Impact
The character of Allison became a key player in the 1986 Mitch Laurence storyline during a season in which the series rose from No. 4 to No. 3 in the Nielsen ratings. Villain Laurence wreaks havoc in fictional Llanview and seeks to exact his revenge on longrunning One Life to Live heroine Viki Lord Buchanan; his death does not end his reign of terror, as disciple Allison kidnaps Viki's newborn daughter Jessica but ultimately returns her.
Garrick returned as Allison in 2001 for what Soap Opera Weekly called "The Mother Of All Reveals," a storyline in which the series exploited a loophole in its continuity and created a secret history that would "resonate for months and years." The reveal that teenage Jessica had actually been switched with another baby by Allison in 1986 – and so was not the daughter of Viki and husband Clint Buchanan – "was about as big as they come."
When Gary Tomlin joined One Life to Live as Executive Producer in January 2001, his familiarity with the series and its characters – from his stint as director from 1992 to 1995 – "manifested itself in ... the utilization of the show's rich history." At the time he noted that the return of Allison Perkins "invigorates the Viki storyline, and kidnapped Jessica, so there's a history there." Tomlin explained how then-Head Writers Christopher Whitesell and Lorraine Broderick had thought, "OK, where can we do something where we do bring back that history but also explore something that's going to affect the future of this show?" He added that One Life to Live had been "so fortunate to get Barbara Garrick, who played the role originally, because we used those flashbacks from 13, 14 years ago. It's a treat for the audience that has invested in the show for that long, and the audience that doesn't know the story and gets to see what happened and realize, 'Oh my god, this is real. This isn't something they're making up.'"
Read more about this topic: Allison Perkins
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
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“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)