DRW50

BTW, I will still be posting those 1977 GL recaps, Katie. They're on an old computer that is tough to get into.

Yes, he dated Alex and Lillian, until he was written out in 1984. Mike seems a little lost in some of those Dobsons episodes, as if they don't quite know what to do with him. I think that the five and six sided love games were a way to keep writing for characters they may have been stuck on ideas for. Stewart was a huge draw for female viewers in the 70s, to the point where he didn't even let the soap press know he was married with kids until the mid-70s. There is this "you had to be there" photo of him wearing one of those 70s white jumpsuits, VPL and all.

Anyone who thinks the hate for Romney is anywhere close to the hate for Obama should read up on the disgusting DVD "Dreams of My Real Father," which, among other things, tries to claim that Obama's mother was a porn actress hooked up with a Communist.

That would have been great, especially since Mike had more of a history of somewhat volatile women. When he was working on Holly's case I thought they had chemistry, which I don't see with MG and Hulswit.

Of course he was with Hope at that time (although the relationship seemed somewhat dull by the time they were actually married). Imagine all the conflict within the Bauer family if he was torn between Holly and Hope. (This is taking out the Rita affair though, as Bert probably would have had enough and run Alan over several times...)

And if I ever start my AMC fic you can help me out. I know it wouldn't have made any sense for Holly to associate with Alan after how he helped Roger, but I sure wish we could have seen some of MG and Chris Bernau. Maybe he could have hung around her out of a sense of guilt, and started to fall in love with her.

I've always wondered why MG's Ryan's Hope role didn't work. For me, it basically amounted to my #1 rule - if Delia is humiliated to prop a character, then I will hate that character (my only exception to that rule was Jill). So that, along with my loathing Roger by that point, did her in in my eyes. But most fans are not as pathetic as I am so I can't really imagine that this is why the role did not work out for other people.

I think the problem was Holly's main stories by that time were being a victim and being in love with Ed. She likely would have stood by as Rita and Ed fell apart, longing for Ed. This was also when they were going to start replacing Mart Hulswit. It would have been interesting to have seen how MG would have been with Peter Simon at the start, as I thought they worked well together later on. But I think with Marland's need to bring in the Reardon family, Holly would have been a third wheel to Maureen/Ed. I guess she also would have had a role in the Andy story. I'm also not sure, as has been mentioned before, that Marland knew how to write for the type of heroine Holly was at this point. You don't see a lot of interesting heroines on the show during this time. They are a little drab. It would have been interesting to have seen a story with Holly and Kelly, perhaps a doomed affair early in his stay in Springfield, which would have made him more resistant to Morgan and easier prey for Nola.

Thank you so much for taking the time to type all of this up.

Arlen Specter has died. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82382.html?hp=t1

I would say Edmund had stopped working as a character years before Maria's return. The Kit pairing was a bomb, so was the pairing with Alex, and the last few years of Maria/Edmund the first time around weren't that great either. They either should have kept him with Brooke, or had Maria alive and Edmund leave town with her. Maria never should have been brought back.

Can you imagine anyone on a soap today even caring about whether the death was real. Today they'd just wink and say "soapy goodness." True soap goodness was that era of GL.

video gone/private

Thank you so much. I had never seen this. Rituals material is like a needle in a haystack. That logo actually looks kind of cool. It doesn't when you just see it on a piece of paper.

I think Roger might have always been a candidate for return, if Zaslow wanted to return, because he was so remembered (Schemering saying about his original run that "viewers would not let him die.") Today, they would never bring Holly back, they'd just have Roger with sweet young things. Holly was the key component to Roger as a character and I'm glad Calhoun (?) and Nancy Curlee and Pam Long knew this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlRoYfuFwL0

I get why people hate Reva, and I get that a lot of her stories were awful. I just generally enjoyed Zimmer's work and how she never phoned it in, even when most actors did. Reva never should have been written as a dull heroine but I felt like Zimmer usually played against that anyway. Most of my angst over GL occurred when the show was still on, during the years I had stopped watching. So now, while I still feel some angst, I was happy I got to say goodbye properly (which I didn't with ATWT, but I've already gone on about that) and can look back, especially at some of the material I didn't get to see the first time around. Looking at the older (1979-80) clips of Holly, she seems so much more placid than what she was when MG returned in 1989. You usually see soap actresses, as they age, try to cling to some sort of parody of an ingenue. Garrett never did that, and it really breathed new life into Holly.

It's interesting to read the comments about Rhys being "ruined" by this story with Cindy. All I can think is ruined from what? Rhys has always been weak, selfish, a liar, a cheat. That's a basic part of the character. It tells me that people who say this mostly just cared when he was holding Jacqui's hand, a relationship I never believed, and one which mostly felt like Paul Marquess throwing actors together because he had no other idea what to do with the characters. The same goes for Nancy and Darren. What a relentlessly depressing and miserable couple this is. Nancy and Darren would never be together. Darren would hate everything Nancy stood for, and vice versa. The actors have little chemistry. Paul Marquess threw actors together instead of writing stories, and destroyed the last bits left of Hollyoaks in the process.

The other thing is that Pam Long, or someone, seemed to write a lot of scenes for them together which had a ton of banter and chemistry before the actual rape storyline was addressed again. I think this also blurred lines for viewers. If I remember correctly, the actors asked for clarification, which led to the story in Acapulco where Alexandra, who was convinced that Roger was lying to her or cheating on her, asked Holly to spy on him or something. This led to the two of them almost having sex, until she began remembering the rape. Then they talked through the rape. But he realized she was working for Alex, and felt betrayed.

Roger and Holly had a very complex history for nearly a decade before the rape, as she was drawn to Roger, and loved Roger, as he was drawn to her, but they were both very screwed up people. He was more devoted to Peggy, and her son, who were "good" people, as Ed Bauer was "good." When they finally did marry, Roger still felt inferior to Ed. I think fans were more torn about Roger and Holly once they returned in 1989 because their relationship went back a long way before the rape (which wasn't true for most of the "rape is love" couples on soaps - I think the only other one was Bill and Laura on DAYS), and because GL was a hugely, hugely transitory show. GL had undergone unimaginable changes between 1980 and 1989. Many of the older viewers were gone. Many of the viewers had never seen the rape story, or anything before it. They mostly just saw a very intense relationship between Holly and a semi-redeemed Roger. I honestly think that the show was best off when Roger and Holly weren't an actual couple, because Roger had to be significantly watered down to justify why Holly would want a life with him. But then, they were never a couple during a well-written period of GL (not counting the first go-round).

Ross was, aside from his first year or two, always a hero. He was self-righteous sometimes, a little weasely at times, but always very good and decent at heart once he moved away from being Roger's scummy lawyer. The show rarely used him as a leading man, but he was first matured through his fondness for Rita's somewhat mousy, sweet sister, Eve, and then his marriage to damaged Carrie (Jane Eliot). You can find some Ross/Carrie stuff on Youtube. When Holly returned to the show in 1989 and became friendly (and eventually romantic) with Ross, they did address the way he behaved towards her during the rape trial.

I wonder if he would have played Roger Forbes, or Garth Slater. So Susan left AMC after he did? I never knew that. I thought he was still playing Jeff when Mary died.

He was very handsome. When he came back in 2009 he looked almost the same.