All My Shadows

I read an article about how she tweeted several pictures of her holding hands with other people in public to prove that she's touchy-feely with her friends. IDK. I think it's possible either way.

Trevor has to be pushing 40. He was old when he was playing a teen on 90210. Is Paris even 20 yet? I mean, it's their lives and all. I just googled. Apparently, they're just good friends.

To be honest, I don't even remember episode 1 at this point. For the first time ever, I actually watched the whole season in one sitting this morning, so it's all one big blur lol This was a pretty good set of episodes! Unlike previous seasons, they pulled me in right from the beginning, and they managed to stay on the side of good sense for most of it. Well done, Degrassi. Of course, I have thoughts, but I'll keep them brief: - Esme's slow descent into a meltdown was finely done by the writers and the actress. I'm worried that they're relying too much on the "downward spiral" storylines, though. - Fck the entire "inclusive" gang. If they're our new core characters, I don't know if I want to watch next season. They just completely sucked this entire go-round. - Tiny lost some points with me for his involvement with the Saad drama, but I feel as though they just used him as a generic bully because why not. - Yael is not an interesting character no matter what they do with her. - Zig is an idiot, and I won't miss him. - I wish there'd been more Miles and Tristan this season. Their relationship continued to be the most mature thing the show had going, and it kinda sucks that they just packed all of the drama into the last few episodes. I don't think they were stiffed a happy ending at all. High school graduation is by no means at all an "ending" for anyone, honestly, and there's no reason to believe they couldn't reconnect later on. It was open-ended. - I went back to disliking Shay this season. I was especially aggravated by her presumption regarding Tiny's promposal. - Maya remained one of the most well-written and layered characters, IMO. She will be missed. - Glad they gave Winston a little bit more to do this season. I'm going to miss him and the actor a ton. - Zoe's ending really felt like they were originally going to have her mom show up and send her off happy, but then someone decided they needed more drama at the very end, so voila. I wasn't too thrilled with it, and I hate that she burned the letter without reading it. - Frankie sucks. I'm glad Jonah and Grace just kinda moved past her initial anger and didn't give a fck. They're good together. - And last but not least. Saad was a BRILLIANT addition. The actor was fantastic, and the character's inner struggles were great to watch. As much as I liked the idea of him being in Maya's orbit last season, it was very wise choice to put him with Lola. His younger siblings were also nice background characters. The only problem, and this is a DNC problem altogether, is that we never saw his parents. Great season, though, possibly the best all-around season. The others, once they got going, were better, but this one maintained a steady flow from start to finish in a way the others did not. Forgot to mention - MY BABY CRAIG It was so good to see him!

On episode 2, and I swear, I will never miss Shay or Frankie. Zig and Tiny are about a breath away from being put in the doghouse, too. I like the mini-arc with Miles and his writing, but I hated the piss-poor, half-ass "crossing the line" activity that Mr. Mitchell orchestrated out of nowhere. Winston is

I can't wait to watch this season! I don't expect to be roped in from the very beginning because that's just the way this show has worked for me, but if history repeats, I'll be pretty invested by the halfway point. Adamo is just so

So many of AMC's early 80s hairstyles were questionable. Which, I know, it's the 80s, but still. I've been watching some episodes from 1983-1985, in order (but mostly nonconsecutive), off and on, and I hate Devon's hair, and Donna also had a similar cut for a while. Watching these episodes have really really made me hate Tad and the whole idea of Tad as the lovable cad/rogue. He was a piece of sh!t. Darnell Williams was just as ticky and over-the-top back then as he was when he returned near the end, even moreso in the early 80s. I never realized how incredibly sexy Laurence Lau was in so many ways. Greg was a bit of a goober, but he had a ready strength about him that was appealing, plus LL was hitting 30 and still was hotter than most soap guys who were younger than him at the time. I also never realized how much a loose cannon Tom was. I mean, I know they introduced him in 1977 with the whole football player, hot-headed Catholic thing, but I guess I expected him to grow up much more by the 80s. It's crazy to see Brooke mixing it up with Tom and Mark knowing that by the end of the decade she'll be involved with Tad, who was still written as a kid at the time. I'm currently in the era where Phoebe, Langley, and Palmer are trying to stop Adam from building a "gambling mall" in Pine Valley, and Ruth Warrick is running sh!t, as to be expected. When Phoebe and her supporters are faced with the task of getting 5,000 signatures in a day and a half, everyone feels defeated, but Phoebe perks them up and tosses out the most delicious "Watch out!" as they resolve to win and the screen fades to black. RW was a TREASURE. Then later, she compares the newly-married Mrs. Erica Chandler to Eva Braun at the Glamorama in front of everyone. Good stuff.

The original specials definitely used only people who were currently on TV, but I honestly doubt that's an option these days. Your biggest TV shows/stars are no longer on ABC, CBS, or NBC, and so many of them would probably never sign on to do something like this. Plus, the TV landscape is just so big. Look at the cast list for the first BOTNS, and you have Farrah Fawcett, Penny Marshall, Robert Conrad - people who were HUGE at the time. Even if you didn't watch their shows, you knew who they were. We don't have that anymore.

I wouldn't necessarily call it discriminating, but no, I don't believe any soap stars appeared on the specials, which is surprising considering they were produced when soaps were at the highest level of mainstream popularity. If anything, there could have been a one-off daytime special featuring just soap stars.

I'm sorry, but that article has me all kinds of hyped up. It really looks like great fun! It was a brilliant idea to bring in past TV stars because most of the audience is tuning in for them.

And I will be watching very intently! ABC/SOAPnet missed the boat on a Battle of the Soap Stars 10-15 years ago.

The Audience Network is basically the same network that picked up Passions and Friday Night Lights when they were ditched by NBC back in the day.

In my eyes? Absolutely not. Those were never my style, as a kid or now.

Yes! No sitcom of the last 30 years will ever top those seasons of Roseanne. Nothing since as ever been so unashamedly real and honest, and if that's what they're going for with the new show, then I'm 100% in.

Thank you. I tried to piece together a response to that absurdity yesterday, but I couldn't hack it. This has the eloquence for which I was trying.

"Love is alive, and it's made a happy woman out of me." You just can't beat the conviction in that line.

So wait, now it's Jean Passanante's fault that Hogan Sheffer was a sh!tass headwriter? I think it's highly unlikely ATWT would have ever continued past 2010 regardless of who was writing or producing.

Jerrold Immel did a fabulous theme song for King's Crossing that ranks right up there with his themes for KL and Dallas.

I don't know if this has ever been posted. It was uploaded over 4 years ago, but I just came across it for the first time tonight. Some quick thoughts: nobody wanted to meet Nancy? Also, I'm pretty sure the music playing throughout is the GL theme from the late 60s.

And on that point, I completely agree with you, but the show had failed on that front time and time again over its last 5-10 years, so I guess by the time it ended, I just knew not to expect it. I wasn't entirely disappointed with the end because I didn't have too many expectations going in. I agree with most of what you're saying here. Like I said, if it fits the story/scene/moment, then I'm 100% all for it. I'm a complete nerd for soap history just like most of us are, so I would never shake my head at a logical conversation about a character's history or characters' shared history. I agree with you about Kim and John mentioning Andy - one of my biggest pet peeves with ATWT was that once characters left, they were seemingly forgotten, even though they were parts of these huge families. It costs absolutely nothing to write in a mention of a character. By the late 2000s, though, soaps were no longer written in a way that conversations that are completely normal and commonplace in real life would also find their way into character dialogue. The more time you focus on stupid, complicated, repetitive plot lines, the less time you have to acknowledge impactful characters who are no longer on the canvas. I wasn't referring to Dan in regards to the Bus episode. I assumed tune_in_tomorrow meant their 1990 feud over Bob, which was flashbacked and discussed in the Bus episode and used kinda cheaply for comic relief in the "OMG Bob and Kim are divorcing!" episode. I think it would have been petty for either Kim or Susan to bring Dan up after he'd been dead for so long, but I would've been okay with Kim bringing him up in regards to Emily. All those are things that were NOT really happening much at all on this show anymore and hadn't been happening for a long, long time, though, so while I absolutely agree that it was ignorant of the show's great history, if I'm strictly assessing the finale and the weeks leading up to it, I can't really point at that as a big let down. We all knew that we weren't going to get much. Maybe GL's literal "come to Jesus" the previous year had gotten some people's hopes up, but I wasn't one of them.

......."almost" universally praised. "Almost." Meaning not entirely. I never understood why so many people need characters to talk about things that happened 20+ years ago. If it makes sense with what's currently playing out, then it's great, but anything else borders on gratuitous. What exactly was there to revisit in regards to Kim and John in 2010 considering they hadn't been in a relationship with each other since the 70s and she'd been married to Bob for over 20 years? If they hadn't resolved Kim and John's story after 30 some-odd years, that's indicative of bigger problems. The Kim/Susan feud was addressed during the 50th anniversary and then in that one-shot ep with Kim and Bob's "marital troubles" a few years later. Bringing that up again would just make both women look supremely immature. ATWT screwed up a LOT in its last few years, but not having characters randomly discussing events from 1976 with little to no context isn't an example of that IMO.

GL also got very bogged down by gimmick after gimmick after gimmick. The "Inside the Light" episodes, which weren't all bad but a misguided attempt at addressing the show's issues without really addressing the show's issues, the superhero stuff with Harley which was embarrassing, and of course Peapack. The only gimmick out of the era that I think worked, and I believe it was almost universally praised, was the 70th anniversary special with Beth Ehlers as Irna Phillips.

But this is exactly what I meant when I said that there were huge missteps. When I say the ending wasn't hollow, I'm personally meaning that what we saw - the characters, stories, etc. - wasn't thrown together as a show of pretense to conceal what had been a completely different program over its last few years. They may not have brought back Ellen to be with Susan and Emily, but Susan and Emily were there and had been there, and any viewer who'd been watching for 3 years or 30 years knew who they were. They didn't need to be "brought back" because they'd never left. TPTB's massive skimping on returns didn't leave the show with a dearth of long-standing characters at its end. ATWT was still filled with ATWT characters and families, so regardless of how crappy some of those final storylines were, had the show lived, things were always lined up for ATWT to truly be ATWT again. I feel as though GL, on the other hand, did a great job at bringing back characters at the last minute and delving into the past, but they never should have been in a position to have to "bring back" characters like Ed and Holly, and I figure the chance of them coming back without a cancellation notice was slim to none (obvious exception being Grant Aleksander and Krista Tesreau). To me, as nice and neat as GL's ending was, it did very little to hide the fact that the show had been running aimlessly and desperately on fumes with no sense of self for years. What they did in the last few weeks could have been the show through a lot of those years. I guess what I'm saying is that GL might have gotten the "ending" right, but ATWT had tons more going for it at its end.

I'm in major agreement with all who've said that ATWT was still very salvageable at the end. GL was a dead soap walking for at least 5, but I would say closer to 10, years before its cancellation. I mean, its continuity throughout its entire run was pretty weak. They jumped location several times and refocused the show about just as many times. By the time it hit television, you had the basic foundation of the Bauer family, but there were no stable supporting families until the 70s and 80s, so in 2009, we had a 72-year-old program ending its run with only about 30-35 years of it in tact. Sad. Say what you will, but ATWT ended with its original family, and the last character you saw was an original character played by someone who'd been there for all but four years of the show's life. You had major characters from every single era of the show present and still regularly seen. I know they misstepped a LOT in closing the series, but one can never say that ATWT's was hollow.