Ryan's Hope

Ryan's Hope is a true classic. There are many fine men on the show like Jack, Pat, Frank and Bucky but I love the women on this show.

Helen Gallagher plays loving matriarch, Maeve Ryan. She is sometimes blind to the faults of her grown children but is always there to support them and offers her profound wisdom.

Mary Ryan Fennelli, first played by Kate Mulgrew, is a self-righteous know-it-all but she is also a fiercely loyal wife, daughter and sister.

Jill Coleridge (Nancy Addison) is a brilliant lawyer who was a true liberated woman of the 1970's. Jill is sometimes a little too independent for her own good.

Dr. Faith Coleridge started out as a clingy daddy's girls when played by Faith Catlin but when Catherine Hicks took over the role Faith blossomed into a stronger, smarter yet still sensitive woman.

Delia Reid Ryan Ryan is the shows villain. Delia is highly manipulative and selfish. She simply refuses to deal with reality and has never shown the slightest remorse for what she does. Ilene Kristen plays the Delia you love to hate.

Rae Woodard (Louise Shaffer) is a woman who will use her power and money to get what she wants.

All the characters on Ryan's Hope are very well drawn and much more interesting than what you will find on today's soaps.

Ryan's Hope broke new ground in the daytime drama genre when it debuted in July, 1975. Centered around an Irish-Catholic family living in the Riverside section of New York City, this half-hour soap opera integrated character-driven storylines with intelligent dialogue, a grounded, reality-based philosophy, and one of the most talented casts ever to appear on daytime TV. While it never garnered blockbuster ratings during its all too brief 13 year run, it was showered with well deserved praise from critics and fans alike. It received numerous Emmy awards including two awards for best daytime drama, in 1977 and 1979. Thankfully, the show is now being re-run in its entirety on a soap-opera cable network.

I love this soap. It is so well written, and the characters are so wonderfully portrayed. It's so easy to love them all, and so hard to even hate the bad guys (mobsters Tizo Navotny and Joe Novak).

The family devotion the Ryan's have for each other is so often overlooked in today's soaps. They all stick together, no matter what the circumstances or consequences.

The acting is excellent, and the writing is awesome. This soap should still be on the air instead of in reruns on the soap channel.

Ryan's Hope, the story of the Ryan family, was a wonderful show filmed in New York City, thereby giving it the advantage of some veteran stage actors as well as newcomers. The cast was led by the amazing Helen Gallagher, a great musical theater star, as the matriarch of the Ryan family, Maeve. Maeve and her husband Johnny (the late Bernard Barrow) ran a bar/restaurant and were the linchpins of the soap. Their children were Frank, Mary, Siobhan, Patrick, and the seldom seen Kathleen. The Coleridges - attorney Jillian and two doctors, Faith and Roger - were the other family, a bit higher in class but nevertheless closely tied to the Ryans.

Along the way, many young actors cut their teeth on "Ryan's Hope" - Kate Mulgrew, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Corbin Bernsen, Marg Helgenberger, Ilene Kirstin, Gordon Thomson, Roscoe Born, Earl Hindman and Ron Hale, to name just a few. Today Hale and Kirstin are still soap actors, as was Roscoe Born until recently, while Hindman, Mulgrew, Bersen, Daniel Hugh Kelly and Helgenberger went on to TV series fame (Hindman was the neighbor in "Home Improvement").

In the beginning, the great interest (for me anyway) was the love story between sexy reporter Jack Fenelli (Michael Levin) and Mary Ryan (Kate Mulgrew). The character of Frank started out with an older actor - Christian Slater's father, if memory serves - and there were several Franks, the best remembered probably being Daniel Hugh Kelly. The beautiful, classy Nancy Addison, unfortunately now deceased, was Jill Coleridge throughout the series, and Hale was her brother Roger. Their sister, Faith, was played by more the one actress, the most memorable being Karen Morris Gowdy (now a Connecticut socialite). Delia, Frank's wife and ultimately ex-wife, and Roger's wife and ultimately ex-wife, and a royal pain, was played by both Randall Edwards and Ilene Kirstin, more successfully by Kirstin, in my opinion.

The series had some interesting plots. Two I especially liked were the Gordon Thomson story arc where he played Alexander Benedict White, an Egyptologist who becomes involved with Faith in an intriguing story; and the other involved a relative of the Ryan's, E.J., an ambitious reporter trying to find out if a soap actress, Barbara Wilding, is faking leg paralysis. Unfortunately for me, Soapnet stopped the series in 1981 - in the middle of both of these plots. The word is that they are going to continue the series this time around. Let's hope.

"Ryan's Hope" started to lose steam around 1983 and limped to cancellation in 1989. But seeing it on Soapnet, one is reminded of how good it was at least from 1975-1983, before it became influenced by the breakout success of "General Hospital" and veered from its original structure. At its best, "Ryan's Hope" was more like the English soaps such as Crossroads - about the middle class in a big city, their lives and loves.

This show never caught on and I'll never know why. The writing was crisp and witty. THe cast was excellent and it was only 30 minutes long. Their half hour has been replaced by news which to me shows the lack of interest in keeping daytime television especially dramas like Ryan's Hope on the air. Claire Labine who lives in Brooklyn, New york was one of the major writers of this show. I don't recall it ever being outrageous but it reminded me of the British soaps where it was only 30 minutes long and there was a bar. Helen Gallagher played the matriarch and she is still a fabulous actress who has done television, stage, and films as well. Other cast members were Nancy Addison who passed away so young and Ilene Kristen now on One Life to Live. The show is gone but not forgotten in my opinion. It was one of those shows that should have gone on forever as well but I guess ABC thought it was expendable. Too bad, people out there would have enjoyed a nice written show like this. Since they were set in NEw York (big cities as settings don't fair well on soaps except Bold and the Beautiful), they also went out on the streets of the city to shoot. It was great to see.