titan1978
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Viewing Topic: ALL: "Soapy" Podcast hosted by Rebecca Budig & Greg Rikaart
Everything posted by titan1978
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I never thought any soap would kind of ascend above how I felt about Labine’s GH- but my last year or so watching almost all of Curlee/Demorest/Reilly/Broderick’s run, it might be my favorite soap period. Not only was the major cast almost perfect, but there was a real balance of types of stories and characters. Multigenerational, rich, middle class, poor, strong women and a real sense of community that makes sense- it’s all I really want in a soap. I even like Dylan, who may not be the strongest actor but he fits into that mold of a character I think a soap needs to have. Beth stories of that time might be the only ones I just don’t care for. Nothing broke my heart like Labine’s GH- and that’s okay. Because with that version of GL I had heartbreak and triumph and flat out entertainment. For how much I loved Laura, Monica, Robin, Lucy, Brenda, and Lois, I equally now love KS’s Mindy, Vanessa, Bridget, Nadine, Gilly, Bev’s Alexandra, Harley, Maureen, Jenna, Holly, Eleni and especially Sherry’s Blake. So many great female characters. -
I have such a hard time seeing Marj as Alex. I loved her on AMC. It’s just hard for me as a viewer to go from BM to what Alex became. Maeve Kincaid really was given the chance to shine during Curlee’s era on the show. She got to be an accomplished woman with deep relationships. And sometimes (especially with Billy and Nadine), you would get to see some of that nasty side. She played calculating well too. There are times that I think that era of GL was almost perfect soap opera, the Calhoun period into JFP’s The Blackout.
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I loved her as Livvie on PC, and only really enjoyed her as Sam during the Liz/Jason/Sam/Lucky storyline. She seems miserable on GH at this point.
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The baby shower thing was just stupid. Drama, especially soaps builds towards a payoff. Moments to breath and showing aspects of life like joy and community are pivotal when the payoff requires an emotional reaction. And back in the day, a beloved couple having a child was a payoff, because the audience wanted to see them, and tuned in. Again- for all the lessons learned from Monty, she missed some of the big ones. Gloria Monty irrevocably changed GH, YMMV on if it was for the better. But they always had a human story going while the action adventure stuff was going on. Characters like Bobbie, Tony, Lucy, the Quartermaines, the Webber family- they were rarely in the full mix of the action storylines and were often involved in hospital stuff, affairs, raising families, etc. When everything is a bomb under the bassinet then nothing really matters anymore.
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The Blackout was a perfect plot driven event- because all the characters were in different or pivotal situations but they were so well defined and the writing was strong it all worked. I preferred the show under Calhoun- it was brighter without looking cheap or garish, and Mindy, Blake, and Alexandra were played by great actors who were compelling. And there was still a sense of fun at times. JFP rarely does fun. It’s almost always deadly serious with her.
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I wonder if the glossing over of GH has anything to do with how the power dynamic was there. Guza/Pratt had a producing credit (which I assume gave them some autonomy), and we already know what working with Frons on ABC was like. I wonder if she felt she got to put her stamp down more on the other shows. OLTL being a tough show for her is reflected in all those interviews I read back then. HBS and RW were both critical of how the show broke them up, making them both so stupid instead of letting it happen organically. Even if Lindsey was an excellent addition to Nora’s story. Erika loved JFP, but if you were Erika you would too I would think. Viki got to be romantic and dynamic again without her alters.
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I do think I learned more about her in this interview than in all the years I hate read everything about her while she was EP at OLTL and GH lol. Killing Maureen was a huge mistake. But I think it is also the line in the sand for the quality of the show changing into the mess it quickly became after, which exacerbated the situation for fans and became a kind of rallying cry for what was wrong and when it happened. I had to chuckle at her feelings of success with the Blake and Alexandra recasts, both of which were not successful in my opinion. I would love for someone to pin her down about the decimation of the Quartermaines, especially Alan. I don’t hate a lot of her ideas- she just almost always executes them in a way that I can’t stand. Drama absolutely needs stakes, and soaps shouldn’t be afraid of taking a risk for drama. Including killing characters off. She just doesn’t have the instincts after the decision to make something worthy of the pieces. My opinion of course, and also the audience erosion she has seen at all her shows (except OLTL).
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She missed the biggest lesson Gloria Monty was there to teach her- Gloria wanted to do something different, after decades of playing within the bounds of the genre. But she still understood the genre in a way JFP has always seemed to think she was better than. GM didn’t do right by many of the GH vets- however, we still saw them all the time in the first half of her tenure. Dr. Hardy and Jesse may not have been driving their own stories, but we certainly saw them constantly and they were part of the fabric of the show. And just because an actor was older doesn’t mean they got tossed aside- Ruby, Edward, Lee, Gail, Lila, Dan, and Jesse were onscreen and interacting with Lesley, Alan, Bobbie, etc. The audience still had that comfort while the show morphed into an action/adventure show. GM had the taste in her first tenure of great talent picking and good story instincts. JFP does not have that same skill set, so when she dictates story and tone we get darkness, misery, bland heroines and men as the focus of the show. I wish she left competent writers alone and produced the hell out of what they wrote. Instead of always having her fingers in the story (influencing story in every way possible- from focus groups to changing the scenes as they were shooting them).
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She’s so perfect as Marlena, especially the early version through her first exit, that it is easy to see why she was such a fan favorite and became beloved by fans. She always had an easy charm and also showed a lot of empathy as a character. One of the things I loved about Will’s coming out storyline was how well Marlena was used as both his grandmother, and her therapist roots.
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I love her, and it has been a long time since Y&R had that Bell style, so maybe she could do something with what the show is now. But I would never have put her there back in the day, I don’t think her style suited Y&R before it’s DNA became so mangled in the last 15 years. She would have been wonderful with Curlee’s GL team, and I still wish the rumors of her taking over ATWT had come true.
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Jax without Brenda and no longer married to Carly is an easy character to say goodbye to. He’s not tied enough to anyone else left to make his scenes/stories have enough impact. And I would never subject NLG to having more scenes with him, even though that pairing should have happened back in the day.
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Another Brenda connection- she actually lived in the Quartermaine mansion before. Instead of all these fakes they keep putting in that set.
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I think it speaks to how much many online soap fans want romance. Any romance at this point. Even a boring one. He still has more chemistry with Chase.
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In the last decade we have had Easton’s characters, Howarth’s 3, KA had two with Starr and original Kiki, and TB with Kim. We had Faison/Duke mask, Luke and Fluke (and talked about Bill)! It’s been beyond enough. When I think about this show not throwing money Vanessa Marcil’s way for another year contract, or that they fired Genie and she only came back because of fan uproar…yet these folks keep getting hired on the same show. And most of them aren’t even beloved from GH. It is so baffling. It’s worse than FOJ’s at this point. And for people that don’t care for Brenda- I get it. But she is at least capable of bringing in actual GH viewers and when used correctly invigorates the corner of GH that the show demands always stay front and center. This would be great!
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Has there ever been a miscarriage as controversial as HBS and GM’s Tom and Margo? Nicole’s just break my heart.
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That week was the best Maxie has been in years, and KS did awesome with it. It reminded me why I liked her as Maxie and the character in general. She used to be fun to watch. I appreciate that back in the day a story like Cyrus holding anyone hostage would have involved the entire Sonny crew. But here we got a logical person for him to go to with character ties to him- Portia, and Laura and Curtis putting themselves in danger made perfect soap sense. Think of all those Sonny Crew plots from decades past that would have been greatly helped by someone else playing the hero and other characters getting to shine!
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It was so bad. And I gave VM a lot of credit for some great acting on the show at several points, especially when Sonny left her in the rain, the wire, the shootout in the shower, lots of times really…but she was so awful in that story. Sometimes actors surprise you in a good way-Lynn Herring really surprised me with more range than I gave her credit for with the Serena storyline. Vanessa playing crazy…not so much. I am glad Peter is gone mostly because of the collateral damage he was doing to Anna, Maxie, etc. His acting wasn’t great, but I’ve seen some awful acting on all the soaps left airing in the last couple of years, even from people that usually do competent work.
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The fake-out with Robin was later era Guza, when she had short hair as I recall, and he was hardcore recycling his greatest hits before he got fired (and then shortly after Wendy was fired, although it could have been a year earlier it was hard to keep track the show was so miserable at that point). The Nik situation was the shootout in front of Luke’s when Guza came back to the show after Sunset Beach. It might even be the same episode where Carly tells Tony that Jason is the father of her baby. I have a vague recollection of Alan and Monica finding out Jason did the trach, and having one of those what could have been moments. When all the details of stories mattered Oh Brenda’s breakdown…what a disappointment that was. They didn’t do much with Nikolas having his speech issues either.
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I was not spoiled about Lily. It was one of the most shocking twists I had seen on GH in ages, if not ever at that time. I also thought she was going to crawl out of the wreckage somehow, maybe having lost the baby but still be alive. That Guza/Harris stint between Labine and Culliton was so good. Didn’t they do a Robin fakeout clink/boom? I seem to recall her slow motion walking towards a car outside Luke’s, with Jason looking on.
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The fact that Sony and Corday, who own DAYS and have their entire catalog intact have not been able to come up with a way to have a DAYS streaming service with classic episodes tells me that it’s going to be nearly impossible in the current climate for anyone else to do it, especially with shows that have been cancelled and companies without employees at high levels that even know what they have when it comes to those shows. And Corday has been talking about this for years, with no results. If we get anything close to a streaming service with classic episodes on it, I would imagine the Bell shows and DAYS would be the ones on it, just due to having their catalogs intact and still airing.
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Well mission was certainly accomplished with Donna Mills as Abby. She really brought a lot to the show, and Abby quickly became one of my all time favorite soap characters as soon as I saw her in action. I especially loved those first few years, and her and Gary together at the ranch.
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It’s not so much any individual artist. I remember and Indy film director a few years ago wrote a letter to two artists in the hopes of getting discounted song rights, one of them was Dolly Parton who agreed because she liked the story. I wish I could remember what that film was, it was in the director’s commentary. It’s the publishing companies and studio conglomerates that have been buying those rights for decades/already had them- they set prices that are too high. Which is hilarious, because we know many soap couple themes in the 1980’s helped drive the sales of those songs. GH used a lot of music and helped a few bands score bigger hits. I hate corporate mentality! Also some bands just flat out refuse. When they released WKRP a couple of years ago, they got about 95% of the music cleared. It made the box set expensive, but that show really needed the music. Pink Floyd, who had allowed them to use it back in the day during the original broadcast flat out refused. From what I read at the time, the dollar amount didn’t matter, they just did not license their music any more.
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I appreciate the many classic elements GH is using in their current stories, even if I don’t love all of it. We have the normal GH action, we have friendships being shown, there is an active attempt at romance with several characters, we have a couple of medical stories being told, and I’m happy to see GH actually using their Black cast. Even though I don’t love Kevin with Laura, I enjoyed the show following up with them after Cyrus was in custody, and the acknowledgment that she put herself in danger and that this is who she is.
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Kristin Storms. What’s the line from Steel Magnolias? When it comes to suffering, she’s right up there with Elizabeth Taylor! I think she did some of the best work she has done in a long time in the last couple weeks. The mommy stories have got to stop after this and they need to reinvest in Maxie as a person, not a tormented heroine/baby machine.
