titan1978

Agreed! And yes, his tenure with Guza was much sleazier than Guza alone.

I don’t know, both sound terrible. Maybe I could see Guza on OLTL, with a greater focus on Angel Square and the newspapers. The only soap I can see Pratt on other than GH is DAYS. He would have loved Carrie/Austin/Sami and turning Hope into a bitch! Pratt absolutely turned Melrose Place into the show to watch when I was a teenager. He’s the one that told them they have a soap, and they might as well take advantage of it. I do think a good writer for GH in modern times should be better at balancing character development and growth with the spectacle and crime elements they are known for, slow it down a bit too! Pratt is too much trash all the time.

If they want him to be so publicly evil they should have him doing gotcha style political interviews like Fox News, so even his work is a ridiculous as his life.

Funny to see Alan with his train set after it came up in the recent stories with Monica’s estate. lol. I think Frons had a simpatico minded producer with Jill. She produced a splashy show, and that was what he was always trying to force onto AMC and OLTL and it just didn’t work the same way because they are all three fundamentally different shows at their cores. Nobody in their right mind would think Pratt would be a good fit for AMC. Cutting vets to impact the budgets is something both of them believed in. The fact that Alan Quartermaine died and then shortly came back as a ghost just reeks of ABC getting cold feet and wanting to lessen the blow, forcing it on Jill. I know Laura waking up was an ABC thing to capitalize on the 25th anniversary of the wedding and also to get Tony and Genie to Super Soap Weekend in 2006. The stuff with treating the women like crap bts, especially over the men was absolutely JFP. Again, Frons had no problem with misogyny, so he wasn’t going to stop her. I also think the overall nihilistic approach to telling stories fits both of them- they both acted like there was no future beyond a handful of years for soaps so they stopped training new bts talent and had no problem decimating the shows. There are many little things that you can add up along JFP’s career and see her fingerprints on stuff that happened at GH during her tenure. But Frons shared so many of the same values that it’s hard to fully tell who made which errors.

It’s one of those times where Pratt walked in the door with a high pricetag and the clout from his primetime career to demand power over the stories, and from what I have heard back in the day Guza got favored nations with him when they came back as a team. Which was very smart on his part. But we know that power was not total and Jill could use the budget to override them. Alan Quartermaine’s death being and example of her vs him. Thanks to MVJ spilling that tea. Same thing with Vanessa Marcil’s contract extension- JFP got in the way there too. I suspect she was more the reason Laura didn’t fully return than Bob Guza too, based on what he used to say about Genie and the fact that he seemed to write for her several times.

Happy holidays all!

I’m sorry, what? I refuse to engage in Passanante as a Head Writer so I pretty much missed most of her tenure.

It points to the lack of general schemers on the show right now. Back in the day you had grey characters like Alan, Edward, and Monica who were capable of anything in the right situations. And people like Scotty, Lucy Coe, Katharine Bell, even early Damien Smith and early 80’s Heather Webber. Reliably capable of blackmail, opportunists, scoundrel behavior without crossing into supervillain. That type of characters are reasonable suspects in a story like this to keep the fuel in the storytelling fire.

I just got to the eye mites. They made Felicia be part of this too?

That was deeply stupid and a waste of time. Now if the full rumored story had happened I could see a Monica/Rick interlude, leading to Alan being a credible suspect when he died. I think the ending was always going to be Rick dead, I just think they were setting it up to be more of a mystery. I could see even Lesley being roped into this mystery (but not as a major player). Scott, Laura, and Luke being set up as the main suspects. I could not bring myself to watch more than the first vid, but even then they were being very heavy handed with Scotty/Rick. It did feel very Melrose Place Pratt. And I think the Bobbie stuff was maybe the second version of the story that also didn’t fully play out, that she was who Rick was sleeping with. But when they decided Laura (later Scotty) killed that nurse, they shifted away from Bobbie except as a red herring while Laura tried to piece it together. Although JFP was more than willing to destroy Bobbie as a character, I cannot imagine her knowing Laura was molested and keeping it to herself for decades. In all the retcons, I know they decided Laura didn’t kill Rick. But she did still kill that nurse, correct? Or was that reconned away too? @carolineg Brenda’s return really saved several jobs, JFP especially. Because they were able to use that as a reset and momentum to carry them out of a real rough patch that had lasted over a year, from the end of Riche to that dreadful first period with JFP. Then they established the big sweeps event storytelling that kept them going for several years.

Does anyone know what the original Rick Webber storyline was supposed to be in 2002 before Genie quit/was fired? Were they actually going to reveal that Rick molested Laura? And was there originally an element of Bobbie being involved in it? I was watching classic GH episodes and it auto started a Rick Webber returns playlist otherwise I would probably never have seen it again. Right away Scotty is very anti Rick, so he was included from the beginning. I assume the hospital takeover was supposed to last longer too, and everything got cut off because of Genie’s exit.

We have fallen very far from Bert Bauer’s Pap smear and Stone dying of AIDS. It’s comical how much soaps used to do storywise that they would never touch today. Especially the real stuff. We saw Erica Kane at Betty Ford! But at least the eye mite community got their PSA.

I know I have said it before, but the Ava/Nina and Ava/Alexis confrontation scenes during that period were my favorite Ava scenes in a long time. Maybe ever. The turn with Nina where she just drops the pretense was so good! It wasn’t just two ladies sparring, Ava seemed dangerous again.

I really don’t get it because Ava hasn’t been on the front burner much in like two or more years. She is a natural antagonist that should be up to no good. Deeply involved with Drew against Sonny. Or with Sidwell against Sonny. Watros is in the same boat. It’s like Valentini would rather leave them on the shelf than actually use their talents. And Rick Hearst has energy and chemistry to burn all over the place. And now he’s back to trying to win over Sonny too! Puke!!!!

We should have seen the real Ava get very nasty! Except Ava had to be a near victim of Kristina, and they even squashed that beef too!