DRW50

Corrie's been about the same (not very good/bad with occasional patches of OK) for a long time now - 15-20 years. There are producers like Kate Oates or Phil Collinson who get hype because they replaced producers who were not as charismatic or hyped, but their actual work was still horse [!@#$%^&*].

There's a bitter irony in P&G hiring the Dobsons to salvage GL because they still cared so much about keeping the show alive, yet the main reason most viewers will have ever seen the work of the Dobsons on GL is because P&G long stopped giving a damn about their soaps. By the time I got an Internet connection good enough to properly watch WOST, it was paywalled or mostly gone, so the first time I ever got to really watch their GL work was on Youtube through the ClassicGL channel. Those clips reignited my love for GL after the '90s and '00s had washed most of it away. The guy who did that channel has, sadly, been gone for over 15 years now, but still, the clips remain.

@Vee https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-rare-photographs-exclusive-newsupdate/ Some recently found photos of Katy Manning, Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee taken on the set of The Mind of Evil, with some comments from Katy.

Thanks. January 8, 1986.

Thanks @soapfan770 although "harping on the same tune" makes me laugh for some reason. Soap fans know all about that.

You can see that really ossify in the '90s, with the reigns of people like JFP and Guza who so clearly hated soaps and wanted to make them more acceptable to their own standards. The industry had such a clear contempt for soaps - you can see that in so many TV shows and movies going back even to the '40s and '50s - but they were still able to have their own identity and didn't bow to the mass hatred until somewhere in the '80s and '90s. What bothers me the most is someone like Carlivati who is endlessly patted on the back for loving soaps, yet also treats them as a joke. At least Guza's failed ambitions were honest. I have a harder time getting part Ron turning so much of the end of OLTL into a wankfest for his endless self-parodies.

This reminds me of something from Star Trek - like the episode with Kathryn Hays. I do think the full closing theme is beautiful. The opening music, similar to ATWT's 93-00 opening, is just too sludgy and somber for me. The 83-85 music and visuals are great, unfortunately marred by how much the show is hollowed out in that time frame.

I would guess Jacqueline Jossa had other commitments and could only film a limited time. The choice to focus so much just on Penny unfortunately reinforced how trite and repetitive these "long lost bad girl relative" stories are (Dotty deja vu).

https://variety.com/2024/film/obituaries-people-news/cindy-morgan-dead-caddyshack-1235863303/ Very sad - she was apparently dead for a while before her roommate returned from a vacation and found her. Here was a post she made about her time on Falcon Crest. https://www.instagram.com/p/C0PO2g3OLjW/

The Loving Murders episodes have been taken down and reuploaded several times now. Someone reuploaded the two surrounding Cabot and Isabelle's murder (very tender scenes, even if I wish the dialogue wasn't so generic given the recent history of the characters). I had forgotten that their death happened in the same episode as Ally setting Danny up for rape. So unnecessarily crass to make this choice, or to tell the latter story at all (and if Amelia Heinle hadn't left they likely would have made Ally/Danny a couple...). It would probably be more obvious to audiences of today, overdosed on true crime, that Gwyneth was the killer, but Christine Tudor always sells the melodrama with her whole heart, to the point where you still want to lie to yourself just as she was.

The late '90s is actually the point where I had grown to accept Buzz. I really couldn't stand him in his first few years on GL. He felt so alien to the rest of the show for me.

@Vee Thanks. Nice to see more Sarah Jane promo material being found. I can see why they cut that line but it's a fun bit.

This is beautifully put.

@Soaplovers That's a good point. Diane is more of a plot device after the Dobsons leave. With the Dobsons there are almost everyone seems to have a motivation and a complicated internal structure.

In soaps, nothing is a coincidence, so it seems fitting that I got back into watching, and talking about, the Dobsons' work on GL, we hear about Bridget passing away. I just wish more of their run was around because so much of what I have seen is top-tier, breathtakingly complex, and engrossing to watch. I often feel that the GL I prefer is messy, wild, mixed with the straight drama (similar to where the show was in the late '80s and early '90s), but somehow Bridget and Jerome got the tone so perfect in their run that they remind me just what a lost artform this more restrained, psychological touch could be.

When Threads first came around, someone I have a lot of respect for warned people against using it, saying it was run by bad people and that he was treated horribly for even asking a few basic questions about the site. I decided to avoid the place after that, and I'm very glad I did. https://mashable.com/article/threads-transphobia-anti-abortion-posts-hate-speech

Santa Barbara may be the first daytime soap I ever watched - it was not the soap (or network) my grandmother watched, and which I ended up gravitating toward, but a babysitter watched it. I think that's one of the reasons I still feel drawn to the show even as I never end up having time to do a full watch. I have to thank Bridget Dobson for how she did help me, and so many others, find our way into soaps.

Another Melba gem.

That's a good point. I guess we need to appreciate any scrap.

Among other soap names, you have Larry Gates (looking the same as he did on GL...) and Ruth Warrick as husband and wife.

As shown with the decision to hire Richard van Vleet when Peter Simon left in 1984. I'm half-surprised they brought Simon back.

I imagine P&G and their wanting to get glossier were another factor. I wonder if Peter's work at Search was what helped him - what I've seen of his ATWT role was extremely dull.

Thanks @Soapsuds . Sad to think how many more episodes of that era we might have gotten if P&G hadn't stopped releasing DVDs. I know the narrative reasons, but I wonder how viewers at the time felt about Jackie and Elizabeth trading off the same three men.

I don't think the passing of former Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was mentioned here. This is a difficult read about how neglected she was in her rehab facility, hastening her death. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/04/texas-eddie-bernice-johnson-lawsuit/