As Footprints celebrates the 20th anniversary of its debut online, creator, writer, and producer Michael Ross weighs in on the highs, the lows, the could-have-beens, and the I-wish-they-hadn’t-beens…

What has been your favorite storyline over the past 20 years?

This is an easy way to begin! As an overall story, absolutely the Footprint Killer. I’d wanted to do a serial killer story for years, and I’d come up with several iterations along the way, but the timing was never quite right. And I’m glad I waited, because it wound up not just being about the shock of the murders, but a chance to really tell a canvas-wide story in a way I hadn’t quite been able to do before that. It really forced me to up my writing game in terms of weaving various threads together and balancing forward-moving action with the necessary reacting and reflecting from the characters. And I’m really proud of the way that it wasn’t just a “the bad guy gets caught and everyone moves on” wrap-up — the repercussions have arguably been bigger than the story itself. The murders spun off stories about Sarah and Molly covering up Philip’s shooting to protect their mother, and the blackmailer targeting Tori to put the screws to Sarah, and Danielle drinking, and so on… It really turned into exactly what I’d always wanted such a “big” story to be.

How about least favorite storyline?

I could reference a lot of the early stories as things that simply didn’t work or weren’t executed as well as they should’ve been (or well at all!), but at least most of them had an underlying point or accomplished something dramatically. But there was one story in those first few years that still makes me go, “What the hell was I thinking?” That story is the Helen/Don/Sally triangle.

Helen has sort of become a hilarious fan favorite in the present day, but back then, she and Don were just random “parents” I created for Courtney. Like, the entirety of my thought process was, “Uh, Courtney needs parents in this episode.” The Chases were a second family by default, so I decided to flesh them out by giving Don another kid, only Alex wasn’t really his, and frankly, I don’t think it would be possible for me to get drunk enough now to come up with something as ridiculous as Sally sweeping Don off to Paris, where his fugue states made him think he’d stolen a painting from the Musée d’Orsay. Like, what?! And for all that weirdness, it was also just another bland triangle where a third party was trying to separate a poorly defined couple. The one good thing to come out of all this was the introduction of Alex, whose dynamics with Jason, Courtney, and Lauren proved pretty interesting and who has gone on to become a legitimately popular character. But boy, was that whole thing a mess, and it’s hard for me to skim those scenes now without wanting to crawl into a hole.

Is there a character who has surprised you most — in terms of development or reception you didn’t expect?

As I mentioned above, Helen Chase has kind of become a fan favorite, which is both hilarious and amazing to me. When she first appeared in 1998, she was literally just conceived as “older lady who is Courtney’s mom.” She supported her daughter and loved her husband and got upset when it seemed like he had left her for Sally Marshall. In truth, it wasn’t until Courtney’s death in 2009 that Helen became anything more to me. She and Don had been on the series for 12 years, and it felt necessary to explore their grief over Courtney’s murder, even though they were far from the main focus of the series.

I knew that I wanted to play the conflict between Jason and the Chases as everyone dealt with their grief in different ways, but unlike how I normally write, I didn’t really plan the story in much detail. So I wound up “finding” much of it as I went along, which made it fun. (I would never really do this with something like a murder mystery, where the clues need to be planted early and carefully, but it can work for something that’s more of a purely emotional story as long as you stay true to the characters and their realities.) When Helen decided to challenge Jason for custody of Sophie, I had no idea that she would wind up faking a kidnapping — which then backfired on her. Something about all of that really brought Helen to life as this impulsive, outspoken character, and I just ran with it. Her conflict with Natalie, her grandmotherly relationship with Tori (and rivalry with Fee C.!), her arrests during the Footprint Killer mystery — all of that has just flowed from my discovery of a real voice for Helen in the wake of Courtney’s death. She’s a fun combination of comic relief and plot device, but I think it works because the audience has seen her go through this devastating loss that, frankly, anyone would struggle to recover from. I never thought that, on the occasion of our 20th anniversary, I’d be naming Helen Chase as a favorite to write, but here we are.

Are there any characters you wish you’d gotten to write for more?

The nice thing about Footprints being text-based is that I’m not subject to the comings and goings of actual actors. It’s crazy, when you stop and think about it, how many big moves on the TV soaps have happened solely because of an actor leaving the show, or an actor being willing to return, etc. In this medium, I don’t have to worry about that. I only really write characters out of the series when I feel that it serves an important purpose or that their stories have been fully told. My point is, I get to write as much as I want for most characters because it’s completely up to me if and when they go. And there have been quite a few characters I’ve gotten stuck writing for longer than I would have liked! But one does come to mind whom I wish I’d gotten to “live” with longer: Shannon Parish.

During her original run, she was a completely disposable, run-of-the-mill psycho who became obsessed with Jason, terrorized Courtney, was revealed to have killed her parents in a fire, and wound up in a mental hospital. Aside from being a catalyst for some craziness — and a Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan ripoff — that pushed Jason and Courtney to go from friends to lovers, there really wasn’t much to Shannon. But I have this thing where I love to visit the biggest of soap opera tropes (you might even call them clichés) and try to build stories that prove why those devices became so big in the first place. Shannon was my opportunity to do that with the old “back from the dead with a new face thanks to amazing cosmetic surgery” setup. In building that story, I was forced to dig into a really one-dimensional character and figure out what made her tick. The abuse she suffered as a child, her chemical imbalance, her furious need to prove she was worthy of love — all of this combined into what became an incredibly compelling character. The more outrageous her plans and actions became, the more fascinating I found her.

I always knew that the way to give her return true gravity was to have her murder Courtney, and after that, Shannon realized that she would still never have Jason, and she hurled herself off the roof of a building to her death. I remember sitting in my parents’ kitchen writing the scene where she jumped, and I started crying because I felt so bad for this psychotic fictional character. I don’t think there was necessarily more story to tell with her (minus maybe some on-the-run tale that would prolong her inevitable end), but I definitely would have loved to be able to keep getting inside that character’s head.

What’s your biggest regret from the past 20 years of Footprints?

There isn’t much that I would say I regret. Some things haven’t gone as planned, and some ideas turned out to be bad ones. But I’ve generally learned from all of those stories or characters or eras, and one thing that I’m proud of is that I can usually spin them off into something useful, even if it isn’t what I originally intended. But there’s one general thing about the beginning of the series that I do regret, even though it’s absolutely been a learning experience, and that’s the murky handling of sexual consent in those early stories.

In my original bible, Ryan had raped Claire back when they were teenagers, and yet she still had an adult relationship with him — and, after that, he went on to have a serious relationship with Danielle. In the series, I was able to ‘fix’ that by revealing fairly early that it was actually Stan, Ryan’s biological father and a character whom I had no intention of making rootable, who’d raped Claire. I still think it was an unnecessary plot element, but Claire’s past as a rape victim has informed the woman she is today (most recently, she shared her experience with her foster daughter, Tempest, in urging her to open up about her own past abuse in order to move forward with her life).

The situation that’s been much trickier was the plot in which Diane Bishop lied to an amnesiac Tim (her employee) that she was his wife, thus causing him to have sex with her. It wasn’t written as a rape, and this sort of coercion or trickery — especially female-on-male — tended to be used pretty widely two decades ago in daytime TV. I think that our understanding of informed consent has really deepened in the past 20 years, and there’s a continually growing realization that sexual assault doesn’t have to mean one party pinning down the other while s/he screams and cries. What Diane did to Tim was, I came to realize several years later, was rape. Tim consented because he didn’t know who she was — but if he’d had his faculties about him, he would not have slept with her. He didn’t give informed consent. It was an assault.

For a long time, I just kind of ignored this backstory. The incident produced their daughter, Samantha, who is now a central adult character. Tim and Claire got custody of Samantha, and Diane — who was a pretty one-dimensional, albeit fun for her snakiness, schemer — left town. And this is where things got messier. Tim was presumed dead, and I had Diane come back to challenge Claire for custody of Sam. Eventually, she won, but in the process, she became friends with Tim’s sister, Sarah, and became a fan (and writer) favorite. Diane has a different energy than the Fishers, and that sort of firecracker is a great addition to the cast. When Tim returned from the dead, only to find Claire involved with his half-brother, Ryan, his whole world was thrown off-kilter, and he actually wound up in a relationship with Diane. That eventually fizzled out, and despite Diane’s penchant for misdeeds (usually things like revealing others’ secrets for her own personal gain — nothing on the level of her original violation of Tim), she grew into a central cast member, even remaining friends with Tim.

Tim and Diane were actually a pretty popular pairing, and every few months, someone suggests to me that they should be endgame. Given their chemistry during their mid-2000s relationship and the offbeat nature of their friendship, I’ve often been tempted to go there again. But, in the past several years, their backstory has really weighed on me. I suspect that Diane’s assault on Tim is something most readers only know about as a vague piece of history — almost no one was reading way back at the start of 1998, and it was rendered in such a dopey way. My brain, however, doesn’t do well with dissonance, and it’s increasingly bugged me that I have this popular character who did this largely unacknowledged terrible thing. Finally, I decided to tackle it in the text. The story is playing out in the current episodes (October 2017): Samantha’s girlfriend, Tempest, vengefully digs into Diane’s past and exposes the truth about how Sam was conceived. I know it’s a really tricky thing to handle, and there’s a delicate balance to hit, but I think it’s worthwhile. Samantha is struggling with this horrifying truth about why she exists. Diane — who, frankly, I do love, and I wish I could just have everyone decide to blame a foolish 14-year-old writer instead of this character! — is admitting that she has carried around guilt all these years and is being forced to reckon with the reality of what she did. Tim, as the victim, has had some really complicated reactions: he actually got involved with Diane, and he doesn’t hate her, but this is all colored by the way that his life was ripped away from him and how he had to re-center himself upon his return. It’s been a really tricky dance to nail, and I’m sure that I’m not getting it all right, but I do feel that it’s been worth it and attempt to square some really careless, messy history with who the characters have become since.

So, to circle back to the actual question: I regret ever using this as a plot device, and if I could go back in time, I’d have just written in a brief separation for Tim and Claire, during which Diane seduced him and he willingly slept with her.

What was it like rewriting the pilot episode for the anniversary?

Two descriptors come to mind: strange and exhausting. This was something I’d kicked around for years. The original pilot is written so flatly, partly because it’s done in a very bare-bones script format (as opposed to the narrative style I began in 2000) and partly because I didn’t bother to flesh anything out. I mean, it just starts with Paula and Molly having this totally humdrum conversation, giving us no context of who these people are or why the hell we should care about them.

For me, this project was a way to reflect back on the origins of the series and think about how and why the characters became who they did. One of the most-referenced things about the early days is the feud between sisters Sarah and Molly (which developed around a love triangle that had them fighting over Brent Taylor), but that tension is completely absent from the original pilot. It’s like Sarah only began resenting Molly when she sensed an attraction between her and Brent, and as the story went along and I developed more of a clue (any clue at all) about how writing works, I retrofitted the sisters’ rivalry into their lives and backstory. Doing the rewrite allowed me to do things like go back to a time when their animosity was basically all subtext, rather than something explicit, and to thread in Paula’s seeming preference for Molly. I also took care to figure out Sarah’s side of it (she shouldn’t have just been this poor, innocent victim) — she could be selfish, and in the new version, we see her hanging out with Brent and purposely being late for the family dinner without calling to tell anyone where she is. Of course, I also got to write Bill and Courtney as living, breathing people again, and they’re both characters I miss.

Since I was only rewriting the pilot for fun (and to give people something readable to check out if they wanted to see the “early days”), I made myself stick to the general plots of the original premiere, so that it would flow into the subsequent episodes and maintain continuity. But doing this spurred all kinds of ideas for how I would do things differently if I were starting out now or rebooting the series. I would definitely want to open “bigger” — not for shock value, but to use a central event to introduce everyone and kick stories into gear, rather than all four siblings’ storylines coincidentally beginning on the same day out of nowhere. In the way I used Paula’s dinner party in the rewrite to bring everyone together (in the original, everyone just showed up at the house without actual motivation), I’d want to use something along the lines of Tim and Claire’s wedding to start the series off with some stakes and action.

Have you ever seriously considered ending the series? 

I’ve been pretty vocal about having considered ending Footprints back in 1999. This was during a “boom period” (I’m laughing as I write that, but you know what I mean) for the written web series community — especially the soap-styled ones — and, given the relative craziness of Footprints, with its psychos and mobsters running amok, I decided to try my hand at a much more down-to-earth family drama. It was called In This Life, and I posted it without identifying myself as the author. It was fascinating to see how much more positively people responded to stories that arose out of character rather than the gimmicks that had generally fueled FP to that point. [Side note: One of the things I’d hoped to do for the 20th was collect all the In This Life episodes and post them on the site as a bonus. That turned out to be much more daunting than I anticipated, especially given the recent site renovation, but it’s in the pipeline for later.] Eventually, I revealed myself, and the difference in reception between the two stories (FP was generally, at that time, regarded as fun but pretty schlocky and surface) caused me to consider canceling FP and moving ahead with ITL. But the Fishers had my heart, and my lack of long-term planning with ITL made it tough to feel as invested. After six months, I ended ITL and redrafted my bible for FP, having had the revolutionary idea to incorporate the things that worked well in ITL — you know, digging into character, finding the emotional underpinnings of stories instead of just flying through events — into FP.

There were two other times that I came… not close to ending Footprints, but strongly considered what that would look like and how I would do it. The first was in 2006-07. I was in grad school working on my MFA in Screenwriting, and I flat-out did not have the mental or emotional space to juggle that much fiction in my head. I was living and breathing TV and film, and at one point, I think I was writing two pilot scripts and a feature, as well as trying to keep up with FP. Episode production slowed to a serious halt during that time, and I briefly experimented with doing longer, less frequent episodes — I guess because my brain was so in that one-hour-primetime-drama mode anyway. But that felt completely off for what FP was, and it only lasted two episodes. I graduated in May 2007, which was right around when the “Who Killed Nick Moriani?” murder mystery was reaching its climax, so I used that event as a bit of a reset for things. Even once I started working assistant jobs in the industry, I found that I once again had the breathing room to immerse myself in FP again. If anything, it was a way of committing to the universal advice to writers — “Write something every day” — while I worked on my professional samples simultaneously.

The most recent time was more of an extended period. It’s tough for me to pinpoint, exactly, but it fell between 2011 and 2013. I was still working on a TV show, and I was regularly writing for the show. Similar to that last year of grad school, I just felt so wound up in my responsibilities that I didn’t have a lot of room in my head for FP. Things would get slow, then pick up again, then die back down, as the last thing I was able to do after eight hours in a writers’ room was generate more fiction. I remember thinking pretty seriously about what it would be like to end FP around this time. How would I wrap up everyone’s stories? What big event would I use to ratchet things up if we were to head toward a finale? Ironically, this is when the concept for the Footprint Killer story began to gel in my mind, and I was so excited about getting to tell that story that I kept pressing forward. And, as happens, that particularly intense period of work died down, and I admitted to myself that I wasn’t yet ready to let go of Footprints.

In retrospect, I can see that it wasn’t just that I was too busy — I also wasn’t super-inspired by the stories at that time. That’s a bit of a generalization, because the aforementioned Jason/Helen stuff was going on, and I’m sure there were lots of other bits and pieces I loved, but as a whole, that might be my least favorite period of Footprints since the very early episodes (which I loved at the time). I was telling a bunch of stories out of some weird sense of obligation to… I don’t know, see my ideas through? This was the time when Sarah was married to Graham, and Matt was seeing Danielle, and Claire and Brent were kind of bonding but nothing was happening, and Travis and Elly were still together but not very compelling, and Diane was spiraling thanks to her elopement with Ryan. It felt like things “needed” to happen, but I wasn’t very invested in any of it. There was a pretty clear breaking point — with Episode 700, I jumped three months ahead and gently “reset” things — and, from that point forward, you can sort of see me moving the pieces into place for the serial killer storyline and shifting into a new phase of the series, with stories that I was more passionate about telling.

What does it mean to you to be celebrating 20 years of Footprints?

That I’m old? I was 14 when I posted the first episode online, and now I’m staring down my 35th birthday. That is absolutely insane. Aside from remaining alive (which is a minor miracle, if you’re familiar with the way I conduct my life), I haven’t done anything for 20 years. Anything. I haven’t lived in any one state for that long. My figure skating career wasn’t that long. So to have not only been doing this for a period of two decades, but to actually have been doing it consistently for that long, blows my mind.

Jokes about my age aside, it’s really comforting to know that I always have this world to escape into. I’m sure most creative types can relate, but sometimes real life is overwhelming, and whatever art you create becomes your “safe space.” Being able to escape into King’s Bay when I’ve been lonely or frustrated or scared in my actual life has been such a gift — even more so because people have deemed it worthy of their time and have paid me the enormous compliment of going along on this ride with me. I really don’t envision ending Footprints at any time in the foreseeable future; I understand the highs and lows enough now to accept that there might be periods of slower activity, or times when I need to do something to kick-start my motivation. But I value this outlet and escape too much to set it aside. So, for now, I see this anniversary as a chance to reflect upon and be grateful for this wonderful gift that I stumbled into as a bored kid with a really underwhelming social life. I’ve learned so much, not only about writing, but about myself, through this experience, and I hope that I’m able to continue with it for as long as absolutely possible.