No, she wasn’t originally on the schedule for this week. I read about her while writing Wednesday’s article, and I knew there was more about her than I could fit into it without making the article unwieldy; Sweet Valley has a lot to it. However, the woman is 85 and the next opening on my calendar into which she’d fit was in July 2026. That sort of thing, I’ll shuffle the schedule for, though we’ve got a lot of theme months in the next two years, and there’s not a lot of shuffling the schedule will take. Still, I promise you she’s interesting for more than just launching the greatest grade school soap opera for girls book series of the ‘80s.
If, as I posited when discussing Sweet Valley, the ‘80s were the Golden Age of soap operas, the ‘60s were the silver one. And it was the ‘60s when Francine Pascal got her start. She and her husband John were staff writers for The Young Marrieds, a short-running soap that followed General Hospital on the rotation. It ran for a year and a half and ended on a cliffhanger wherein one of the major characters, a commercial artist, discovered he was going blind and locked himself in his studio with a loaded gun. This would be a little more extreme than the plots of the books, but only a little.
From there, the Pascals took a brief detour to Broadway. They, along with her brother, Michael Stewart of Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly! Fame, wrote a musical called George M! (it appears Stewart liked him punctuation in a title). It had music and lyrics by George M. Cohan, its subject, and was apparently known by pretty well everyone to have been terrible and a destined flop. Despite starring Joel Grey in the title role and featuring Bernadette Peters as his sister, it sounds awful. It was the Pascals’ only Broadway credit.
It’s kind of hard to get a real feel for what books she wrote on her own. There’s Hangin’ Out With Cici, made into “My Mother Was Never a Kid” for ABC Afterschool Special. There’s Fearless, a series which later became a made-for-TV movie starring Rachael Leigh Cook. There’s If Wishes Were Horses, which seems to be a semi-autobiographical novel written after the death by cancer of John at age 48. She seems to have co-written The Strange Case of Patty Hearst with him before then. There are something over 400 books on her Amazon page and I know with certainty she didn’t write a ton of them.
Because, yes, there’s Sweet Valley. Sadly, the CW Gritty Reboot seems to not be happening. That’s disappointing, because I feel as though only a CW Gritty Reboot could do the books justice. You could just do straight adaptations of book after book and have people insisting that they were taking bizarre liberties with the series. Oh, the books where the girls are preteens are wholesome enough, I suppose, but Sweet Valley High was as bizarre as anything you’d see on Riverdale, maybe more so. And the cast of Young, Pretty People is much larger. Pascal thought about making it a TV show originally, and maybe its true potential only existed in the ‘80s.
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