DRW50

AKA Little Miss Seattle.

Thanks! I really need to try to remember this one.

Chris Schmering (not wholly reliable) claimed the Pollocks wrote a lot of the quad, saying it was a forerunner to their Dynasty material. He also panned all of their material, citing dialogue along the lines of, "You're my heaven and my hell," and, "I've got a fever in my blood for you."

At the time Scott was on the canvas, Marley was still with Jake - if Scott had stayed to when she started dating Jamie or Dennis, he would have been about 3-4 years older. This does point out what a questionable decision it was to keep Jamie the same age for a decade, as they never did acknowledge the age difference between Vicky and Jamie.

A part of me has wished they had tried the story, just because the Loves needed expanding and it would have given Donna more story down the line, but most likely he would have been forgotten in a year anyway.

Good for her.

Sorry if I seemed brusque. We all do it - I just didn't want you to feel confused if no one had replied to your post.

It was posted a week or so ago, yes. Then they also both ended up struggling at P&G before finally returning to ABC to struggle some more (FMB pretty much torpedoing herself from the getgo on that front, although I appreciated her honesty...). McTavish sounds like hell to work with, but I don't think AMC really ever did improve a great deal even when she was gone, as in some twisted way I do think she understood the show's core. I wish she had not been such a pain and also let someone curb her worst excesses, because I agree with those who said she and Broderick would have been a good team.

I think the idea is that the show was in good form until the early '70s, where it slowly began to decline (peaking with Audrey's passing Tom Hardy off as someone else's baby, or being on trial, or something), then really began going into freefall around 1974 or so when they began dumping actors en masse.

You may already know about those but there are about 4 or 5 episodes from 1975 on Youtube (I think someone once said they came from an Australian station), all in B&W.

This episode (February 1975, apparently) was already on Youtube, but this version seems to have better audio quality.

The scenes with Chris getting hooked on Drag Race, even putting drag makeup on, because it's a happy family atmosphere unlike what he has, were so nicely done. I don't really connect to Chris, but for a character who has been on the show almost all the way through its 30 years, they have managed to make him feel much more rounded and relevant than, say, EE have done with Ian Beale. Curtis seems so likeable - I can see why the show is reluctant to fully let him go, even though it means Esther is left in limbo. I wonder if they are killing him off. Is that why the actor came back to make those few appearances? I wonder if the actor who played Eddie left abruptly. The Eddie/Esther tension had been bubbling along for a good while, and then he's left so instead the tension involves whether Esther will sleep with some rich guy viewers had known for about a week before this. And Curtis says hey, no biggie, rather than the more complex reaction he might have had if she was getting further involved with the father of her child.

This makes me furious.

Logically, Philece could have passed as the mother to Vicky and Marley, yes, but I think it was more difficult with replacing Anna, who was more believable as their mother. If the writing had leaned more into how Donna was actually not a mother to either girl in any way but biology, then Philece could have made more of this, but they didn't want to do that because it was easier to just have her wringing her hands. The audio on this clip is low, and the writing is not great (it's fine, but not great), but here's an aftermath which Philece's Donna probably could have played - when Marley confronted her over sleeping with Jake (Donna had not actually shot Jake, but she had lied about it to get Marley out of prison). (as a side note, people don't ever really talk enough about what an excellent job Anne Heche had done to make Marley a real character again in her last year and a half or so on the canvas - sadly Jensen Buchanan did not have anywhere near as much interest)

Oh that liberal media: (say what you will about Biden's views on marijuana legalization, these remarks were clipped out of context) Speaking of this topic, here is one of the deeply loathsome scumbags at Qullette (a publication lauded by some pseudo-intellectuals even though it does everything from publish race science to a hoax written by a man pretending to be a "Marxist-Leninist-Alinksyite" from Queens trying to join the DSA). I know you aren't supposed to give professional trolls attention, but this particular monster is always given some type of pass she has never earned.

She's a bit wooden as an actress but I can see the woman who plays Marley's drug-addicted mother becoming a bigger name someday. She has a lot of presence.

Likely followed by her barely appearing.

The main problem with Philece's Donna is that she was written as a generic ingenue. This was not unique to her - Anna Stuart's last months in the role before she left in 1986 (I'm not sure if this is part of WHY Anna left or she just left for other reasons) also had her suffering, and being victimized and drugged, none of which I find worth watching. So you had a generic Donna, suffering or being in the midst of vacuous love triangles, with no real depth or wit (which was always key to Donna). I also don't think she had much chemistry with Kale Browne or David Forsyth (although to be fair to her that was not a unique problem...). And she simply looked too young to be the mother to Vicky and Marley. When Harding Lemay and then Donna Swajeski got into the main chair, Donna began to act more like her old self, and Philece was better, but she was mostly just doing what Anna Stuart would do a better job with if she were in the role. Anna basically was Donna. I know that there were bigger roles which were somewhat successfully recast, like Iris or Rachel, but Anna brought so many of her specific nuances as a performer to the role and in many periods of time, was literally the only thing that kept the role together at all. Not to be too glib in comparisons (apologies @vetsoapfan) but I might say it's a similar issue to the attempts at recasting Alice after Jacquie Courtney left the role. Philece likely would have been fine in another part - maybe yet another of Mac's cousins or nieces or whatever, or a recast of Nicole Love - but she just wasn't Donna.

I saw that Philece was trending, in large part thanks to fans of shows like Digimon. Even as soaps dumped veteran actors as yesterday's news, that community seems to respect their elders. One is on its last days and one is still thriving - there's a lesson to be found here. I feel like most of what I have said about Philece involves her AW work, because that's most of what I have seen, but her work (what I have seen) on DAYS was excellent. I can understand why she was so well-regarded by many fans. Her last "telling off" scene she plays beautifully, especially her moments of pain and heartbreak.