After Agnes Nixon created One Life to Live and All My Children, she and Douglas Marland collaborated to create another daytime soap opera for ABC, a half-hour drama titled Loving, which premiered 40 years ago, on June 26, 1983.
There was plenty of Loving to go around the fictional town of Corinth — between the Aldens, the Forbeses, and the Donovans, for starters — but viewers and critics didn’t share the love. Loving was the lowest-rated network soap during most of its run, according to The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television, and it eventually became known as “The Little Show That Couldn’t,” per the Los Angeles Times.
ABC canceled the show in 1995, and the writers ended Loving with a serial killer plot that killed off half the cast of characters. The survivors of that bloodbath decamped to a Morgan Fairchild-led, NYC-set spinoff called The City, but even that show ended after two seasons.
On the bright side, Loving advanced the careers of TV stars and not just daytime faves like Genie Francis, Debbi Morgan, Laura Wright, Amelia Heinle, and Roger Howarth. Scroll down to see ten other TV stars who have Loving in their filmographies.