Fanelli, a reporter, drove most of the plotlines for the first few years. Mary, an aspiring journalist, shocked her traditional parents by moving in with Jack Fanelli without the benefit of marriage. The scandal! The couple fought, broke up, and got back together, culminating in a wedding and a honeymoon on location in Ireland (remember when soaps used to do location shoots? Those were the days!). Mary also wasn’t perfect; she could be sanctimonious and smug, especially when it came to her sister-in-law, Delia. Her protectiveness and closeness to her family caused mucho drama in her relationship with Jack who grew up in an orphanage.

My favorite character, however, was Delia Reid Ryan Ryan Coleridge, played by Ilene Kristen. ⁵ Delia was messy, needy, and vulnerable, obsessed with staying a part of the Ryan family. In the first episode, she pushed her husband, Frank Ryan (initially played by Michael Hawkins, Christian Slater’s dad), down the stairs because he would leave her and then lied about it for months! When she finally gave up on Frank, she got her hooks in his younger brother Patrick, her high school sweetheart. Delia was fun; she did things you might think of doing but would never have the courage to do. She constantly got into trouble but had big dreams and wasn’t afraid to go after them. She and Mary had several fights, especially over big brother Frank.

When Kate Mulgrew left the show, the other actresses cast to play Mary Ryan could not capture the magic she brought to the role, so they killed her! Siobhan Ryan became the new heroine, and her romance with Joe Novak, who tried to leave his crime family behind him, became a major plotline. That romance took off when Marg Helgenberger and Roscoe Born took over the roles of Siobhan and Joe. The show was so special because the Ryan family felt like people you might know in your neighborhood. Who wouldn’t have wanted Maeve Ryan to fix you a cup of tea while you poured out your heart to her? And the bar looked like every Irish bar that I’ve ever had the pleasure of drinking in. There was a realness to the characters and the actors who portrayed them.

When Ryan’s Hope went off the air in 1989, an era of daytime television ended. The show wasn’t built for the glitz and glamour of nighttime or daytime soaps. Over the years, it went through many producers and headwriting teams and departed from Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer’s original vision. But who can forget the sight of Maeve Ryan singing ‘Danny Boy’ for the last time at Ryan’s Bar in the final episode? I was sad to see Ryan’s Hope leave the air as a viewer and as an actor. Soaps were a great training ground for actors, especially in New York. I would have killed to have done background work on Ryan’s Hope when I was still acting.

When ABC launched SoapNet, they started rerunning Ryan’s Hope in the early morning. The show gained new fans and reminded old fans of the show. Now, fans can relive those days at Ryan’s Bar thanks to author Tom Lisanti and his new book Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History of Daytime’s Groundbreaking Soap. This book is a must-have for soap fans. It’s undoubtedly going up on my shelf with my copy of Dan Wakefield’s book All Her Children and Harding Lemay’s Eight Years in Another World.

In Lisanti’s book, he details, through countless interviews, the early days of the show up to the final episode. He peels back the curtain, letting readers behind the scenes see this groundbreaking soap. It was fascinating to take a trip down memory lane, remembering storylines and marveling at the years I wasn’t watching the show. Ryan’s Hope attracted some of the best actors during its daytime run, including Geoffrey Pierson, Grant Show, and Yasmine Bleeth, as well as movie stars like Joan Fontaine and Gloria DeHaven⁶. I can’t tell you how happy I am that Kensington published this book. I loved reading about all the backstage drama and the different writing regimes. The biggest problems for the show began when ABC started interfering with the soaps. This continues today with General Hospital.

Ryan’s Hope⁷ is one of the few daytime shows I could see a network reviving (Generations⁸, Edge of Night, and One Life to Live) either in daytime or prime time. The show would still feature Ryan’s Bar, now run by Frank and Delia’s son, Johnny. His cousin Ryan Fanelli is a crusading journalist like her dad, and she is back from working overseas. The show would focus on them and their kids, romances, and Riverside Hospital. One thing that would be different would be the chance for the show to have a more diverse cast than during its initial run.

What I’m watching:

Will Trent on ABC - I knew nothing about this show when it popped up on Hulu. I haven’t read any Karin Slaughter books, but I fell in love with this show. Will Trent is an agent with the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation). He also grew up in a foster home with Angie Pulaski, a detective with the Atlanta PD. Angie and Will deal with a lot of things, but the show also has lighter moments, particularly between Will and his dog, Betty. It’s one of the few shows that I look forward to watching. Everyone on this show has an interesting backstory.

The Equalizer on CBS—My mother was a massive fan of the original, starring Edward Woodward. It was also one of the first shows I did background work on. Queen Latifah plays Robin McCall, a former CIA agent who has now turned vigilante (according to the NYPD). She’s assisted by her friend Mel, a former U.S. Air Force sniper, and Mel’s husband, Harry, a master hacker. Robin is also a single mother of a daughter named Delilah, who wants to follow in her mom’s footsteps, much to the chagrin of Robin’s Aunt Vi. The personal relationships make the show more than the week’s investigation for me.

1. My father became a Guiding Light fan, but my mother was devoted to the NBC soap operas, particularly Another World and Days of Our Lives.

2. Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer had met while working on the daytime drama Where the Heart Is. After that show was canceled, they became head writers on Love of Life, taking it from number 15 in the ratings to number 9.

3. Helen Gallagher played Maeve Ryan. She had a long, successful career on Broadway (Sweet Charity, Pal Joey, and High Button Shoes, to name a few) before joining Ryan’s Hope. She won two Tony Awards, one for Pal Joey and the second for No, No, Nanette in 1971. Gallagher won three Daytime Emmy Awards for portraying Maeve Ryan during the run of Ryan’s Hope. Here is a great interview with Helen talking about working with Jerome Robbins on American Masters. And here’s Helen talking about Ryan’s Hope on The Locher Room.

4. Ironically, there used to be an Irish bar called Coogan’s that was a block away from Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights.

5. Ilene Kristen was the original Patty Simcox in Grease on Broadway.

6. Tichina Arnold, Catherine Hicks (Faith Coleridge), Earl Hindman, Nell Carter, Corbin Bernsen, Ana Alicia, and Christian Slater all got their start on Ryan’s Hope.

7. You can watch old episodes of Ryan’s Hope on YouTube. I fell down the rabbit hole while watching the show and reading Tom Lisanti’s book. It still holds up, apart from the awful music.

8. Lucky for us soap fans, Michele Val Jean is working on a new daytime soap featuring a core black family.