This is the third post of a series. The previous posts are:

#1: The Howdy Doody Show
#2: 
#3: 
#4: 
#5: 
#6: 
#7: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
#8: 
#9: 
#10: 

I believe it was my grandmother, Tillie Zellers, my mother’s mother, who first introduced me to The Edge of Night sometime in the mid-50s when we were still living on the farm. I don’t recall any specifics, so I think I probably started watching just at the climax of a story and she filled me in on what had gone before. In any case I didn’t watch it for long because I remember her telling me that afterwards they started a story about the black market. Or perhaps it was blackmail. Black something. But I was no longer watching it.

But then in the very early 60s, my sister insisted on switching the channel from whatever it was that I was watching to the CBS station to watch The Edge of Night. It was right after Mike Karr’s wife Sara had been killed saving their young daughter Laurie Ann from a hit and run driver (the actress wanted go on to do other things and apparently the fans were quite upset), and now Laurie Ann was hospitalized with a rare illness (paranucleosis, or something like that) brought on by that car crash. The clock was ticking and a cure needed to be found. Or a doctor who could treat it. Or something. Anyway it was touch and go for a week or so.

And I was hooked.

But basically, the show was a crime show. It had been created in response to the success of Perry Mason, and Mike Karr was the lawyer who defended the clients accused of murder. It wasn’t a whodunit, however, as you always knew who the guilty party was because you had watched them plan and execute the crime.

In fact, one of the stories I recall from back then involved the DA murdering his wife. Of course, Mike Karr figured it out in time to get his client off, but it involved some fireworks in the courtroom.

The show was easy to watch because it came on at 4:30 in the afternoon, well after I was home from school, and I was hooked on it for years.

Until CBS moved it to an earlier time slot for some obscure reason. That brought an abrupt end to my viewing.

In the 70s it moved to ABC, and they returned it to a later time slot (4:00 PM Eastern), and through various jobs I was able to watch it again. But that’s another story because by then it had morphed into a real whodunit as Henry Slesar had become its head writer and he came up with some real humdingers.

One of the things I loved about the show was its original theme music which was written and performed live for every episode by Paul Taubman. Yes, this was the era of live television, and every episode was performed live every weekday. So sometimes the actors screwed up.

But I was talking about the music. Taubman performed the theme music as well as the incidental music during the episode on the piano and organ, and I hereby claim that the original theme from The Edge of Night is one of the top ten television themes of all time. Usually on Fridays the episode would be a minute or two shorter to leave room for a full credits roll at the end of the show, and that’s when Taubman would play the entire theme music rather than the truncated versions that were used the rest of the time. I used to look forward especially to Fridays just for that reason.

And here is a recreation by Lance Jackson of that original piano/organ theme from The Edge of Night. This is what I looked forward to every Friday. Not only is it performed on simultaneously on piano and organ, but it ranges over several octaves.

I could probably go on for some time about this show, and perhaps I’ll return to it at another time, but I’ll conclude this piece with a partial list of some of the actors who appeared on the show. I’ll confine this list just to those that I actually saw on Edge:

	Larry Hagman, aka the son of Mary Martin, played Ed Gibson, a police lieutenant and love interest of Judy Marceau, the daughter of Police Chief Bill Marceau. Gibson helped lawyer Mike Karr, the Perry Mason-like star of the show, solve the murders, and he eventually married Judy, one of the most neurotic characters ever seen on the soaps. When they left Monticello, most folks were happy to see the back of Judy but sad to see Ed leave. Meanwhile, Larry Hagman struck gold twice: first when he dreamt of Jeannie and again when he played an oil baron so evil that the county spent an entire summer wondering who shot JR.
	Dixie Carter played Brandy Henderson, the sometime love interest of Adam Drake and Draper Scott. Alas, she was unlucky in both those love affairs (Adam really loved Nicole and when she returned from the dead, well…, and Draper was always a bit a flake), but Dixie Carter found her true calling for seven seasons as president of a design firm playing Julia Sugarbaker.
	Kiel Martin as Raney Cooper was a henchman of mob boss Tony Saxon and hopelessly in love with Tony’s daughter Deborah. It became even more hopeless when Deborah went to work undercover for the cops. But Kiel Martin went on to success as Detective JD La Rue, a womanizing alcoholic, who was always treading dangerously near and sometimes crossing the legal line in the groundbreaking cop show Hill Street Blues.
	Frances Fisher, as the aforementioned Deborah, went on to have a pretty good career on the police force and a better suitor as well, but eventually Hollywood called, and while Frances Fisher never made the A-list, she had a respectable career and supporting roles in the Oscar winning Unforgiven and 1997’s blockbuster Titanic.
	Holland Taylor was Denise Cavanaugh, the first wife of Dr. Miles Cavanaugh (played by daytime heartthrob Joel Crothers). It was a loveless marriage and she could easily have been a very sympathetic character if she hadn’t been plotting how to get revenge on Miles and everyone around him. She went so far as to plot her suicide and stage it as murder and, well, let’s not get into that story, but it is a humdinger. Meanwhile, once Denise finally kicked the bucket, Holland Taylor went on to have a very successful career, baring all to win a Primetime Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her work on The Practice, where she played Judge Roberta Kittleson. She’s been nominated for several other roles as well.
	Marcia Cross had a very short stint on Edge near the end of its run when her character sculpted a three dimensional likeness from a skull to help investigators to figure out who it had belonged to. Marcia Cross had perhaps her biggest success as a very desperate housewife.
	Lori Loughlin was sweet, innocent Jody Travis, whose big ambition in life was to be a dancer; well, that was until that particular storyline played out and then she danced no more. Lori Loughlin had her big success in the sitcom Full House, but methinks she may have taken the crime aspect of Edge a little bit too seriously. As far as I know, she’s the only graduate of that show to actually be arrested and spend time in prison. Tsk, tsk.

 

For the record, I wrote most of the above from memory, only looking up to verify the spelling of character names here and there, and in some cases to verify details of their after Edge careers.

Here is Larry Hagman discussing his days doing The Edge of Night, and the challenges of memorizing 20 or more pages of dialog every day as well as what went wrong doing a live TV show.