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Bridget and Jerome Dobson were writers for American soap operas, best known as creators of the NBC soap opera Santa Barbara .
Bridget Dobson is the daughter of General Hospital creators Frank and Doris Hursley. Bridget and Jerome married in 1961. Bridget began writing for General Hospital in the early 1970s and Jerome joined her soon after.
In 1975 the Dobsons were hired as the head writers for the long-running CBS Daytime soap opera Guiding Light. They spent the rest of the 1970s at Guiding Light where they created alluring nurse Rita Stapleton, the rich, upper class Spaulding family in 1977, and wrote the infamous storyline of Holly Norris Bauer's rape by her own husband Roger Thorpe in 1979. The Dobsons would later go on to become the head writers of another Procter and Gamble soap opera, As the World Turns where they created the infamous character of James Stenbeck and also paired the characters of Tom and Margo.
In 1984, NBC debuted Santa Barbara where Bridget and Jerome Dobson had creative control of the show's storylines until they were locked out of Santa Barbara's NBC offices in 1988 after the Dobson's repeated attempts to fire then head writer, Anne Howard Bailey. The Dobson's filed a $53 million lawsuit against NBC and New World Television. That same year, when claiming Santa Barbara's Outstanding Daytime Drama Emmy, a bittersweet Bridget Dobson taunted, "Though New World Television locked me out of the studio, they couldn't lock me out of the Emmys!" By 1991 the case was settled out of court and the Dobsons returned to the show they created.
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