ALL MY CHILDREN has a new head writing team in James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten, who sat down to answer our questions about their plans to revitalize the show.

Soap Opera Weekly: In what direction will you take ALL MY CHILDREN?
Barbara Esensten: [We're] going to start with the core characters and the core families. Their histories haven't been utilized as much as we would like to utilize them. One example is the Martin family, with the three generations on the show. Another area is the teenagers on our show. We'd really like to have them involved in real-life problems that kids and their parents understand.
James Harmon Brown: We want to create a world that can showcase a younger character, and have more of them. One of the immediate goals in the next few months is to bring kids on the show and make it more of an ethnically and culturally diverse place.
Esensten: Humor is really important to us, because you can be dealing with a lot of situations that are heartbreaking; you try your best to use humor to lighten the mood.

Weekly: So fans can expect a somewhat lighter show?
Brown: Very much lighter. But juxtaposed with very real circumstances. One of the things we hate to see on shows is when tragic things happen and there are no consequences. We believe that if you keep doing that, the audience is going to stop believing that anything bad can happen [because] it'll all be fixed next week.

Weekly: Will you tie up the loose ends left by the previous writers?
Brown: We've been here for about a month, and we're building the house with the ingredients we have now, knowing there are certain things left [out], like the whole issue with Adam, Tad, Jenny and Julia. That's still to be resolved, and we plan to do it.
Esensten: We plan on [finding] interesting and different ways of tying up any questions in [viewers'] minds about stories that were started [by the previous regime].

Weekly: Do you have plans to revitalize any characters that came on the show with big storylines that have since been phased out?
Brown: We have big plans for several characters that haven't been prominent on the canvas up until now. We're familiar with that [situation]; we have a couple of people who have not been big players for the past year.
Esensten: And who we think have great possibilities.