Never Say Goodbye: An oral history of Aaron Spelling's Sunset Beach

As the short-lived sudser turns 25, take a look back at the cult classic with the cast and crew themselves!

It was 1996 and Aaron Spelling had done just about everything. The 76-year-old prolific producer, known for putting primetime soap dramas like Dynasty, Melrose Place, and Beverly Hills, 90210 on the map, was about to make a splash into daytime of his own.

American soap operas were beginning to wane in the ratings in the age of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Creating a new one would be a massive feat, even for Spelling. Originally called "Never Say Goodbye" in development, Spelling’s show would break soap opera conventions dating back decades. 

Over 755 episodes, Sunset Beach would kick off the careers of Jason Winston George (Grey’s Anatomy, Station 19), Sherri Saum (The Fosters, In Treatment), and Eddie Cibrian (CSI: Miami, Country Comfort). The soap would go on to win two Emmys during its three-year run, while racking up another 13 nominations.

Sure, the show was loaded with typical soap opera storylines like baby swaps, evil twins, and back-from-the-dead surprises. But the show also included campy stories like Operation Insemination (featuring a turkey baster), a Scream-esque Terror Island slashfest that aired over Christmas, and an earthquake/tsunami disaster reminiscent of The Poseidon Adventure.

Now, as Sunset Beach celebrates its 25th anniversary, take a deep dive into the classic soap opera with the cast and crew themselves.

Part I: Welcome to Sunset Beach

Randy Spelling (Sean Richards, 1997–99): I was graduating from high school and I remember being outside my house, still living with my parents. Jonathan Levin, who worked with my father, was discussing this soap opera. I remember they asked me, "Would you? Do you have any interest in being on a soap opera?" Because I did 90210, and I was involved in Malibu Shores [a short-lived primetime soap created by Aaron]. At first, I said, "No. No, thank you. " And then, as the summer went on, my dad asked me again. 

He said, "Listen, we're doing this soap opera, and there is a part. Would you do it?" And I don't know what changed for me. I don't know if I was thinking of going to college, or if I just wanted to be done with high school and kind of, you know, smoke pot or do something with friends. After a couple months of that, I thought, "Yeah, I want to work." That sounds good. Levin was over, and I said, "Tell me more. Give me more information."

Charles Pratt Jr. (co-creator, executive storyline consultant, 1997): We were at the height of Melrose Place, and I was an executive producer, writing and directing. In a lot of ways, we were at the top of our game. I knew Aaron Spelling, who knew my whole history. We were very close. He said, "Listen, Don Ohlmeyer is thinking of doing another soap." I said, "That's a tough call. Nobody’s come up with a soap since Santa Barbara."

Aaron said, "Well, why don't you think up some ideas about what would work, and you know me, it's got to be different. It's got to be more like primetime." I agreed.

So I came up with a concept pretty quickly. My influence would have been Lifeguard (1976), a movie with Sam Elliott. I’d lived in Manhattan Beach for a short period of time while I was in college, and that sort of beach lifestyle, I knew very well. 

Phideaux Xavier (director, 1997–98): I was working at One Life to Live as an associate director at the time, and there was a feature in Soap Opera Weekly about a new soap opera being started by Aaron Spelling to be produced in California. I've always been a fan of soap operas since I was in high school. I liked the continuing form of soap operas; how the show never ended and how it could tell stories on a longer, more relaxed playing field where you could really see into the characters. I also liked a lot of the silly tropes of soap operas: the cliffhangers, the somewhat expositional dialogue. I liked the larger-than-life characters that were starting to appear on the soap operas when I was in high school, and some of the crazier storylines, which is why it was so wonderful to work on Sunset Beach, and later Passions.

PRATT: We really wanted a diverse element with a Hispanic family, which we had on Santa Barbara with Cruz Castillo. So we said, "Let's just start out with a diverse show." I know that The Young and the Restless and other shows have always represented diversity, but it became an important part, with the socio-economics that are associated with living in a beach community and having lots of secrets and sex and all the other things that make a soap work. I took that concept to Aaron. He loved it and he said, "Can you write up a Bible? We’ve got to move fast on this."

I was right in the middle of a 28-episode order on Melrose, and I thought, "I can't do this alone," so I called two of my closest friends at the time, Josh Griffith and Bob Guza, who had writing experience. Between the three of us, it was a dream team. Josh was living in New York, so Bob and I met a few times, and then Josh came out. We pitched the story originally to Aaron and Susan Lee (then-Head of Daytime at NBC), and we wrote up a Bible that was over 300 pages long. It was literally a Bible. We had to put a cover on it, so we [used the] 90210 sign: NOW ENTERING SUNSET BEACH, POPULATION 90210. That was our little nod to Aaron. 

Dominic Messinger (Composer/Music Supervisor, 1997–99): When I started in General Hospital as a music coordinator, we were literally playing what were called "broadcast cards," which look like track cartridges. We would be playing them in a machine (think of a DJ with a turntable). We were literally playing this music at the same time as the actors were shooting the scenes, and we were hoping that the timing would be the same when they taped the show as when they had rehearsed it before. If not, you'd have to have a backup piece of music that you could segue to. I remember sometimes you'd run out of music because of Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) ad libbing or something, and then the producer, Gloria Monty, would cut and say, "Why did you run out of music? Now we've got to do the scene over. Luke was perfect!" The reason I left General Hospital initially, back in the late early ‘80s, was that Monty just wouldn't think of me as a composer. I was actually ghostwriting for the composer at the time, and the only stuff that was working on the show was the stuff that I was writing, quite frankly. So I had to leave and go somewhere else to become known as a composer. 

PRATT: We put [the Bible] together, and I remember thinking, "No one is going to actually read this entire thing. It would take hours." It wasn't dry because it was detailed dialogue. Aaron felt we needed that or we could not sell [the show]. We never really got notes on it until the show was picked up. Ohlmeyer was really anxious to do this because he was friends with Aaron going way back. We had this big meeting with Ohlmeyer about two weeks after we turned in the Bible. What I recall most about that meeting was that Ohlmeyer was frightening and terrifying. We were all a little intimidated. I kind of spent the weekend summarizing it for him, because I thought he wasn't going to read the Bible. It was the formal pitch. Aaron was coming, and when Aaron comes, that's a big deal. So I went in, I started pitching it, and Ohlmeyer held up his hand and he goes, "I read your Bible. Did you think I hadn't read it?" Susan Lee [then-head of Daytime at NBC] made him read it. He had a couple of questions, and they were mostly about production. Josh had another show to work on when it came time to need a head writer. Bob was available, he left General Hospital to do this. Bob brought on Meg Bennett and they wrote it with Gary Tomlin who came in as co-executive producer after that.

Sarah Buxton (Annie Douglas, 1997–99): I’d been studying acting since I was 14. I’d gone to New Zealand to make this small, independent movie. John Hurt was in it. It was directed by somebody who won a French Academy Award. It was called The Climb. I felt like I had finally got something that I was interested in; it felt like a big deal. When I got home, I'd been gone for maybe three months in New Zealand. The third day I was home, this audition came up for a soap opera. I really wasn't in that headspace at all. I wanted to do interesting things. But I'd read for Aaron Spelling so many times. So I was like, "okay, just go read." 

PRATT: I have a lot of production experience, so we talked about how we were going to make it look different, which is a funny story unto itself. The "film look" was new then but pretty good, so we were trying to make it look like films. Nowadays, everybody tries to make digital look like film. So we had some tests, and we brought in a couple of experts on it and listened to them. 

Wes Kenney was the first executive producer, not for long, but he really kicked off the show. I told Wes that our cameras weren’t going to face away from the ocean, they were going to face towards the ocean. And he goes, "We can't do that. That'd be a terrible backdrop."

I responded, "Well, we're going to shoot on location." Combining those elements, we came up with a way to have a location – blue skies, as Aaron would always call it – to put our characters into that environment.

BUXTON: I went to the audition. I was tired, and I had this floppy little sundress on. They called me back, and they were like, "Um, she was really good, but she can't wear that dress. She has to wear something more like the character." The next audition was to go see Aaron. I never get hired by Aaron, but I always go in there and I always see him for different roles like Charmed and Melrose Place and all those things. Then this time, I said to myself, "Okay, I'm so tired of not getting roles, I'm gonna get this one." I wore this outfit that I knew he would like, and I wore a big man's shirt over my tight little black dress. He stood up after my audition and said, "That was great, and I love your outfit!" He was just so personable and nice, and I ended up getting the job. [Aaron] was so excited about my character. He wanted to make my hair red, and he knew exactly what he wanted Annie to wear. He was very involved. It was just one of those little moments where it just happened. Acting is like that. It kind of drops out of the sky. It's like preparedness meets opportunity.

Hank Cheyne Garcia (Ricardo Torres, 1997–99): Believe it or not, I was doing theater. We had a theater company in Los Angeles. We had a play in about six months called "A Kind Man and a Good Lover," and we won all kinds of awards. So I was very involved in the theater end of things. And then the subject came up. It was for a daytime show. I went in, and I had a meeting. I felt like I did pretty well, but I never heard anything from them. I was like, "Wow, that's interesting," and about two weeks later, they said they wanted to see me for Sunset Beach again. Okay, so why? Am I going to producers? My agent said they don't remember seeing you. So I go back in and do the same thing I did before. And all of a sudden, I'm called in again by the producers a couple days later. And I met all of them, I read for all of them, and everything's going great. As I got them reading, Gary Tomlin, who was on Another World when I was back in the '80s, jumped up and said, "Hey, Hank! Can I talk to you for a second?" He was executive producing Sunset Beach, and he said, "Where have you been?" I said, "Ah, I read for them, but I guess they didn't like what they saw." He goes, "Oh yeah, we've been looking for you." And I was like, "Great, I'm glad you pursued it." The rest was history. We went in to read for Aaron Spelling. It was a famous casting situation—they called it "the casting couch" back then, which was not a derogatory term at all. It was this long sofa that he had in his executive office. It was maybe 15 or 20 feet long. So when you went in to read for him, there were 25 people sitting on that sofa, so it was really cool. It was kind of everything you ever wanted to be in as far as a situation goes when you're an actor. So I read, and I did the same thing I did in the first audition. All of a sudden, Aaron Spelling jumps up out of his seat and gives me a big handshake and a hug. He said, "Great job, Hank! Thanks for coming in," and I got the role. It was a real treat to remember how great of a guy he was and how personable he was.

PRATT: When we were planning the production, Aaron could never wrap his head around shooting one show a day. You know, seven days was the absolute minimum for an hour-long show for him. So he brings in Abby Singer, who was a legend in production. In fact, to this day, when you're on set and you're directing or producing, or you're the first assistant director, you call the second-to-last shot The Abby Singer. That's because Abby Singer used to say, "The second-to-last shot is fine, we're good, let's go." He never wanted to go that extra take. Anyhow, Abby came in and studied it. I met with Abby shortly before because I'd worked with him, and afterwards, he said, "Just find people who know how to do it because I can't figure out any way to do it." He said to shoot all the location stuff before you shoot your first episode, and then we'll lay it in over six weeks, which means having six weeks of scripts approved, which right away became a problem with Susan Lee, because she wasn't used to that. We had to figure out where to shoot location scenes without absolutely knowing how we were going to wrap them around. I had experience with that on Santa Barbara; we did Paris, France—we basically shot all the exteriors months before and then we just knew what we had to formulate our story around.

XAVIER: Suddenly, we learned that [Wes Kenney] was out, and a colleague of mine, a man who was sort of a mentor, Gary Tomlin, became executive producer of Sunset Beach. On One Life to Live, where Gary was the director, I was an assistant director, and I had worked with Gary a couple of times on All My Children, so he had an opportunity to see my enthusiasm. I also directed a soap opera occasionally called Another World, and one of the writers, very timely, told Gary that he liked it when I directed his scripts because I seemed to get all the beats. I seemed to really get the subtext of what he was going for in the scenes. He concluded that I was not a lazy director. So Gary knew me personally, and he offered me the opportunity to come out to California and be one of the directors on Sunset Beach. At the time, I was just 30, so I would have been considered the token young director on the team. 

SPELLING: That September or October, it was my first time doing wardrobe, and I just got really excited, thinking, "wow, what's about to happen?" My dad has never done soap operas before. It just seemed like something exciting was on the horizon, and certainly exciting for me as I've never done that before, and shooting an episode a day was a brand new medium for me. They told me about the role and said that he was Gregory's son. You know, here's a wealthy family, and it's going to be dramatic. So I thought, okay, well, this isn't that far of a stretch.

MESSINGER: Sunset Beach was a co-production between NBC and Spelling Productions. I'll never forget after working on episode one, I scored and wrote music for that entire episode, and it went through a lot of people looking at that and giving notes over to NBC. Everything went relatively smoothly on my end, and then I got this call that there was going to be a screening for all the big shots at Spelling’s. "You're coming down." So I got over there and I saw the producers and the video editors, some of the network execs, and then a whole slew of people from Spelling Productions. We're all at this long rectangular table in this high-ceilinged room, and somebody rolls out a TV monitor and sticks in a VHS of the pilot. Aaron wasn’t there, but E. Duke Vincent, his partner, was. 

We're all sitting there in absolute silence, watching the pilot we've worked so hard on. Every now and then, they pause it and say, "Gary, what are you intending here?" Or to the editor, "Maybe we need to change that shot." I kept waiting for them to get to me and I'm just sitting there in silence and nobody's looking at me. Well, after they finished watching the show, which took about two and a half hours because they were giving notes on everything, nothing about music. 

And Duke says, "Well, that's good. Good work, everybody!" And then he turns to me and says, "Dominic, nice score. Okay, now everybody, let's go to lunch!" And that was it. That was the best comment ever. No notes from Spelling, nothing. Slam Dunk.

XAVIER: [Spelling] believed that we could open up the barriers from the studio. Gary Tomlin was instrumental in that as well. They had a method of going out every month to do a whole bunch of location scenes that would be integrated into the show. Tomlin, with his team of producers, devised a second unit that would do the location [shoots]. At first, it was a director named Rick Benowitz, a very talented gentleman who had been in soaps for a long time. He came from Santa Barbara, and was a long-serving California director. He did the first year-and-a-half of the location work until, sadly, he passed away. Then the second person who took that over was Grant Johnson, who currently works on Days of Our Lives. (1965-)He had also been the associate director under Rick and knew exactly how to get those beach scenes done.

Lisa Guerrero (Francesca Vargas, 1998—99): Up until that point, I had been living kind of a double life. My mom died when I was eight, and my dad put me in theatre therapy when I was a kid to help me deal with the grief of losing my mom. So I had been an actress very young, and I started to dream about potentially being a sports reporter. It was pretty rare in the 90s for women to be sports reporters. So I put together two different headshots and got two different agents, one under my mom's last name and one under my dad's last name. I started going on auditions and interviews, one as Lisa Coles and one as Lisa Guerrero, and I thought I was being pretty sneaky about it, until I got two calls on the same day.

Carol Potter (Joan Cummings, 1997—99): It's a fun story because I had been off Aaron's other show for several years, Beverly Hills, 90210. I was in the process of getting my license as a marriage and family therapist. I had gone back to school and I was collecting my hours. I was working with a dear friend who was also my manager, and she was the one who heard about this character. She told me she wrote Aaron Spelling a letter and said, "Don't you think Carol Potter would be wonderful in this role?" It was a very similar role, as the mother of a family displaced from the middle of the country to California. Only the first family, I had a set of fraternal twins, and we were coming from Minneapolis. In this situation, it was a family from Kansas, and I had two daughters. [Spelling] offered me the role, and I took it. I think it's the only time I've been able to escape the audition process.

XAVIER: I met Aaron [Spelling] in the first week before production. We all went and celebrated the fact that we were about to begin, and I had an opportunity to meet Aaron and Duke Vincent, who were the overseeing producers. We also had some other people that were more hands-on, who would be in the studio with us. Those would be Aaron's "eyes and ears." I never saw Aaron again after that.

GUERRERO: We were able to negotiate something that you could never do today: On Monday through Friday, I worked at NBC Studios in Burbank, playing Francesca, and on Saturday and Sunday, I went to CBS Studios in Hollywood to be a sportscaster. I worked seven days a week for 13 months straight without taking a weekend or a holiday off. That’s why I'm credited as Lisa Guerrero Coles, because I hadn't decided. I got both of those jobs at the time. I ended up combining my last name to connect with my heritage and to honour my mom and just go by Lisa Guerrero.

BUXTON: The beginning was a lot of fun for me because they were focusing on establishing this character and finding a look. I was on that journey of finding the character with the people who were involved. Then we had our first table read, and each person had their label on their seat, and there was like a stack higher than my head of scripts. Embarrassingly enough, I said to the whole group, and the producers were there, "Is this a Bible for the show?" They said, "That's the first week." At that moment, I'm sure they've hired the wrong person, or they think they have, because I've never worked like that before. I got good at it, and the memorization, the speed, and the swiftness of the shooting. It's like a muscle, and your memory just goes there.

MESSINGER: I really believe that custom music, music that is really branded for those characters and those stories, is really important. Beyond the Sunset was a great example. That was the most popular song I wrote with Cliff Downs. At the very beginning, I had a meeting with Gary Tomlin, Chuck Pratt, Bob Guza, and Josh Griffith. [Tomlin] said, "We need a song for Ben and Meg, the supercouple," and we wrote that song. On YouTube, people have been putting up their own fan videos for years because it was something that was meant for the show and wasn't something that was recycled.

POTTER: In the old days before you could edit videotape on computers, you had to be there the whole day. They walked through the show exactly as it shows up on the television. Even if you had one line or scene, you were there all day. Because they could now edit on videotape, they shot it much more like a one-camera evening TV show. 

BUXTON: At the very beginning, I'm used to when they say "cut," meaning you’re done with the scene. So I started to laugh because there were three minutes that went by before they "cut" after we were done. That's a commercial hold where they put music over, and I had never done that before. Sam Behrens (ex-Gregory Richards) actually taught me how to do it. 

XAVIER: On my first day, we had a table reading at the studio, where we read the first episode. From the very beginning, the scripts were very ambitious. In the beginning, I didn't quite understand how we were going to do it, because I was used to the scripts of the New York soaps I had worked on. Rick Benowitz did the first day, Tony Marina did the second. They were pros who made things simple and clear and focused on the most important things. 

POTTER: We did some location shooting in Lawrence, Kansas [for the pilot]. I remember it vividly because it was very cold and I was wearing something with a very open neck. They had these Long John's made for me and cut a big V in the neck so they wouldn't show up. So I’m walking around in my fancy, formal wear, but I've got Long John's underneath because it's frickin’ cold. My first husband wrote a movie called Kansas. I was supposed to play a part in that movie, but I was pregnant with our son when it was shot, so I never got to go to Kansas. It fulfilled a sort of longing in me that I'd had for a while, and I thought it was just beautiful.

PART II: Show begins

Sunset Beach debuted to a less-than-desired start, launching to less than 2 million daily viewers, ranking dead last among the ten soap operas then on-air.

Reception for NBC’s latest soap opera experiment was also critically panned. Michael Saunders of the Boston Globe called Sunset Beach "comically bad, with a script loaded with lame, unintentional one-liners."

But the poor reviews didn’t stop the Sunset, which ran on a production budget of approximately $1 million per week, or $200,000 per episode. In 1997, soap operas were still profitable, racking up nearly $40 million per year in revenue.

"It frightens the hell out of me," Aaron Spelling told Entertainment Weekly. "With a prime-time show, you'll know [if it’s successful] in six weeks. With daytime, I don’t know."

Susan Lee, then-President of NBC Daytime, estimated the network would spend about $60 million in start-up costs, with extra funds for location shoots. NBC also "flooded the airwaves with an unprecedented $2 million paid advertising campaign." 

"The thorny question, morally and legally, of being unfaithful on the Internet (cyber infidelity) is raised, read a Variety review of the program. "An explicit sex scene between underwear-clad law enforcement officers pushes the daytime envelope. And by Friday, there was some momentum as the week ended with a graphic gunshot murder."

XAVIER: This was a show that was about young people living in a kind of group home. The traditional soap opera family on Sunset Beach was our group of lifeguards and surfers and the people in that community. So it was a different approach than the normal core families.

MESSINGER: I was usually there three days a week working in the music editing room because the shows were still being videotaped. A lot of the things that were in-studio didn't require scoring to picture. I would write the music ahead of time and then lay it in on a separate audio track while the show was actually being filmed or videotaped at the time. Most of the time, except when they were doing special storylines or location shoots, the music was pre-recorded, based on my interpretation. Everything has changed in the soaps; everything is in post-production now, which makes sense. 

PRATT: The first thing was the "film look." NBC polled audiences and they said it doesn't look like other soaps. Aaron did not understand that; he thought it looked great. We all did. So that was the first surprise for Aaron. Most soaps start kind of slow and then, hopefully, build and become huge. There was a little bit of disappointment and questioning, and there was some fighting between Gary and Bob. I was a consultant, and I just tried to stay focused on the story, which is really my forte. We never clashed, Bob and I. In 40 years of working together, we tend to agree on everything, but he was getting hammered because word came down that Ohlmeyer expected more from the show. 

BUXTON: In America, the show didn't really catch on the same way it did in Europe. They understood the campiness of it. I would go to Europe every summer to see my friend who lives in Majorca, and all these college kids would be around. I had a billboard in England called Sunset Bitch. Everybody thought it was so funny, whereas here people were very serious about how bad it was.

XAVIER: I never did the beach scenes. I had an opportunity to do one location scene in Sunset Beach one day where Caitlin (Vanessa Dorman) and Olivia (Lesley-Anne Down) were driving through essentially Griffith Park in California, which doubled as some mountain road where Caitlin accidentally drives them off a cliff. 

SPELLING: For me, I was genuinely grateful to be there. It was exciting, it was fun, and it was just so full of possibility at that age. I was 18–19, so it was fun to have my worldview at the time and also be able to talk to people like Lesley-Anne Down, Kathleen Noone (ex-Bette Katzenkazrahi) and Sam Behrens, because there was more wisdom and they had more experience. 

GARCIA: Seal Beach was a beautiful town, and we were supported by the locals and the police, especially because I was playing a cop. When they found that out, they were always razzing me and giving me a tough time down there, and I was going back at them at the same level. I got along really well with those guys. It was a lot of fun and great to actually be on location in a city for a sustained period of time, three years. People got to know you around the city; some people would come to visit the set. It's a different experience than it was being in the studio 24/7.

BUXTON: Seal Beach was so nice. It was just the early rise, but I loved it. It was beautiful, and we got to be out of the studio. It was fun because my favorite thing about acting is when you travel around and have location shoots. Soap operas are mainly shot inside, so we were lucky that we had this continuous location shoot and it was in this beautiful spot. 

POTTER: It's always nice to go to Seal Beach. Shooting on location can be a royal pain. You have your honey wagon, but there are all sorts of external factors you don't have control over. Is it windy? What's that going to do to your hair and your clothes? How is the sound? Sometimes you're back in the ADR room because you're on location and the sound is just not as good as it should be. Even though you may be wearing a microphone, if there's a lot of wind, it can cause static in the microphone. So it's nice to be on location, but as far as shooting on location, it's a lot more problematic. And yet, it’s nice to get away from the studio.

XAVIER: We were always trying to get it done as quickly as we could. There's a misconception when people talk about soap operas: we always say we just do it on the first take. And it's true. The reason we do it on the first take is because we meet with the actors ahead of time, we block the scenes with them, we discuss the scenes, we find out anyone's concerns, and we deal with any issues they may have in the script or how it affects their character. Then we do camera blocking, where the actors go through the scene while we're describing it to the cameras. Then we do a dress rehearsal and then tape the scene. The actors are geared up to do the scene, and if they do it well, which they probably do, because they're now in the muscle memory of work, there's really no need to do a second take. If there's a stumble, we might have to do them a couple times, but the misconception that we force people to take their very first take is not, strictly speaking, the way we do it.

BUXTON: I didn't really understand it at first because I don't think the writers did either. They weren't sure how the fantasies were going to play [to viewers]. What comes to mind is the Joan Crawford fantasy. There was the one with the angel and the devil. Another fantasy that I really liked was Annie in the 50s with Gregory. It was so much fun. It was just like playing this other character.

POTTER: Coming in on the ground floor and meeting everybody just as it’s getting going is very satisfying. But I think there's also a more realistic spirit. This is a daytime soap. When you're on a nighttime show or a network series, a lot of people are already thinking about "Where's this going to take me? I'm going to go into movies or I'm going to start my own series or something like that." Well, the soap opera ladder is a lot longer and slower. I think people were just appreciating being there and having work that was enjoyable. Some of these people already had really solid careers, so they were probably thinking less about what was going to happen next and just enjoying being where they were.

XAVIER: At one point, Gary suggested that I do one and a half episodes a week, which would essentially mean I would do two episodes one week and one episode the next week. That was a pretty high workload for a soap opera director at the time. So I never really had the opportunity to do the location stuff, but I was definitely happy to work on a show that had a greater sense of reality and space than an entirely studio-bound show.

POTTER: The first year, it was "call-as-needed." I really didn't know how prominent the character would be, but they were calling me fairly regularly. At one point, because I was seeing clients, they called me the night before and wanted me to come in the next day, and I had all these clients to see. [So I said], "I can't do it this week. I need a little more notice." I don't know if that's what motivated them, but then I was on contract for a day-and-a-half per week or something like that. Obviously, there are some weeks when you're there every day. If it's a wedding, everybody's there, and you're there all day long. But most of the time, it was a couple of days a week or not even. That was a really great schedule for me. The person who was doing the scheduling was able to give me a heads-up so that I could cancel all my clients with a little bit of notice. She usually knew a week in advance of what the shoot days would look like. I only had one or two days a week that I was seeing clients, so if my shoot day landed on that day, I would either just cancel people or move them to another day. It was such a wonderful balance because you go to this set, and it's all about me and my character and her motivation, and there's hair and makeup and lines and what's happening here in the scene and all my emotions and how they figure in. Then I go to see my clients, and it's all about them. I could just completely leave myself behind and get totally engaged with what was going on in their lives. It was really a marvellous balance. It was much easier to plan my life and give the show the proper attention that it required, as well as give my clients the attention that they required.

XAVIER: We began with morning blocking. The day has two components. It's usually the morning session, the afternoon session, and rarely — though it did definitely occur — the evening session.

In the morning, we would arrive at 7 a.m. The actors had staggered calls, so we would rehearse and block by set. So we would maybe tape everything at Surf Central, which was the set where Casey (Timothy Adams) lived, and we would do everything in that set for the day. The day would usually involve maybe an episode and pieces of another episode, depending on what the sets were. 

Maybe in the morning, we would do three sets: Ben's (Clive Robertson) house, Annie’s house, and Surf Central — rehearsing perhaps 15, 16, or maybe 20 scenes. Then, at 9 a.m., we would start taping. So once people came in at seven and got their blocking for the first set, which would take from like 7 to 7:30, those actors would then go to makeup and get ready for the 9 a.m. on-set call. 

Then, at 12:30, we would stop for the crew to take a meal break, and the afternoon actors would come in. So we would have Olivia and Gregory or Gabi (Priscilla Garita) and Antonio (Nick Kiriazis) come in and we would rehearse the afternoon scenes. And once the crew came back at 1:30, we would continue to tape until maybe six or seven.

SPELLING: I would show up, wave to security, just another morning going to pull into my space. I got there, said hi to everyone, started to converse, and it was just like a little family. We would be joking around, or get our hair and makeup done, which back then was usually about five to 10 minutes. It probably would be much longer now.

Then we'd be called to go out on set to do a run-through, and it was always freezing cold. I remember those mornings in the studio, having sat in Burbank all night, and it would get pretty chilly without any heat on. My nose would be running with my script in-hand. Everyone would be a little bit more disheveled, have their coffee, look over their lines, and then the day would start. It was just rapid fire, barreling through the material. 

The day wouldn't be complete without being slapped by my father [Gregory], who was played by Sam Behrens. Sometimes I'd be out by about three or four in the afternoon, sometimes a little bit later. And wake up, rinse and repeat.

XAVIER: We had a great group of characters that were a little larger than life. Annie and Olivia were certainly that Aaron Spelling kind of Dynasty thing. I think Sunset Beach was perhaps unusual in the sense of not being about a family, not being about the same kinds of soap opera tropes of the past. We became more soap opera as the show went on and it became more about families and stuff, but when it began, it was definitely more of an unusual thing. 

GUERRERO: It was funny. I got a phone call from my agent saying I had an audition for an Aaron Spelling show — Sunset Beach. I’d seen it on NBC and I thought, "Oh my gosh, what a great cast and how fun, but I've never auditioned for a soap before." Because it was Aaron Spelling, it was really special. I definitely wanted to audition for it, but the role I auditioned for was Maria [Torres], not Francesca. Francesca hadn't been written yet, but Maria was a role that they had already envisioned and were seeing actresses for. They wanted a Latina, so I was brought in to audition for Maria. 

Interestingly, I read the audition scripts, and I decided that if I were to play Maria, who they had written as a rape victim, I would envision her as a rape survivor. I played her very differently than the other women that were auditioning for it, but I kept making the cut. They brought me all the way to the screen test. I think I had gone through four or five different auditions, each time reading Maria as a very strong character. I didn't cry in my scenes with her. I was very angry about what she had gone through, and I almost played her as if she wanted vengeance.

SPELLING: I don't think that anyone treated me differently. I was always conscious of that. Because of the whole idea of nepotism and whatnot, I never wanted anyone to think that I didn't earn my keep, or that I wasn't talented enough to play the role, or, you know, didn't deserve to be there. 

So for me, I really prided myself on showing up on time. I was never late. I was always prepared. There were times, of course, when I made a mistake and messed up here and there. But again, I got pretty down on myself if I flubbed a line more than once, because I was very acutely aware that if I wasn't on my game, then everyone would start to look at me and judge me. I did not want to be judged or criticized by other people for being Aaron Spelling’s son. I felt like I had to work really hard to make sure that I was on my A game. 

XAVIER: The funny thing is, shows are sometimes cast based on the height of the leading man, so you have certain characters that are all going to look good together. Ashley Hamilton (ex-Cole Deschanel) was someone that was a friend of the Spelling family. He was certainly one of Hollywood's brat packs at the time. He was sort of given to the show, and Ashley may not have understood how rigorous the workload was going to be. He was at a sort of partying time in his life, if I'm not mistaken. Ashley was also very tall in relation to Vanessa Dorman (ex-Caitlin Richards) and some of the other cast, like Randy. But the character of Cole was meant to be pretty important. They couldn't just sideline him, so they wrote him out. Then we got Eddie Cibrian, who was such an awesome worker. He was great to look at, he was funny, he got along with everyone, just a top-notch guy. I was very happy when we had Eddie Cibrian take over the role.

GUERRERO: When they brought me in for my test screening, I read against Timothy Adams (ex-Casey Mitchum), and I was the last of the four women they were reading. I busted into that room for the audition with a vengeance, and he went up on his lines, meaning he forgot his lines for my screen test. He’d just done that scene three times before, and he just looked at me and went completely blank. I heard the director call, "Tim, cut! Tim, what are you doing?" And he goes, "I wasn't expecting her to come into the room like that. You know, she slammed the door open, and she came in with this energy." He wasn't expecting that because the other three actresses had played her very differently than I did. Long story short, I didn't get that role. I thought, "Well, I blew it. I could have been on an Aaron Spelling show, and I saw the character differently and didn't want to play the victim." So I just went about my life thinking that that was my one shot at being in an Aaron Spelling show. 

PRATT: The first thing they did was try to change the story, which you always do anyway. And then you base it on what you formulated, what we call "the money", but characters are the money. Sonny Corinthos is the money on General Hospital. So we really look at who's the money on this show, and as I recall, it was Jason George and Sarah Buxton.

Aaron brought Randy on, which is just what Spelling always does. I have nothing but great things to say about Randy. It's unheard of, if not impossible, to walk in and find your first acting job on a soap opera, and he did such a good job. You know, it's in their genes, I suppose. But none of these things were making it popular, so I knew the writing was on the wall a year or so in. 

MESSINGER: Gary took that guitar theme that I wrote into Aaron's office. [Spelling] heard it and said, "Oh, my gosh, why haven't we been using this all along?" For whatever reason, he had never heard my theme, and they went with Tim Truman's theme initially. The [theme song] graphics were very different too. Tim’s opening sequence had a lot of slow dissolves of the headshots with the cast. There was a more aggressive movement in the second version that Gary had reshot nine or ten months later, because there was a lot of feedback, probably from the Spelling crew, that it didn't feel like the [first] opening graphics really fit the show. That happens a lot. You know, a book cover may entice you in a different way than the actual content of the book. I think that was the case with the opening graphics.

GUERRERO: A little while went by, I would say maybe a month, and my agent got a phone call saying Aaron Spelling saw my screen test and he wanted to write a role for her. He wants a very strong woman, and his favorite character is Rita Hayworth from Gilda. What was so crazy about it is that in my house in the Hollywood Hills, I had a framed poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda in my living room when I got that role.

Francesca was originally written to be on the show for three months, to be a disruptor, and to get killed off immediately, but the character became popular and people liked her and they liked to hate her. Then, as the writers got used to my delivery and my sense of humor, I think they decided to have some fun with Francesca and to make her pretty ballsy and not just a disruptor. She was going to have fun as she was taking Sunset Beach down with her. 

XAVIER: In some cases, we recast up; in some cases, we recast down. For some reason, Adrienne Frantz (ex-Tiffany Thorne), the powers-at-be did not like her in the character, so they brought in a different Tiffany, who was not better, but worse. Adrienne was great and she was doing what they wanted the character to be. She was saying the words that the character was supposed to say in the way that she was great at doing. We had another actor, Lauren Woodland, who came on to play Sara Cummings, Meg’s sister, and she did not work out. She was gone within an episode or two. Then she went on to The Young and the Restless as a front-burner character there.

BUXTON: One time, the police pulled me over because I was speeding to get to work. Literally, I didn't care because I just had to get to work. He was writing me the ticket, and I was painting my nails because I had to have my nails a certain color. He comes back to the car and he goes, "I've seen everything, but that's a first: doing your nails while getting a ticket." 

Part III: Terror Island, the Rosario Jewels, and Shockwave: The Zaniest Storylines of S.B.

In the summer of 1997, Sunset Beach went on a week-long hiatus in an effort to do a "soft reboot" of the soap. Even with new theme music and a return to the slower-paced storylines daytime fans are accustomed to, Americans just weren’t interested in a new soap opera. 

To NBC and the crew at Spelling Television, it would take more shock value to turn viewers’ eyes to the Sunset. That fall, plans began for a serial killer storyline that would culminate in the death of a prominent character—bartender Mark Wolper (Nick Stabile)—and the revelation of an evil twin seeking vengeance on brother Ben Evans (Clive Robertson). The Terror Island story, despite airing over the Christmas holidays, proved to be a hit with fans, ringing in a second year of Sunset Beach full of murder, natural disasters, baby swaps, and cursed jewels. 

(Yes, cursed jewels that prematurely aged many Sunset Beach residents, culminating in a race against time to return the jewels to the Madonna statue before midnight to break the curse.)

Some ideas worked better than others. An earthquake-turned-tsunami storyline in summer 1998 not only gave the show its highest ratings, but earned the soap a rare primetime special in an effort to hook a new audience. 

One storyline that hasn’t aged well was ripped from the headlines itself: Meg’s sister Sara (Lauren Woodland/Shawn Batten) was found to be having an affair with a congressman while being blackmailed by a political operative she thought was her confidante. The main difference was that Melinda Fall (Elizabeth Alley), the Linda Tripp character, lost her leg in a shark attack.

In August 1998, Mimi Torchin, Editor-in-Chief of Soap Opera Weekly, wrote: "It's a cheap, attention-grabbing stunt mirroring a national embarrassment that could conceivably bring down a presidency."

POTTER: To me, those two worlds were completely separate. I was quite the news junkie at that time. I would come home and watch the news. I was trying to stay on top of things that were going on. [When] I would go to the set, for me, it was a very self-enclosed world. I was there focusing on "who am I as a mother to my daughter going through this experience? What are the emotional qualities that I want to bring forward in this?" It may have been because Monica Lewinsky's mother wasn't as visible at that time. I wasn't thinking in those terms, I never even really made that connection.

XAVIER: When a show begins, it takes a while to get underway. At one point [June 1997], NBC shut down production because they decided to retool the show and clarify it. We did a week where we aired catch-up episodes. They edited together a clip show that took you up to date on who all the characters were so far in five different nucleuses. I think that's when Meg and Ben were trapped in a cave. From that point forward, we had new writers who were recreating the show.

I loved all of the crazy, fun storylines that we had. I'm just thinking of Mrs. Moreau (Joyce Guy) and Vanessa with Martin’s Syndrome [a rare genetic disease that causes skin disfigurement and mental illness]. The character of Virginia Harrison, played by Dominique Jennings, was a standout. There are certain actors that come on a show and they just write themselves in, and Dominique just gave the writers the ability to see what she could do. I can't think of any single person on that show that I didn't absolutely love, but Dominique was definitely a special find for that show.

SPELLING: I remember one time, in particular, the storyline was that my dad died, and there was all this relationship turmoil that I was going through. Because we shot locations, I had to go to Seal Beach for a two-day period when I was really involved in the storyline. 

I had to leave at 4:30 in the morning to go to Seal Beach and do 22 scenes, which were three or four pages per scene. They actually got a car for me that day, and I had to be driven back to Burbank to give the eulogy and do another eight or nine scenes for the second half of that day. 

I pretty much nailed it. I remember my dad coming home a day later and saying, "I got a call from Gary Tomlin saying, ‘Randy was amazing. Not only did he do good work, he didn't miss a beat. He didn't really miss a line.'" And to me, that was just such a huge compliment, because I'd worked so hard to not give anyone anything to discredit me in some way.

PRATT: When [Guza Jr.] left [in late 1997], I basically left. I still had a consulting credit, so I would talk to Gary occasionally, and they were literally writing it from the hip. They were trying to reinvent the show every week. That went on for like a year, and as time went on, I was just doing Melrose, concentrating on that road and some pilots during that time. I didn't distance myself from Sunset Beach as a credit, but I kind of stayed away and let them do their thing. I'd see them at the Christmas party. Like any soap, it's a family and you do everything you can to make it work. I would never fault Gary for some of the crazy stuff that he did, like the ship turning over, the Titanic thing. I would hear about it and I would wince because I knew that on Melrose, when you jump the shark, you never really get back. So for me, I would never call it an embarrassment. I was disappointed because I thought the show would go on forever.

XAVIER: Shockwave was, of course, a really ambitious thing. The first thing was the earthquake that hit the town. Partly, they used the earthquake to change the set of Gregory and Olivia’s house. Before that, we started with one set that was awkward to shoot in, and then they moved into a much nicer set. I just remember the big chandelier falling and trapping Gordon Thompson under it. We inherited Gordon Thompson (ex-A.J. Deschanel), who was well known from Dynasty to be on the show. A.J., of course, was a star crossed with Olivia. They were thrust together somehow during the earthquake portion.

We got really great stuff, but there was one part of it that was left unrealized and not really well conceived. Poor little Jimmy (Jeffery Wood), Virginia’s son, was supposedly trapped under debris. When we got to the set, we realized what the debris was going to look like. It basically looked like a leaned tube of paper, and Jason George (ex-Michael Bourne), God bless him, had to play that he couldn't shift this deadly debris off of Jimmy. It was ludicrously terrible and horrible. I urge anyone to look it up on YouTube because it truly kind of ruins the whole wonderful reality of the other 90 per cent of that story.

BUXTON: It was dirty for days. They're big party scenes, which means many people in a scene. It goes on for days, whereas normal soap scenes wrap up in one or two days, even if you have big ones. But that one was a long one. It's funny because we hadn’t experienced the big [Hector Mine] earthquake yet. But they're terrifying, so to live in that kind of fear and in that state of mind for so many days is upsetting. But it was dirty and cold on the set.

GUERRERO: I was really intimidated because I had never done a soap opera, and I was thrown right into a very busy storyline, which was Shockwave. To make matters worse, I was in a skimpy red dress doing underwater scenes and working with all these veteran actors. I didn't know how to memorize 30 pages a night. So the first time they handed me my first week of scripts, I just went back to my house and cried. I thought I could never memorize this, plus do all of the physical blocking that was necessary for the Shockwave storyline, and I don't swim – I have to be underwater for some of these scenes. I was so overwhelmed. I was very nervous that I was going to get fired.

XAVIER: I remember one day when I got called up by the producer saying we're adding two scenes to the day tomorrow because we realized that we needed to do them for some reason. When you get scenes added to your day, usually it's like people in the coffee shop chatting. When I come in for my meeting, it turns out they were scenes where Meg and her family are in the hospital corridor during the earthquake, and down a flight of stairs comes tumbling this large cabinet that hits Meg's father. It was quite an ambitious scene to suddenly add at the last minute. 

GARCIA: [Shockwave] was like shooting a film, and there’s a big difference between shooting a film and a soap opera. They took their time, they built great sets, and the writing was great. We had time to really put it together on-camera; it was a big production. Being central in the story is something you always hope to do as an actor, and to be one of the heroes of the show, we've got to bring people out and help them survive. I tried to do every [stunt] I could. 

[Getting the truckload of water tossed on Priscilla and I] was a blast. Priscilla was so great to work with because she'd just go with the flow, and even if you ad-libbed something, which wouldn't be very often, she was good at staying in character. 

SPELLING: For me, I haven't done anything like that. So there's this heightened adrenaline that is running through the set as everyone is dirty and in makeup and the stakes are really high. I was fascinated by it, watching how Phideaux [the director] would envision this and where the cameras had to be. A lot of the time, I was paying attention to all of that. The [actors] are all older than me, so I'm watching how they're handling all of this and how they're playing the scene.

GUERRERO: It was really daunting because there were water tanks and cruise ship sets, and there was quite a bit of physical action, so there was fight choreography. Francesca had some physical altercations with her husband, and then was jostled around by the ship, getting her head cut and going underwater. I was really overwhelmed with it, just the thought of having to do all this in a skimpy red spaghetti strapped gown. Francesca basically had three outfits for most of Sunset Beach: the red skimpy spaghetti strapped dress, the black leather catsuit, and a towel. That was basically my wardrobe for the year. It was hard to do a lot of that choreography, especially the underwater scenes in that little skimpy dress, because I was so self-conscious about it. You know, here I am on an Aaron Spelling show with all these beautiful people in perfect shape, and I hope nobody can see the burrito I ate for lunch.

GARCIA: They had me swim underwater for maybe 30 feet and come out the other side. They [Gabi and Ricardo] were seemingly trapped underwater in the hallway of the ship. That was a little tricky just because when you try to swim underwater for 30 feet and you're inside a cage, sometimes your buoyancy makes you hit the top of the cage, and it's tough to stay down when you've still got 30 feet to go before you pop out of the hole, and you're underwater. I was trying to do my best to stay cool in that one, because Ricardo, being the one that was leading the rescue, was carrying the rope through the tub and everybody else could kind of hold on to the rope and pull themselves through. So it was a little difficult, but I don't think anybody realized that.

XAVIER: We had a designer named George Beckett, who had also been the designer for Santa Barbara. He built three different dining room sets. One that was the dining room, one that was the dining room that could actually pivot almost 90 degrees. The tables were all bolted down, and we had stunt people who were sliding down the set. Then we had the ceiling of that set, where there was one particular table that Aunt Bette happened to be trapped on. The whole plotline was to get her down from the table because we were now on the ceiling. 

Then they had to climb up the ladder. It was just amazing the amount of money [NBC] spent. I mean, first we did the ship part, where we had huge water dumps that would come into the set. We had portions of the set cordoned off where we could have floods. There was a point at which the ceiling collapsed in the dining room, and water was coming in. They had to escape up through the ladder to the second floor, where everything was upside down. We had a camera operator named Ray Liu who operated our jib, the crane camera, which we obviously needed to use a lot during that whole sequence.

GUERRERO: Francesca became more popular, so they extended my three-month contract to six months, then nine months, and then a year. I think the problem was that she was written to be in different storylines so that a lot of people would have a motive to kill her because they wanted to have a storyline a la Who Shot J.R.? So the storyline, of course, was: Who Shot Francesca? The problem was, this was to boost ratings, and then they were going to get rid of my character and hopefully retain these new viewers. But the viewers started to like this character, Francesca, and so the producers faced this dilemma of "we can’t kill her off." They kept extending my contract, writing new scenes for me to be in, and finding out that these people wanted to kill her. They finally killed me, and it hurts the ratings. So they kept bringing me back as the ghost of Francesca, or I was haunting people’s nightmares. There's a scene where I come back as a nun. 

XAVIER: One of my favorite storylines was when we revealed Ben's brother, when Derek went to the haunted island. Ben’s beard never grew, no matter how long he was kept in seclusion by Derek. 

At one point, they did these scenes called "drop-in scenes" where they would take a story from the news a day or two earlier, and we would always reserve a minute or two in an episode where Aunt Bette would somehow be talking about the very thing that happened that day or the day before. We would not finish editing an episode until the day before it aired. I also remember a radio station, I think it was in Los Angeles, that was trying to somehow get a potato on various television shows. I remember we had the potato on Sunset Beach. I think we hinted that someone might have cut the potato. 

SPELLING: [My father] did come to the set a few times, whenever there was something to celebrate. I think we hit 300 episodes and he came down and there was a cake. He actually played a role in the soap opera [Vincent Duke, in a nod to co-executive producer E. Vincent Duke], which I was blown away by—that out of all the TV shows that he's produced, he would choose to play a role in Sunset Beach. I thought that was really interesting.

GUERRERO: Some of the fun things were the love scenes with Eddie Cibrian (ex-Cole Deschanel). He was a former athlete at UCLA, and I was, of course, a sportscaster. So we would always be talking about sports off-camera. We really bonded, talking about the Lakers, the Dodgers, the Rams, USC and UCLA football. It's funny, when we were making out, we were just being silly about it. Of course, it's great to make out with hot Eddie Cibrian. But also, I looked at him as my sports buddy. I enjoyed my time with him, and he was a dream to work with because he's such a good actor. 

GARCIA: Obviously, the Gabi rape trial was a very emotional time [on-set]. It was the last few weeks that Laura Herring (ex-Paula Stevens) was on the show. I remember her coming to me during the filming of that, because [despite the fact that] we still hadn't satisfied the whole storyline, she told me they were letting her go. It was during this time that Paula and Ricardo actually said goodbye to each other. I just remember shooting that scene. It was a pretty intense, emotional scene because she'd just told me she was leaving the show.

XAVIER: There was another slight controversy that we had at Sunset Beach as well. The storyline with the haunted diamonds was going to actually culminate in revealing the character of Phillip Vargas [Michael Sabatino] as a vampire. NBC would not let us do that story because, at that point, Passions (1999–2008) was in the offing. The network knew that if we used that type of supernatural thing, it would subvert Passions, which was going to be totally supernatural.

BUXTON: One time, we were working at the beach. We had to get up at 4 a.m. to drive to Seal Beach, and then they expected us to drive ourselves back to NBC and work a full day in the studio. It was pouring rain, and I had all this antique jewellery on and some crazy outfit. They wanted me back at the studio immediately to work, and I couldn’t. I was so tired that I could not go any further. It was a really bad neighborhood, and I just pulled my car over to go to sleep. I was going to crash if I didn't. And so I just fell asleep for an hour, and then I woke up and drove to work. Like, there's Annie on the side of the road taking a nap.

XAVIER: One of the things that was wonderful about the show was Annie's fantasies. She would sometimes have these outrageous fantasies, and I remember one of them being Jerry Springer. Annie, Olivia and Cole were guests on The Jerry Springer Show. It just so happened that Howie Mandel was next door on the lot that day [filming The Howie Mandel Show] and someone saw him at the commissary. So they said, "Hey, would you come over and be in Sunset Beach and just introduce The Jerry Springer Show?" So Howie Mandel came on the set and they just threw him in the scene to be part of Annie's crazy fantasy. 

MESSINGER: We tried to get some soundtracks out there. As a matter of fact, when I did Beyond the Sunset, I met with the head of Maverick, Madonna's music publishing company, Lionel Conway. He came over to my studio and I played him that song and a few other things from Sunset Beach. I wanted to see if they would get an artist or do a record deal or something and get Beyond the Sunset out there. The problem with a lot of the soap music, in his opinion, is that the music was too soft for radio, and there was no audience for that. I beg to differ. 

PART IV: Cancellation

In 1999, Tony Calega wrote, "Sunset Beach is NBC's best soap. Unfortunately, because it's not as big as Days or outlandish as Passions, Sunset is suffering from a bad case of middle-child syndrome."

While Days and Passions aired back-to-back, Sunset Beach aired in scattered timeslots across affiliates. Before the show’s cancellation was even announced in October 1999, many affiliates were already scrapping plans to air the remainder of the soap in favour of another hour of The Today Show.

The writing had seemingly been on the wall. During the 1998-99 TV season, Sunset Beach was bringing in just 1.9 million viewers, a rating still surpassed regularly by three of the four remaining American soap operas on-air.

Despite the show remaining low-rated in the U.S., Sunset Beach caught on with fans in the United Kingdom, where episodes of the soap would regularly outrate their U.S. broadcasts. With Channel 5 airing episodes featuring commentary by John Duvall, the show proved to be so popular in Europe that a help-line was set up for viewers to grieve the loss of their beloved program. The dial-in number aired during the closing credits of the final episode.

In typical soap opera style, the show ends with its two supercouples — Ben and Meg, and Michael and Vanessa — exchanging vows at their double wedding. But just before it seems like a happy ending is on the horizon, Meg wakes up... in her childhood bed... in Kansas... in 1997?!

In a wink to Dallas's (1978–1991) genius cliffhanger of rendering the events of an entire season a dream, Meg found herself coming to the realization that her three years in Sunset Beach never happened. What if Sunset Beach wasn’t even a real place at all?

Just like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meg (who used the chatroom username Dorothy from Kansas during her initial online fling with Ben) would recognize everyone from Sunset Beach around her as family, friends, and wedding guests. But just when it seemed like all hope was lost — and viewers were cheated out of 755 episodes — Meg answered a knock at the door: Ben.

Waking up from their honeymoon, they shared their final exchange:

Meg: When you came in the door, I knew…

Ben: We’d be together?

Meg: Forever.

Ben: Well I promise you darling, this is no dream.

XAVIER: What NBC ultimately planned was to own their own show, and they were going to get rid of Another World (1964–1999). NBC was going to slim down to two soaps. It was a political thing, probably because NBC realized, "Why do we need Spelling?" The show never got the high ratings that they expected. The network regretted having cancelled Santa Barbara (1984–1993) and thought a show with the initials S.B. would be a great way to go. They had a lot of the same people from Santa Barbara, and they also wanted that beach quality. Sunset Beach was just, unfortunately, at the wrong place at the wrong time.

GARCIA: All of a sudden, it became Sunset Beach vs. Another World (1964-1999). We didn't know which one was going to remain and which one was going to be cancelled. That was so ironic because Another World was where I started in the business. I knew a lot of those actors, and I didn't want them to lose their jobs. I was split between what I really wanted to happen. During this time, I bought a camera and started recording interviews with all the cast members about how they felt about our possibility of being cancelled or not, what their feelings were about the show, and how they got on the show. I still have that footage on a hard drive. I'm trying to put it together, maybe for a mini-documentary. It's something I have on the back of my project list.

PRATT: Melrose finished its run, and Sunset Beach was right at two-and-a-half years. Jonathan Levin called me into Aaron’s office and said, "We want you to take over as executive producer and head writer of Sunset Beach, a show you created." I looked at him and I thought, "This is just like the ship; it's sinking. I'm in a good spot in my primetime career. I don't really want to go back." I mean, I was reluctant to do it in the first place because it could damage my primetime career and would have – I'm not kidding about that. From a network standpoint, the pressure was relentless on him, as it is with new shows and especially soap operas. Aaron takes it as well as anybody, and so do I. But, you know, life's too short at some point. So I said no, and Aaron said, "We'll pay you a million dollars for 12 months." I looked at him and said, "I've got two young kids." I had not made that amount of money at Melrose, and at the time, that was a great deal of money. I contemplated it, but I didn't sleep on it. I remember I said to Levin, "Well, are you guaranteeing me 12 months, because there's only six months left on the show and then NBC can dump it." At this point, Ohlmeyer was gone, and I said, "I don't need my latest credit to be that I drove a show I created into the ground."

XAVIER: When I went to Sunset Beach, I wasn't really sure that I wanted to stay in Los Angeles. I couldn't imagine leaving New York. I insisted that I have a contract that was two years in length, and I could leave before the third year if I wanted to. My contract was for three years, but I had what they call an "out" after two years. So I exercised my "out", but I stayed six months longer than I had intended, so I left in mid-1999. That was just before Sunset Beach got the news that they were going to be canceled. 

GARCIA: It came down to a time when NBC said they would make an announcement between Sunset Beach and Another World on a specific day. Then, by the end of the day, they'd say, "Oh, we'll do it next week," and that happened three or four times. Finally, there was an announcement over the P.A. and Gary asked everybody to come to the set. There were between 200 and 300 people on set. Gary came out with the longest face, and when he walked by me, I thought, "Oh gosh, this doesn't look like the face of someone whose show just got saved." He went to the front and he said, "I have to announce that Another World just got cancelled and NBC kept you guys." Everybody breathed a big sigh of relief, but Gary came from Another World too. All those people were friends of his. It turned out to be some kind of Squid Game with each other.

MESSINGER: About three months before Sunset Beach was canceled, as the ratings were starting to decline, there was this big production meeting where the producers and the network all came in and said, "One of the ways we can help the show is if we play the same songs that Dawson's Creek plays." I foolishly disagreed because I know soap fans are loyal and they'll actually tell you, "Why are you playing the same crap we're hearing on Days of Our Lives? We want our own music, we want our own brand." And I knew that that's what our fans wanted. I knew there was a website started by a European fan called SOS, which stands for Support Our Sunset. Sort of knowing what was on the horizon with the powers that be, I literally went into Gary Tomlin’s office after that meeting. I had printed out about 100 emails. 90 of them were "please keep the original songs in Sunset Beach" and about 10 of them were "oh, we love hearing what's on the other shows." So I said, "You've got 90 per cent of your audience wanting us to keep the songs and not play everybody else's stuff." I got beaten down, and the show still got canceled.

POTTER: I knew that we were in a competition, and Passions had that whole supernatural thing going on. I'd been in a competition like that before. The first TV show that I did was called Today’s FBI (1981-82) and we ended up in competition with T.J. Hooker (1982-86). We lost that competition as well. I knew it was possible that we were in some jeopardy, but I didn't really pay much attention to it. I tried to just enjoy it for as long as I had it. By the time we finished, I was almost finished with my hours, so I sat for the licensing exam soon after that. But I was very disappointed. I would have done it for the rest of my life. I never would have had to make money as a therapist, I just would have done it pro bono and kept that balance back and forth.

PRATT: Everyone said, "Oh, he'll never forgive you." Levin even said that to me, but boy, Aaron sure did right away. I created the show Titans (2000) for him within six months. I remember Aaron saying, "You mean to tell me you don't have the confidence that you can turn this show into a hit?" And I said, "I have lots of confidence, but sometimes when the ship is going down, having created and then riding it into the ground, I'm not interested, Josh Griffith is not interested, and you already fired Bob. I think Christopher Whitesell is great. Keep with your people."

My only advice was to simply write it back, pull it back – as we did with Melrose – to its core, pull it back to what sold it and what the audience liked. Use six actors total. Don't bring new characters in right and left. Build on whatever small audience you've got, which we did on Santa Barbara to great success. It had its foundation through the ups and downs of that show, and they were as big as they were on Sunset Beach, always unnecessary: drama, drama, drama, fueled by Emmys.

GARCIA: Six months went by, and the show was about to start its third year, and they were renewing all of the cast's contracts. By this time, I'm in the middle of building a huge swimming pool at my house. I'm spending money. They gave me a great contract. Everything was laid out. And then the show got cancelled. It was tough because we had just bought a house a couple of years before. My wife and I had been looking for a home in Ojai when I was in one of the six-month periods where they could cancel my contract. That was in 1997, when the show was in full gear. I was the one feeling vulnerable because I was coming up on a six-month contract review. Before the end of my final six months, I went in to see Gary and said, "I don't know how my storyline is going or what's going on, but we're thinking of making an offer on this house in Ojai." I said, "Gary, I don't know what to do." He looked at me and replied, "Buy the house." So we bought the house, and that was a massive thing in our lives. It brought a great deal of joy (and a great bunch of bills too!) but a lot of fun over the past 20 years. I credit Gary for helping me do that because he kind of sensed my hesitation.

GUERRERO: Weirdly, for me, I never really knew [when I finished as Francesca] because after I died, I wasn't really dead — I was in a coma, and then I came out of the coma and accused the wrong person of killing me when I knew it was really Gregory. The joke was that every time I left the set, they would say, "Okay, we'll see you next week!" At the time, my old manager kept getting these phone calls from the production, saying, "We're thinking about a way to bring Lisa back." The last thing we heard was Francesca’s evil-er twin. So I never really felt like "okay, this is my last day." I'm really thankful for that because I didn't have this sad, crying realization that "This is it. I'll never see my friends again."

BUXTON: We had a 700th episode party where they brought a big cake out and gave us gifts and things. We knew that the network was negotiating. So they still gave us that recognition. A few months later, we were constantly waiting for an answer about whether or not we were picked up. It had to do with the argument about who was going to get the European residuals, either the network or Spelling. It had to do with money. It was just upsetting. We were just super sad, everybody, the crew, everybody. We were all crying, especially Randy and I. It was hard. I remember that [last] day, we were crying and hugging, and we were all really upset.

SPELLING: I seem to remember, somehow, I was in the dressing room and the news kind of rippled through. I was bummed out, like most people. I think any actor or crew member who's on a show and they like the show, no one wants that to end. You know, it starts to feel like a family. It's a pretty well-oiled machine. I could have easily spent another few years on it and would have been happy. It was bittersweet. 

[The last day] I’ve blanked it out. It's funny, I look back on that time now and there was this wonderful and beautiful consistency. I knew where I was going. [Now] I run my own business and there's always constant flux and change. There's just something beautiful about that consistency; all I had to do was show up and learn my lines. And I got to interact with people and create something fun, and it was just a beautiful time. So when I look back at that last day, I think I purposely hid that somewhere deep because I did not want that to end.

GUERRERO: It was just a group of really hard-working kids that felt really lucky to be on this show. We spent every day on the set giggling and goofing around, and then we would socialize off the set. We would all go out to dinner afterwards. I had a Christmas party, and everybody came to my house. Then somebody else would have Thanksgiving, and everybody would go to their house. I was the designated driver for some of the bar-hopping that the kids did, because I didn't drink. So, you know, it was really a lot of fun.

I was shocked when the show was finally cancelled because we had been trying to crawl back to bring up the ratings, and I know that some of our storylines helped. I thought that would give us one more season to kind of work it out. I was really hoping that I could come back for one final season. But that wasn't destined to be for my career. I had other things to accomplish. I went to do national sports, Monday Night Football, and now investigative journalism. It was definitely meant to be for me to move on. I look back with no sadness and no regret – just totally awesome, happy memories.

MESSINGER: I think what ended up happening within the business was a lot of reality shows, and then the Judge Judy's of the world kind of helped bring down the soap opera audience. That was inevitable ever since The Real World (1992-) and the OJ Simpson trial back in the ‘90s. The audiences were dropping, the budgets were climbing, and you couldn't reconcile the two when you had a cast of 40 people and 10 writers.

XAVIER: Sunset Beach was an ambitious show, and we had long hours. I was told by the producers very early on that the episodes were not about me making my mark as a director. It was not about me wowing and dazzling people with creative methods of shooting. It was about telling the story. What I was meant to do was not get in the way of the actors but to support them in being able to do their best work. That was great advice because, honestly, at the end of the day, people care about the characters they love. That was the secret weapon that I developed as a result of working on Sunset Beach.

GUERRERO: I’ll always be so thankful to Aaron Spelling for seeing something in me. I ended up really bonding with two of my fellow actors, Priscilla Garita (ex-Gabi Martinez) and Kam Heskin (ex-Caitlin Richards). 25 years later, the three of us are best friends. In fact, I'm the godmother of Kam’s youngest son, Lucas. Priscilla and I see each other all the time, celebrating each other's birthdays, weddings, and everything. I would never have met them had it not been for Sunset Beach. Ironically, of course, I'm the bad girl, and they were both good girls. The dynamics are pretty funny that we all ended up being such great friends.

GARCIA: I wish NBC would do the right thing and make it available [on-demand]. I'm sure it has to do with licensing and advertising and all kinds of things, but it would be such a good gesture to the fans. Put it in high quality and release it. It's weird, we aired kind of right before the whole internet scenario happened, and that was the one bad timing of the whole thing. If we'd come on five years later, the internet would have carried the series, or maybe another network. Gary seemed to be very optimistic about us landing on MTV. He'd even told me, "Don't worry, because I think we'll get picked up." Nowadays, there are so many streaming services, it probably would've been picked up automatically.

BUXTON: For a while after, it was really hard to work because [Hollywood] saw me as this caricature. That's why I got rid of the red hair and changed things a little bit, just so people would take me seriously again.

I'm so grateful to the fans because they're the ones who made it happen in a lot of ways. Sunset Beach was so much fun, such a great period of time in my life, and I'm so grateful for it. It was fun creating the characters. I could jump right back into it — Annie lives right next to me. It was just an incredibly fun journey. It had to do with the people watching. You felt it when they caught on to the fun of it. You know? That's why I love the European fans. They just got it. The fact that people really experienced Annie as I had intended made me really happy. 

GUERRERO: I tell young actors and young broadcasters to try to do as many different types of jobs as they can. Get used to being on camera, get used to writing, get used to performing, get used to seeing yourself on television, get used to self-criticism. Because everything that I've done has helped to make me a very confident investigative reporter. In fact, I would say that working on Sunset Beach and being an actor has specifically helped me, because as an investigative reporter, I go undercover and I play different characters. I'll pretend I'm a victim or a homeowner. I've worn disguises. My acting background has definitely helped me be a better investigative reporter because of how many times we do stories that include hidden cameras and those kinds of undercover elements. I'm really good at that stuff because I'm an actor. I throw myself into those roles. I think I've used Francesca’s powers for good. She used her powers for evil. But who knows? She may have had a life change as she got older. I like to think of her as not evil, but misunderstood.

SPELLING: I'm always acting. You know, just by the nature of life, everything is kind of a stage. I've taken everything I've learned as an actor and applied that to [my work as] a life coach and motivational speaker. One of my strong suits is that I'm able to act things out for people. It's one thing to tell someone a concept because we all know the patterns that we have. But we don't necessarily see ourselves from an outside point of view. So if I can act out the pattern that's happening within someone or within someone's life, they can see what it looks like. And there's a completely different "aha."

I'm really thankful that I had the time that I did as an actor because it allows me to play with creativity and tone and inflection and intention and really feel. Even just from an empathy standpoint, I feel like everyone should take an acting class so they can learn to understand what it's like to feel a character, even if that's not you. I think I'm a pretty nice person. It's also fun to play a devious character or a bad character. Because you get to feel what it's like, what the thought processes are with the feelings, and what the backstory is for that character. I think it's a really helpful tool in life and in relationships.

BUXTON: Sometimes we want to escape, especially now. I feel like Sunset Beach was that opportunity. It was an escape into something unrealistic and fun. That's what I like: very dramatic things to escape from. Now, I binge-watch all kinds of things. But I didn't understand back then what being an audience member and loving a character so much in a show meant. It was a fun ride with fans. It was a fun ride with my friends and the other actors and the producers, and I feel lucky. I'm sad Aaron Spelling is not with us anymore. He was a genius.

GUERRERO: Nobody realized how popular the show would be internationally. We thought we were just doing a daytime American soap opera, and when the show became this international sensation, especially in Europe, I don't think any of us expected it. We were on the cover of Loaded Magazine, which is a men's magazine in England. We were on primetime across different European countries. I've never seen the show front to back. Hopefully, some streaming service will make it available so that people can see Sunset Beach from beginning to end.

“When the moon rises early /

just as the Santa Ana winds kick up out of nowhere /

as the sun is just dropping out of sight /

whoever you meet at the far side of the pier /

is who you're destined to be with.” - The legend of Sunset Beach

Who knows? This may be your night.