Matt

Jul 21 2008, 10:03 AM

The Matthews family matriarch was Mary. I believe they killed her off in 1975. Matthews patriarch Jim died in 1982 when the actor who played him died. However, mostly by that time all the Matthews family was written off save for Liz (who went through long periods of not even being seen). They'd throw some Matthewses onto the canvas every few years as a pufunctory nod to history, but the focus of the show had already shifted to the Cory family (hell, during a long spell in the mid-1980s, even Mac & Rachel hardly saw any action or story) and the Love family. By the late 1980s, AW was almost a completely different show than it'd been in the late 1970s. IMO, the biggest loss the show never fully recovered from was the death of Douglass Watson (and the resulting death of Mac Cory). He'd sequed nicely from mature leading man into show patriarch. They tried to focus everything around Rachel, but (IMO) once Constance Ford (Ada) died, the character lost a *lot* of her grounding.