Hi Dom! You heard correctly. I had the fortune of speaking with Peter Miner and Ron Sproat in person in New York at different times when they were involved with current projects. Ron Sproat was a writer (and had gone to drama school with Frid) and Peter Miner was a producer and director on DS. Anyway, both men concurred that the key reason they left the reason was the "chaos" they endured working on DS. The scripts became ridiculous and it was dictated to them that everything had to be at lighting speed: every day had to be a cliff hanger, etc. I don't care how good you are at what you do but if you are driven to produce at a consistent manic pace, things will get sloppy and you will soon not know which end is up or what you did yesterday. Yes, they could have hired someone or assigned the task of having the ongoing story monitored for the sake of consistency but they didn't for whatever reason. Probably because Curtis did not want to spend the money.
Sam Hall admitted in at least one interview that even though he authored Levithan scripts, he had never understood the story. That's how nuts it got. Curtis hit the gold mine with Barnabas and wanted more more and still more but seemingly without the discipline to understand the importance of continuity, consistency and obviously pacing. The show's production values, even on a low budget, would look better if the show had been done more on the standard shooting pace of soaps of the era. The stories would have been better drawn out and the actors who were not speedy studies would have made less mistakes on air since rehearsal and study would not have been as compromised.
I don't believe the attitude Curtis had was meant to be a slight towards the viewers as much as it was the desire to get higher ratings for the show for the moment and thus gain more and more publicity. In the end, that kind of attention would get him more work.
I agree - it would be embarrassing to most people to have something so sloppy go on the air.
Nancy
It appears to me that much of the writing was done "as they went along." I'm pretty sure it was stated by Curtis or maybe one of the writers (perhaps in one of the MPI specialty tapes or maybe I heard it at a fest) that they had a "devil may care" attitude toward the continuity and integrity of the show. (Can someone back me up on this? If I misinterpreted what I remember hearing, I'd like to be corrected). And it is an extremely sore point with me because to me that translates into a blatant disrespect for the bulk of the fans, which were "kids," and for the show in general, by its creators.
