The drama just never stops for Prospect Park’s “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” with the latest shocking news regarding the online sudsers coming from the L.A. Times. According to the publication, Prospect Park is shelving ‘One Life to Live’ until the lawsuit it launched against ABC in April is resolved. Additionally, the company will focus on producing “AMC,” with writers having already started work on scripts for the second season of the show.
As fans of the former ABC soaps recall, Prospect Park’s co-founding partner, Jeff Kwatinetz, lent a few ‘OLTL’ characters (Todd, Starr and John) to “General Hospital” so that the actors portraying them (Roger Howarth, Kristen Alderson and Michael Easton) could continue working during the show’s brief hiatus and transition to the web. Shortly after, the production company sued ABC with the accusation that the network purposefully induced those actors not to join ‘OLTL’ and killed off Llanview characters Cole, Hope and the unborn child of Téa and Victor in an effort to sabotage the revived sudser. ABC countered that it had “acted reasonably and in good faith at all times.” Consequently, the two entities have been in a battle that has been playing out since April, and with no end in sight, Kwatinetz and his partner, Richard Frank, have decided to shelve ‘OLTL’ for the time being.
However, it looks as though fans of ‘AMC’ don’t need to worry: the Times states that Kwatinetz is “soldiering on and plans to ramp up production this month for a second season” of the long-running Pine Valley-set soap.
“We’re still fighting to keep these shows alive,” Kwatinetz told Soap Opera Network. “In a million years, we couldn’t have imagined how many hurdles there would be and how hard it would be, and we’re just trying to work through it.”