titan1978

6 hours ago, Khan said:

Honestly, they'd be better off just updating the old opening from the Gloria Monty era.

Agreed.  It also has drama with that speeding ambulance.

 This one is boring af.  Even Valentini’s first one was better.  This is like web soap material.

It was nice to see Tony again, and the scene with Bobbie was sweet.

That memorial wall is always sad and nice at the same time.  Poor Jessie though.  Relegated to the bottom row and a smaller photo than Steve.  I think Lucille is even a row up between Amy and Gail.  Wtf?

His work on Guiding Light and GH was pretty amazing.  I’ve never paid attention to B&B.

I can’t imagine a worse fit than with him and Valentini.  Valentini is all plot first, and only.  I always thought Mulcahey wrote for character first, and if that moved the plot forward great.  But it did it with depth and reflection and sometimes wit.

That name makes me cringe.  Chance Chancellor?  FFS.
 

Being on some Nina please to help make me care.

2 hours ago, alexisfan07 said:

 

I believe the latest is she is returning onscreen in December, per Soaps.com. That will have given her a full six months off. No one knows in what capacity she'll be returning in, i.e. contract, recurring or short-term to wrap up story.

 

I don't disagree but this is actually the most consistently Lucas has been used in years. As of this posting, he's appeared in 45 episodes this year, which is tied with his 2014 and 2015 year-end totals. A breakdown of his year-end totals since Ryan Carnes returned:

 

2014: 45

2015: 45

2016: 24

2017: 4 (yes, 4 for the year!)

2018: 27

I do not dispute that he has been seen more.  I just think with the baby story, his relationship, and his family ties he should already be in the 80 eps and up crowd.

I mean what purpose does Julian serve at this time if he isn’t here to power grab from Sonny?  At least Valentin has Nikolas back to reignite a story that has some real stakes.  And he is useless too.

So much story has been wasted on the likes of Todd, Julian, and about half this cast.  They really won me over a year ago with the Ryan revisit, Genie back, several stories were good on paper even if the production was lacking.  But it really fell apart.

Thanks for the episode counts!  These stats are always interesting.

It was such a great website.

I had not seen anything from EON since I was really little, and just hearing that early 1980’s theme music brought back so many memories of it being on when I was at my grandmother’s house.

Any word on Finola Hughes returning?

Lucas should be in actual story and featured more.  He is an attractive, decent actor with character ties to the hospital and family.  It’s mind boggling.

Also- a whole lot of this cast was in between 8 to 11 episodes.  

I have watched a lot of the Curlee and team HW era of the show thanks to YouTube.  Didn’t watch it back in the day, and I was truly missing out.

I can’t imagine watching it so sparkle for a great run, only to see it start to unravel and be dismantled brick by brick with not great casting decisions and terrible management.  I can’t think of another soap at that time that had so many riches and was using them all as a true ensemble with well written characters of all ages doing stuff that made you want to watch.  And was willing to take chances!

I know she gets bashed plenty.  But JFP really does cast a lot of bland women, produces shows where they are always in competition with each other and fighting, kills off all the wrong people, and centers her shows on talented men that she lets or demands dominate everything.  I will give her credit at GL (certainly the writers were responsible) for not shoving all the vets aside.

On her watch Alexandra, Blake, and Mindy were replaced by people that are just not quite right in my opinion.  And Alexandra and Blake’s characters became nothing like they were.

18 hours ago, Khan said:

I thought Deception was just a fragrance company, too.  (A spa?  Called Deception?  Say what?)

 

And I'm sorry, but I am not here for Genie Francis reliving her "Bare Essence" glories as investor Laura or whatever.  Working at a fragrance company?  Really?

 

Laura should be doing something with more gravitas, like going back to school and eventually become a therapist or counselor.  With her history, it'd make sense for her to work with troubled kids.

It was a fragrance company at first.  By the time it was a cosmetics company I’m pretty sure Jax had taken it over from Lucy.  Laura and Carly were fighting over it at one point if I remember correctly, with Sonny siding with Carly over Laura.  It was during the brief period after Guza was fired but before Phelps replaced Riche.

It was going to be a spa when Ron was writing for the show, it was one of the things in play post the 50th anniversary stuff.  Lucy and Laura were involved With Scotty I think, but the plans were scrapped and they wrote all three of them out for a bit (or years with Genie).
 

I loved Deception back in the day.  Lucy was great as a schemer with a little bit of power, but not enough that she didn’t still need investors and partners.

I also really miss the stuff with ELQ, and how Lucy had a play there thanks to asking for a small percentage in her divorce from Alan.

Laura was doing something related to counseling when Lucky died.  She was even treating a kid that kept making her sad about Lucky.  She had than incident with the train (where she maybe was contemplating suicide), then never went back to work again at the hospital as far as I can remember.  It would be a natural for Laura to be a counselor.

I thought part of the Deception story imploded because it was going to be a spa, and they didn’t have the budget so it evaporated.  And they wrote Genie out and we saw less of Lucy than we had been seeing for months prior.

Tony Geary- GH

On Steve Burton’s podcast, he often recalls his first day and watching Tony kick a door open and throw a fit.  There was the rumored fight with Richard Culliton that may or may not have included getting physical.  He hated Labine’s writing, didn’t respect Wendy Riche, called Ron Carlivati “the writer”, and fought for years to keep his line re-writing in his contract.  He is why Luke and Laura never reunited.
 

This is just the stuff we know.  Although I think his kind of diva attitude wasn’t towards his peers as much as those producing and writing the show.  Even when he was leaving, he spoke very highly of Genie, just not Luke and Laura.

5 hours ago, Faulkner said:

Look how far up Jackie Zeman was that year. When did they really start phasing her out? EDIT: According to your Google spreadsheet, it was 2003 when she dropped episode count, and in 2009 she began to disappear completely. Not sure how that aligns with her cosmetic work.

The last year Riche was there she had just had that work done that changed the shape of her face.  From the Carly is your daughter reveal episode to her aborted wedding with Jerry, her face changed pretty dramatically.  She also darkened her hair a lot and grew it really long again and started dressing much sexier.  It was kind of harsh at the time.

After JFP got there and started really sidelining her(our audience doesn’t want to watch people over 40 kissing), she had another procedure that was really just hard to watch.

I used to wonder if the Carly storyline really affected her.  She went from having small kids on the show to being a grandmother in like 4 years.  That would be hard on anyone, let alone an actress.  Her cosmetic surgery got way more noticeable then too.

Thanks for putting this list together.

Funny to read and think how much dead weight I thought some of these people were at the time.  Now it is like Masterpiece Theater compared to the last 4 years.

Who knows where Kimberly McCullough will end up?  She is booking big gigs as a television director.  If she ever gets to direct a pilot of a hit show she will be rolling in money.  It is a different kind of Hollywood success, but still worth noting.

Wasn’t he fired before and ended up staying?

Beth deserves better than the likes of him, and he is an absolute fool for tanking that possibility.

On 10/21/2019 at 10:53 AM, Franko said:

Thirty years ago yesterday, Victor Jerome bit the dust.

 

Fun scenes.  What an idiot Victor Jerome was.  

I miss that old school synth music sometimes, and the extreme close ups like Anna’s when it is confirmed Victor had escaped.  Such a staple of soaps and the GH directors used it a lot during from Monty’s 1st tenure through the early 1990’s.

I do remember thinking the original Julian was hot, and I loved him with Cheryl (I also loved her with Robert though!).  Can’t stand the current one.

Sad news.  I only knew him as Uncle Mickey, although I did watch the show when his daughters were getting story too.

I would love to see some of his work when Bill Bell was writing the show.

I always thought he was a good actor, and even when they gave him nothing he commanded attention and you could tell he cared about doing good work.

Like a lot of longtime vets.  I never saw John Beradino when he was a lead on GH- but I also never saw him phone in a performance. Even a minor one.

Just awful short sighted writing.  Tie them to the Quartermaines, then start killing them off like they did to the actual real Q’s, and we have two years of wasted story and Monica has become a walking tragedy.

If they had just recast Oscar and refocused the whole thing would have had a reason.  Even with Drew gone a new, better Oscar could have helped Kim and Monica. Ugh!

When they actually killed him I knew Kim and Drew were done on this show.

Well, as angry as some viewers were, more loved Luke.  Which is gross in hindsight.  I mean Rise skyrocketed up the charts after the rape, and usage in scenes like this and others.  Fans screamed rape me at Tony Geary at appearances.  It’s just all around awful.

Once his popularity took off and the show decided to keep him, there was no going back.  There are several scenes of him tormented by hurting Laura.  That screams PFS, but still the intention seems pretty clear in hindsight.  Redeem him and get them together.

On 10/4/2019 at 4:21 PM, Paul Raven said:

After 26 years on the show MB is still the leader in appearances. Good or bad thing?

 

What status did John Beradino have after the same amount of time on the show?

He was still a lead until the mid 1970’s, and even after that with Jeff Webber being his unknown son.  As much hate as Monty gets for sidelining him and Audrey, Marland’s stories do not seem to feature them as leads, and it continues on from there.  So not just her fault.  He wasn’t a focus again until Tom came back and started dating Simone, then briefly again when Ryan attacked him and Audrey.  Nothing compared to Sonny or Luke.

What is kind of remarkable is that he and Emily as Jesse weren’t just leads, they were the leads for a good while.  I remember Rachel Ames made a comment about their workload and that Jessie and Steve were the couple that should have been together in the 35th anniversary special.

Outside of Luke, I can’t think of another character on this show that has been the focus for as long, and neither one is a good thing.  I remember when they were kind of moving the show from being Sonny focused to Jason as the focus (mid 2000’s, all of a sudden Sonny could be wrong and Jason was carrying a burden by being his friend), and it still felt awful because it was Guza’s unholy trinity of Jason/Carly/Sonny.

Have any of you listened to Steve Burton and Bradford Anderson’s podcast?

I do not listen to every episode, but I do listen to the episodes with vets.  There was a great two part episode with Genie Francis, and another two part with Lesley Charleson.  If was great to hear her opinion of the Eckerts and the differences between David Lewis and John Ingle’s Edward.  Also how she felt betrayed by Gloria, and how awful she treated them when she came back. 
 

The interviews are usually a little bit about their history before diving into GH.  Sometimes they flub the details a little but these people are not historians of their show like a lot of fans are.

10 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

 

Not to mention Luke before them. 

It was quite a leap from thug, to low level mobster, to rapist, to hero, to mayor.

The difference with Sonny is that he stayed a mobster and everybody else became immoral somehow.  Like their failures of character had more weight than his did.

People like Robin Strasser would be fun because she seems to give zero f#cks.  I think she would tell her version of events with little sanitizing.

I would love to read a bio by Genie Francis, but I think hers would not be as open.  Although in recent years she has been much more forthcoming.  I know she does not enjoy dwelling in the period of time she was an addict and felt abused by the show and ABC.

I would absolutely read a JFP book.  Even if we know her perspective is flawed, it would still be fascinating to read.

Most of all I would kill for another oral history type book like we got about OLTL.  Especially about GH, but I would read one about almost any soap.  Rachel Ames, Valerie Starrett, and Denise Alexander are great resources for earlier years and are still alive. So are most of the people from when Monty arrived and then the Riche evolution.  I just wish it would happen!

19 minutes ago, BetterForgotten said:

Guza famously complained that Labine left "nothing" behind when he took over. He's kind of right, actually, the show was running out of fuel by the end of her tenure. But she gave him the canvas he would ape for years (namely Sonny, and Sonny and Brenda). 

 

And credit where it's due, Labine did bring this show into the 90's. It wasn't Monty's GH, but the show needed a big leap forward, and that's what Labine accomplished. It's a shame she was awful/boring as hell at OLTL and GL. 

She left him pretty well set up, it was just the beginnings of it all, and not fully developed plots.  But he did not inherit a bunch of stories already deep in motion.  His complaints are funny because when he came back, he famously wrapped up nearly everything as a ghost writer before his first official show back, when Nikolas was shot outside Luke’s because he hated everything.

Bobbie’s flashback/dreams with babies crying, Jason was firmly in Robin’s orbit, his accident, and Jax were all Labine’s last plots. He took them in different places than she would have (Jax was meant for Lois, etc).

But when you look at her last six months, the show was kind of meandering and had lost a lot of momentum with Stone’s death.  It had so dominated for months.  That story took the wind out of the sails of the show for a bit when it ended, IMO.

I also agree that the fire was a real turning point.  It was like they wanted to nail the coffin shut, not leave it open a crack like everything before it.  They kind of tore each other apart, and it was hard to watch.

I do think both Tony and Genie excel with that kind of dark, emotional material.  I thought we actually saw how Laura would have grieved for Lucky, even if it kind sidelined her for almost a year.  Which is rare for a soap. They do tell things in real time (especially back then) but often with extreme grief they let them move on.  She was morose for months.  Had to be hard to act that kind of pain, but it’s one of the things that I loved about her in that era.

I had no issue with the rape revisit storyline- it was important and made sense in the context of Lucky finding Liz.  What I hated was how he treated Laura, and how other than a couple of scenes she got the story wasn’t about her.  It was only about Luke.  And Lucky’s pain kind of eclipsed Liz at times too.  And that sucks.

She had kind of been sidelined during Labine’s last year (maternity leave, Luke and her on the outs), and Guza really brought her back.  She went on trial for killing Damian, then the bone marrow and Nikolas reveal, through her next maternity leave and finding Lesley.  She was the focal point of all those stories, not Luke.  It was the last time they were a couple and the story revolved around her until she went crazy.  I always wondered if it was because she kept refusing to come back to the show during that maternity leave, so they stopped trying with her character.  I remember an interview with Michael Logan when  Guza returned, and he asked about Genie.  And Bob said he would go down on his knees to beg her to come back (or close to that).  What a difference a decade makes- they refused to bring her back when she was ready, except for guest stints.

One thing that first Guza run did is that I did not feel that most of Labine’s work was very soapy.  Guza brought that back, big time.  Love triangles, secrets from the past, murder mysteries, and a medical crisis involving family.  All in one amazing year.

Who killed Damian Smith?