DRW50

It is good that Billie continues to pop up every now and then. That's the best I can say.

Thanks. I had forgotten all that John and Stewart melodrama wasn't at the same time. It sounds bad and tends to mostly just be dull whenever I see footage from that period. Maybe it played out better live, I don't know.

Oh believe me, I am not going to shame you for finding Lily tiresome. I do too (at least Martha's Lily). It's just that after I went back and watched 1986 episodes I understood more of why Lily was so pouty and judgmental toward Lucinda. I adore Lucinda but she was the definition of hot mess for much of that period. I would agree Lucinda was not abusive. I think there was a promo uploaded not long ago - can't remember. @Broderickthank you for finding the screenshot of Julie. I had no memory of her ever appearing in 2002. By then I was so disgusted by the show, and by Hogan Sheffer, I was not watching very often. She appeared in 1998, not 1999.

The 227 spinoff was never picked up.

Thanks @AlexGrimaldi

He goes out of his way to make the story more complicated than it really was. Thanks for posting the review. I just wish more people who appreciated soaps were assigned to write about them at the time.

I think they said that Dee assumed John was Brad (was it Brad?) and as John had no idea that she did not know it was him, it was consensual. My question is who the hell wants to watch this type of story in the first place - I know it was a leadup to Who Shot John? and that had a lot of good dramatic moments, but it's just very gross. Lucinda and Meg and Dusty tended to be the people who called Lily out. I think part of the reason Lily seemed snotty was because Martha played the role in a bratty manner, with less of the layers that Marland's previous Lily types, like Genie Francis and Kristen Vigard, brought to their roles. I loved Lucinda, but I do think that she was often a distant and easily distracted mother figure to Lily when Lily was growing up. Yes, she had a beautiful home, a good education, and servants, which she probably should have not taken for granted as much, but she also had a mother who was wildly out of control, flinging herself into bitter corporate and personal rivalries and bedhopping with the wrong man time and time again. Lucinda was a mess, and no matter how much you love your child, that is going to have an effect. It's interesting what you mention about Andy. I feel like this was explored somewhat in his alcoholism story - we saw how much Kim's busy career and John being John meant he was lonelier and more prone to struggle - but I do think there was more emphasis on "tough love" for Andy than there was for Lily and more emphasis on the consequences of Andy's selfishness and insecurity - not just with nearly killing Lien, but also when his obsession with Julie helped refuel Courtney's eating disorder. I suppose it's because viewers expected to see certain behaviors as typical of young ingenues, but not young men, especially Marland-era ingenues, who were often coddled to no end. I will say that as tired I sometimes got of Lily turning up her nose at Lucinda, they did manage to show she loved her. I appreciated this more after seeing the nasty, mean-spirited way failing soaps like GH wrote Emily Quartermaine treating Alan and Monica, who would have been better off not even bothering to adopt her.

Horrifying.

I was just watching the episodes where Esther went on a talk show and faced down backlash for the quota system and being a Maori doctor, which even went as far as having a white racist vandalize her office. I think what surprised me most was they repeatedly made it clear there was no way for Esther to be a "model minority" - when she tried to be a good doctor and operate on the racist in spite of his hatred for her, he hurled abuse at her and refused her treatment. Even though the guy who plays Rico can't act, I did appreciate the mini-arc of him going from being a pro-assimilation figure to realizing just how little trying to fit in with the status quo mattered in the face of bile and hatred. This is a story that few soaps would ever touch. I guess the one-week runtime for these types of plots on Shorty make it more possible, but I still appreciate their guts here. Esther is such a rich character, especially now that they have moved on from her love life dramas. She's possibly the most layered and relateable character on the show at present.

I preferred watching Hayley Sparks to Beth Ehlers in her temp stints (if you had told me in 1992 I would prefer watching Hayley to Beth, I would have laughed in your face). I think there was some spec about whether she might take over if Beth's high-wire contract negotiations around 2000 or 2001 had broken down.

Another example of how dangerous The Atlantic is. One of their people peddles false statistics and does not take them down even when called out.

They had started to dip their toes into the waters around this point - I believe ABC actors started doing chats with Prodigy, AOL, etc. in 1994 and 1995 - but it definitely was not a thing for a majority of the audience. I also had no idea it was Gwyn. Admittedly I did not see the full story (I think I started watching around the time Curtis died), and I didn't really know the history of the characters, but Christine Tudor did such a wonderful job playing the pain of Gwyn (the moment where we heard her cry out in agony at learning of Cabot and Isabelle still stays with me), and I was also completely fooled by the attempt on Gwyn and Ally's life. It still makes sense even after the reveal, because Gwyn was not one of those soap killers Henry Slesar wrote so well who had many detailed plans to survive - she would have been fine with dying that night (and she wasn't close enough to Ally to care if Ally died with her).

Ariane Munker toured many of the soaps - I think her last role was a thankless recast for Kim on DAYS when poor Patsy Pease couldn't play the abuse/DID story anymore. The little I've seen of her on ATWT, I liked her spark, which stood out in contrast to how staid much of the rest of the show felt. As for Jacqueline Schultz, I've complained about Dee, but I do think Schultz had an ethereal presence and was beautiful, which made the various obsessions men had with her more logical. It's just so many of the stories were so dull, and they did a horrible, horrible job casting Brad, with that pornstache and the general perviness. Probably one of the worst casting choices ever on a soap.

already posted

Disturbing.

Sorry if this was already posted, but I was looking around on Archive and saw a channel that posted some Loving and The City episodes earlier this year. Most of them look familiar, but this one (June 28th, 1995) was new to me. Aside from some beautiful understated acting from Debbi Morgan, the episode doesn't have any real standout moments, but it's an important building block to Stacey's death. I will say that Gwyn being so eager to get Stacey to confide her problems in her feels like a big red flag, but I guess it's a moment easy to overlook if you were just watching at the time without being online or perusing magazine recaps. I also got a good laugh out of Tess leaving big-ass font sized snippets of her threatening notes to Steffi on her monitor, in the middle of the workday. https://archive.org/details/dvd-video-recor-title-01-01

Laura had been one of the central heroines on the show for nearly a decade by that point and she was getting offers elsewhere, so I can see why she felt she was worth the effort and money. With that said, I do feel like Cassie had run her course as a character.

Not much of a surprise, but still, it's hard not to feel completely crestfallen and frightened over what is to come. Not to mention that, as a few other people have said, how long will the groups who are asked to "out-organize" even want to keep going?

I'm not sure if we'll ever really know, but Gloria Monty went back to the '50s for Secret Storm, I believe.

Given their hiring of loathsome Elizabeth Bruenig, I can't exactly recommend an Atlantic article, but this is an interesting piece on media darling Nancy Mace, not for what it is, but what it was intended to be. The Atlantic tries very hard to be Creditable and Reasonable in showing multiple points of view, many of them unworthy of the spotlight and clearly just there for the sake of backbreaking 'moderation.' This is the end result of putting your eggs in the basket of a Republican who is billed as the umpteenth "future of the GOP" but who turns out to be a dime a dozen and also clearly uninterested in even doing the bare minimum of going along with a profile. Sections that in other moments would have gotten hundreds and hundreds of words devoted to them, like the alleged vandalizing of her home, are sprinted through, because there's nothing to say (that this was laughed off Twitter and still did not get Mace a higher profile than someone like Lauren Boebert, who barely seems to know how to wipe her own ass, speaks volumes). The profile barely even seems to end as much as just stop. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-trump-critic-fell-back-line/619534/

Yes - she also went psycho and was involved in the sperm storyline with Adam, I think.

She sure dodged a bullet there.