titan1978

It was on YouTube. There was even a year like it was official!

I know we have gone over this in broad ways many times on the site. I am curious what you think each of the four current shows need to have for you to consider them set up for success? For me- GH needs a strong hospital core of characters, and also the classic thriller umbrella storylines. I just think the show is best when you have both at the same time. DAYS should have high romance and a sense of danger. DAYS was always watchable when you had people falling in and out of love, and a good antagonist to keep stories moving. Y&R needs old school glamour and dramatic staging, with heightened but also somehow reserved emotions and actual business stories involving Jabot. The only show to have business stories I cared about. B&B I have never really watched to be honest. But from what I have seen, and read about it, I think it needs a Spectra type crew to go head to head with the Forresters. Scrappy, rootable, maybe a little shady, and fun to combat the stuffy nature of the well to do characters. Whats makes these shows successful to the rest of the board?

Who is this guy in the opening credits?

I agree. It’s like a snake eating its own tail. And the same thing has broken superhero comics from Marvel and DC. The constant navel gazing. We are now two generations of American kids that don’t read those comics but still support the genre by reading manga. Much like continuing drama is pretty much all of the rest of television, and superhero movies are still a juggernaut. But the source material has died on the vine. The audience is out there, and fandom has such a stranglehold on soaps and those comics that they won’t let them evolve.

That divorce and his desire to have no body fat at all aged Burton a lot between his last stint and this one. I do appreciate he is emoting more than he has in decades. But he looks like old pappy to me paired with Sasha. And Finola is older than him and she looks closer to his age. Honestly, anything to keep him and Anna apart. But I am still in favor of Tracy/Cody!

There is a lot of truth to this for me too. And what you said about Sonny and Jason colors my viewing habits of the entire show. It used to make me feel something, and so I am still tied there out of my history, and how I feel about the genre as a whole.

“Sonny’s treacherous son, Michael…” Oh brother. I wish this was accurate lol!!!

I did too. Ready for a good laugh? The person that wrote this article describes him as steely, and so integral the show will never be the same again. Oh to be white, muscular and young, people let you get away with mediocrity! This entire article is peppered with nonsense! https://ew.com/general-hospital-star-evan-hofer-dex-shocking-fate-8757187

Though horribly miscast, they and Tony Geary helped Jacob Young improve tremendously at GH. He was still miscast, but at least he didn’t just stare and pout anymore. I was shocked to see he arrived in 2022. It felt like he was there for at least 5 years to me. Five long years.

It’s rough that Eden has to play another dead boyfriend. They are on the way to making her the new Maxie as far as dead lovers at such a young age.

And Cyrus gets to do it twice! First time with the Floating Rib bomb, then again up close and personal in the hospital.

The comedy of using Cyrus twice to purge the cast. First with the Floating Rib bomb, then again one patient at a time at GH.

I am shocked at just how many people they have gotten rid of this year. It felt like forever all we did was add characters left and right. And I appreciate they are building a mystery for Liz, because that’s what a death should do. Propel story forward.

In other soap times, that video would have leaked at a huge event, with everyone dressed to the nines. Add in a tipsy Ava letting it spill that scumbag Drew slept with both mother and daughter, and we have Willow running away in tears (hopefully to be hit by a car and killed, maybe even driven by Kristina), and Nina eviscerating Drew in front of the room before running after her daughter. You know, an actual soap. And Michael was the one to leak it, and only Carly knows it was him.

I haven’t seen it. I hope she is well though!

Instead of seeing Erica Kane, I would much rather Valentini lure Erika Slezak in for a year to bring on a new villainous family. I think she could really bring it as a cold, calculating matriarch of a dangerous family. I would love to see her let loose on a contained viper character.

I think Jane has addressed it. She wanted more money with her new contract and Gloria balked, and called her professionalism in doubt for even asking. And Jane would not stand for that. Gloria’s secretary called Jane about the Emmy nominations and she came to the studio and nominated herself, and won, mostly out of spite after she was already gone. The interesting thing is that Jane won some kind of soap award (maybe digest) during the transition from Monty to Riche, and she actually accepted the award and in her speech spoke about Gloria with the highest of respect, possibly not likening how ABC handled things. I saw it when falling in a YouTube hole recently. I agree with Jane too- I think Tracy would be pro-choice. Especially because of her old money background. As far as Stephanie goes, I wonder if Flannery moved the character into what he was reaching for in the first place. SSH has warmth and glamour, and Jane has a grit and snooty attitude down pat. But Flannery, when B&B began, brought the cerebral quality Bell loved. She would play the Oedipal, psycho-sexual themes surrounding her over- involvement with Ridge as actual subtext.

Leaning either direction would have been brilliant for DALLAS. But I think the inherent sexiness of those films, mixed with the grit and southern leanings and melodrama, was something the men running DALLAS didn’t like. A younger ranch hand in Ray’s place sexing up both Lucy and Sue Ellen (although Ray was needed) would have done wonders. But the women on DALLAS lack agency compared to the wome of KNOTS.

The stories maybe. But the look of the show, shooting style, the colors, hair and clothes always feel contemporary to the times they are airing, unlike the fashion of Dynasty over its last couple of seasons which seems frozen in the mid 80’s. Dallas, to me, never really has a set visual identity unlike the several that Knots has over the years.

She did not have a good relationship with Wendy Riche at the time, due to complaining about Tracy being depicted as anti-choice. Riche said it was Jane’s personal beliefs clouding things, Jane said it was the character being forced to fit that was wrong. One of the few times Jane ever fought a story turn. She has spoken about Marland telling her to come back to New York, I can’t remember if there was an exact character yet though. We know from Hogan Sheffer that Marland had bibles with characters not yet introduced and story directions we never got to see. I remember one of his first interviews when taking over ATWT he mentioned being given access to the story bibles the show had, and described those details and the brilliance of Marland’s planning. Kay Alden’s initial story plans reigniting the Jill/Katherine story was incredibly smart. Bell did it himself in the early 80’s to great effect.

At the time and now I still feel there was way more mileage in Gloria being his wife and not his widow. The dynamic of him just truly loving her and his children not being able to stand her and machinations with the house and Jabot would have been better. It would have made Gloria far more tolerable for me if John was still there. Even as bad as things got before Latham with Jack Smith, you still had an idea that the show was being structured for the future as well as what was airing. But since Latham Y&R is no longer meticulous, it’s messy and rarely in a fun way.

while I agree to an extent, this is better than the last few years before the Mulcahey/Korte reset. It felt like most of the stories hinged on recurring people, or were mostly about them, and not the contract cast. At least right now the contract cast is driving story and appearance rates. That’s what was pissing me off- you have these people you locked down, who truly do cost significantly, and you are not using them as much to drive the stories as the recurring folks. And I do wonder if the actual soap talents are paid a recurring fee above just the day rate? Not enough to hit the budget, but certainly more than the random doctors and nurses they use often.

This is exactly what I was going to say. He had so much charisma you just had to watch him. No matter how awful the writing was I was always happy to watch him!

I agree so much with this. It’s also why I have loved Molly having enough of it from both Kristina and Alexis. It’s one of the few character turns lately on GH that feels earned and set up over years. She has repeatedly behaved impulsively and gotten herself into trouble, and Sonny and Alexis bail her out. I hope they keep this selfish edge because as you say, the rest of the town is filled with blandness.

And he had the added baggage from debuting during the Casey the Alien story. And Faison still worked better than the rest of them. I know on the modern show people got sick of Faison, but I always liked him when he was more menacing than bumbling.