Generations, the ground-breaking soap that ran on NBC from 1989 to 1991, was ahead of its time in that it featured a Black family as a core clan. One of the show’s most memorable scenes was a catfight between Jonelle Allen’s Doreen and Vivica A. Fox’s Maya. In fact, they might still be going at now if Kristoff St. John’s Adam hadn’t broken it up!
The Generations Saga
Series creator, executive producer/head writer Sally Sussman Morina (most recently head writer at The Young and the Restless), Allen, and Fox sat down with EW.com to look back on the iconic battle between Doreen and Maya that remains one of soaps’ most memorable slug fests.
Like all good physical drama, there are emotions lying underneath. That was the case with Maya and Doreen. Maya didn’t care for Doreen seeing her father, Rueben Daniels (Richard Rountree), but Doreen wasn’t going to let anyone — let alone a little “piece of street trash!” (her words) — tell her otherwise!
Before the two women threw down, Doreen removed her earrings, kicked off her shoes, hiked up her dress, and readied herself as Maya also removed her shoes and took off her earrings. “The lines were scripted,” Allen recalls. “What we were doing while we were saying them — the earrings and all of that stuff — was not. I added the kicking off the shoes and the pulling up the train. The actors didn’t get hurt, but the cameraman could have, because when I kicked off my shoes, I kicked my shoe so far it almost hit the camera! [B]eing a dancer, I kicked a little too high. It blew across the studio.
“I remember the conversation vividly in the room [when we wrote the catfight] that Maya would be waiting for Doreen in her apartment,” Sussman Morina recalls. “They were both dressed in these elegant dresses, and then they would go at it. Michele Val Jean, who was one of the writers, came up with the line, ‘I wanna wipe this floor with you!'”
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“A line I added was, ‘My train! My train!,'” Allen recalls after Maya ripped off the bottom part of her rival’s yellow dress. “People think, ‘Oh my God, they’re really fighting!’ That gives it more of an intensity. But we were absolutely choreographed, and we had to be very exact with what we were doing. I’m really pleased that we were hitting all those marks, and it turned out as well as it did.”
“[M]y favorite part was just me sweeping her across that [table],” Fox recalls, “and how she spread herself out, and we just destroy that apartment. It always looks more impactful than what it really was.”
The battle only antagonized the dynamic between the two women, but for the show, the battle was gold. “It put the show in a different stratosphere,” Sussman Morina says. “And I remember less than a year later, Y&R copied it. A lot of people copied it. All the subsequent [catfights] that have been forced upon people were not motivated. This one was so motivated, that even though Maya was the aggressor, you agreed with her. Doreen had it coming, but you can’t overstate how long [the tension] was built up between them.”
Thanks to YouTube and social media, the Doreen/Maya battle lives on and finds new audiences. “I was at a café having lunch in West Hollywood, and I’m sitting there, and suddenly, I hear my voice saying, ‘What do you want?'” Allen shares. “And it turns out that one of the guys sitting at a table nearby, that was his ringtone. I walked over and I said, ‘That’s me!’ And he [screamed], ‘Doreen!!’ That catfight has taken on a life of its own. It really has.”
Click here to what Sussman told Soap Hub about a potential Generations revival! Would you like to see one? Let us know in the comments below.
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