All My Shadows

So nice to see so much conversation about Flamingo Road. I would kill to get a chance to see it through new eyes from start to finish. Not quite sure how it never made it to a small little complete-series DVD release on the star power of Morgan Fairchild and Mark Harmon.

For real. Someone saw “library,” realized the show’s been on so long that Dolly Madison watched it in the White House, and decided it was time to pull out “robust.”

Yikes! Like many have said, this isn’t a surprise, but the fact that the move is happening in just over a month’s time is the shocker. My bet? “Soft cancellation” is right. This show is not going to light up Peacock’s subscriptions, and I don’t care how many “old faces from the past” they bring on (and, to be clear, I highly doubt they’re ever going to do that!). It will either not get “edgy” at all because TPTB don’t give enough of a sht to do something new or it’ll be super edgy because they know it ends next year regardless. They certainly won’t make those changes for the good of the show because…since when do soap people do anything for the good of the show? Peacock ain’t gonna all of a sudden breathe talent into these people. And, let’s be real. Not one article or headline has referred to this as “the new plan to save DAYS,” and the mere utterance of the phrase has kept the show on thus far. Re: affiliates, local scheduling. In the south Louisiana market, Sept. 12 will be the first day ever (or in an extremely long time) that no two soaps will air against each other.

If I was on Reddit, I'd report that sh!t for the Brandon slander more than anything else.

You keep repeating the same thing but want to say “let’s move on” lol The moral of the story is not everyone is interested in just surface level discussion. If that kills a vibe for you or annoys you or whatever, then…okay? Suggesting that people water down their conversation because you don’t like it is weird.

This is so gross and rude and unnecessary lol You're talking to people who have been following soaps for 20, 25, 30, however many years. Yes, we know how daytime television is run. Yes, we know how voting in the academy is done. We're not morons. When you've been watching something for decades, you do attain a great deal of knowledge about how it works, and that qualifies you to add insight on it whenever you so choose. Yet, with your 37 posts, you somehow think you're qualified to make judgments on the people who post here. Just...yikes! --- Anyway, it feels like I know more people in the memorial montage than I do out of all the supporting/younger acting nominees combined, but it is what it is. Congrats to John McCook, though. At this point, why not?

Craig was my favorite for so long probably because Jake Epstein was just so good at playing every part of the character - the ambition, the selfishness, the destruction, the manipulation, etc. I hated Ashley and still do. Clare is definitely my main reason for not really getting into the later seasons. Alli was okaaaay, but it was just a blah group. I did like the class before them with Sav, Holly J, Anya, etc. The biggest mistake this show made (even bigger than the wishy-washy post-grad stuff with Paige and co.) was doubling up the episodes during that whole era. There was just no need - none of what they were doing necessitated hour-long episodes (because that's basically what they were, regardless of what TPTB said at the time), and you just ended up with a LOT of Clare and Eli all the damn time. I think Clare eventually clocked in nearly 200 episodes. Meanwhile, Paige was in half as many.

I'm just going to stop having any kind of hope for anything like this to ever happen. It's been ten and a half years since the show left ABC and close to nine years since 2.0. The show gets some attention here and there, and it's great that it gets to enjoy a bit of the "classic TV" treatment that other shows get when they leave the air (and that most soaps never get!), but with each passing year, there is less and less reason anyone would want to bring it back. It gets some attention, but it isn't in reruns or streaming. TV shows get revived based on either fan support following cancellation (which we already had) or their enduring popularity and ability to gain new fans. AMC's got us and that's it, and we're all getting old. Dark Shadows didn't become the big huge franchise it is just because it was a different kind of soap. It was regularly reran across the country for 25 years and then released in its entirety on TWO home video formats. Without any of that, there woudn't have been the 1991 series, the terrible Tim Burton movie, the 2004 pilot, the audio dramas, the books, the conventions, etc. Of course, it being different from the other soaps was influential in it becoming a rerun powerhouse. Every other soap will be forever stuck in the daytime ghetto, and we will never ever see them given any kind of widespread respect or attention outside of a niche piece from time to time. AMC is lucky because its cast keeps on working, and that keeps bringing attention back to the show, but look at some of the others. As terrible as it sounds, ATWT has been on the radar lately solely because two of its cast members passed away. And the one who'd been an iconic part of the show for THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS was still referred to as a "Star Trek actress" in some obituaries. Guiding Light went off the air as the world' longest-running drama series. And today, only 13 years later, it is literally nowhere to be (officially) found....at all. Interest in it will only continue to decline, so you can bet on never seeing it anywhere ever again. It fcking sucks, but it's how our fave genre is going out.

I think the thing with the adults in the early years is that they weren't yet convinced that the show would gain a large enough teen audience to stand on its own, so they wanted to at least keep the interest of viewers of the original series. Those characters were great in their roles as they related to the new set, and anything Spike/Snake was good IMO, but Caitlin was pretty cringe-worthy in those episodes with her trying to stay in Joey's life even as he dated that awful, awful cow Sydney. The ship may have sailed on a college Degrassi - the moment was really right there when Paige and crew graduated, and that's it. They really dropped the ball there, and yes, it manifested itself in pretty lame college stories. The few stories with potential never really went as far as they could because they were still squished in with everything else going on. If the new series is to have no strong ties to TNG, then I would love it if we at least got updates on where the characters are now. I would be content with a concise write-up for each of the major players.

Gosh, that sweet baby boy...all of the episodes surrounding the shooting have been heavy on my mind this week for obvious reasons. Shortly after Parkland, we were given some bullsh!t reactionary directives to "incorporate active shooter safety into lessons," and I just so happened to be teaching a mini-unit on Canadian history so...we might have watched both parts of "Time Stands Still" in my classes that week, complete with us breaking apart all that was wrong with Degrassi's "lockdown," including kids being locked in classrooms while other people just went in and out of the building. Sean and Ellie really were my preferred coupling. Separately, their stories were a bit more mature, then they ended up sharing an apartment as that *whispers* high school couple that lives together. Emma kinda went off the rails for a while, and I always thought she'd be better served ending up with someone who didn't go to Degrassi so that she didn't have to live up to the high standards of the righteous "cause girl" she'd been. I'm ready to start skimming through some episodes to pick up on other regular background music lol There's one little piano piece that would always play at the end of emotionally-charged scenes right before a commercial or freeze frame. It low-key sounds like the hook from Summer Breeze. It looks like they've removed most episodes from YouTube, so I can't find it.

I don't know, they seemed to have a hard time letting go of the original core group (as they should) for about four solid seasons, with us following the Paige/Marco/Ellie crew off to college and then them trying really really hard to keep Emma and Manny relevant, going as far as having them be in the new "life at Degrassi"-style opening sequence, even though they were no longer there. I think the goal would be not to focus on a much smaller ensemble built around Degrassi characters. I honestly think the first big mistake DTNG made was not just spinning Paige, Marco, and Ellie off after they graduated. Trying to tell college stories on a show that was supposed to be (and was still trying to be) about a high school was rough.

Liberty and JT's child should be turning 16 in 2022, I believe, so yes, he would be the perfect link between the old and the new. He could be one of the central characters for the first two years before passing the torch on. And then maybe we can finally get a college-set Degrassi spin-off?? It's insane that we haven't already. Sean remains my favorite, as well. Craig, I liked when I was younger because he was such a disaster and "I could fix him," but Sean's heart of gold mixed with his tendency to run screaming back to the jacked up life in which he was most comfortable makes him the true stand-out. In all my years of watching the show, I don't think I ever connected him with that piece of music, but it's one of the general themes that comes to mind when I think of the show's sound, especially those freeze frame endings.

This is so sad. I enjoyed her as Alison, and I really just loved that the Stewarts were present as a family unit again. So much more could have been done with them, but that's neither here nor there. Marnie, Marie, and Kelley were a great trio.

I saw the video from the supermarket shooting this morning, and those images will probably be burned into my mind forever. The poor woman gasping for air on the ground...then he just murders her and walks over her body like she was nothing. The most shocking part for me is how he casually apologizes to the white man hiding under the checkout counter. Just insane.

Season 5 is atrocious, guys, wow. And to get to the end and feel them trying to end the show and knowing that there’s another season…yikes. The Joey episode with the mugger is provably the worst and most pointless in the series.

Looks like I should’ve watched after Easter like I planned bc it’s already been taken down.

Is this something new? I remember pictures of Bruce Michael Hall and his twin brother Seth being on soap hunk websites 20 years ago.

Such a shocker about Naomi! I haven't listened to as much of the Judds as I should, and I plan to change that, but Love is Alive is one of the most simplistic yet naturally beautiful songs of 80s country music.

Two or three years ago, I came across some art on Etsy or an Etsy like website of digitally drawn recreations of some 70s soap logos in full, vibrant color. Really pretty but also really expensive. @j swift, I love that idea!!

It's been SO long since I watched Bare Essence, but just the first five minutes took me right back to the first time I saw it! That sweeping arrangement of the theme as the camera chases up the beach...flawless. I'll definitely be sinking my teeth back into this again tomorrow as a nice post-holiday viewing. I honestly forget that they made a series out of it lol obviously we all "want" to see it, but at the same time, I feel like there's no big huge loss in not seeing it. The mini is perfect all by itself.

RIP to the one and only Kathryn Hays. That face, that voice...she was an icon of CBS Daytime and embodied literally every thought that crosses my mind when I think of "grandma's stories." The more of early Kim that we can get our hands on, the better. I'd be happy to just see that very short tag scene of Kim and Jennifer from the end of a 1974-1975 episode one more time, with Kim's ENORMOUS hair taking up half the frame.

I agree, there was a big change. Seasons 6, 7, and 8 are the roughest to watch for me, outside of the big moments like JT's death. They were scared to let go of the original core group but also needed the show to still be set at Degrassi. Stretching a school year out over two whole seasons was their remedy for that, but it just made things worse because by the time the Emma crew were ready to graduate, it felt like they should have BEEN finished school. And they never had to do anything like that with the 80s series. It ran in a short little package that allowed them to follow the same group from junior high to high school and then "The End." They clearly needed to keep the 2000s series going because it was still very popular, but maybe being a little braver with pushing ahead with new kids would have helped. The problem is that they centered the show around those two grade levels (Paige/co and Emma/co) for so long and never developed any younger than the Emma crew until they absolutely had to.

I’ve never seen It’s a Living, and I really want to. It definitely should have showed up on TV Land for a run or two in the early 2000s. Barrie Youngfellow is more recognizable to me for her appearance in one of my favorite Three’s Company episodes, “Triangle Troubles,” where she plays a classmate of Jack’s trying to hide the fact that she lives with two (hot af) guys.

I've become a fan of Julia's thanks to Pluto TV. I don't even know if fan is the right word. I enjoy her onscreen persona, especially watching how it changed over the years. She was severely nervous and earnest in the BW French Chef but was pretty confident and grandiose in the color French Chef (just compare the theme music from the two runs). By the 90s, she was kind and grandmotherly in Master Chefs/Baking with Julia, but when it was her and old friend Jacques Pepin together, she was ornery and mischievous with Jacques Pepin. I'd love it if they added her late 70s series into the rotation. Seeing her kitchen at the Smithsonian a few months ago was a big moment, so I guess I really am a fan. I'll watch this series but I kinda agree with you, j swift, that we know her story so well at this point that telling it again just seems redundant. I just hope they portray Simca with all of the no-nonsense bitchery that she has on her appearances on French Chef.