ellabelle

For anyone who still has SOAPnet, in case you wanted to know, I just noticed that on Monday they're starting to air 3 AMC episodes now at 1am, 2am, and 3am. I'm 68 episodes behind (LOL) but I peaked at some recent episodes and it seems they're at around August 07 in the aftermath of the story where Greenlee ran her & Spike off a cliff, resulting in his deafness. Also, Kendall prematurely giving birth to Ian. I'm glad I have all these episodes piled up in my DVR; While it's not the best period of the show ever, I'm still happy watching them for obvious reasons

I'm in May 07 and I have to make a few comments. Jonathan Lavery was the most smug, abusive, annoying voiced character in all of PV/soaps and I absolutely hated his relationship with Ava. Sabine Singh was embarrassing to watch as Greenlee in the beginning. I just can't say it enough. Ryan and Annie's wedding was beautiful. I can't believe they got rid of Brent Weber who played Sean Montgomery. The show made a mistake turning Hannah Nichols into a stalkerish, crazy bat. I LOVED the New Beginnings/Reality show stuff with Erica. I still want to know why the show got rid of Erica's talk show. What a mistake!

I thought Jonathan was one of those characters who had real potential but then he was evil, but no, it was a brain tumor, and then he was simple Jonathan, and then... it was just stupid. The actor was far more talented than Cam Mathison, and if TPTB had put as much effort into Jonathan as they did Ryan, he could have been a good character. I hated Sabine Singh's Greenlee, and I hated how Greenlee causing Spike's deafness was retconned into something that had always been there so as not to trash the character. I LOVED Sean Montgomery! I loved his relationship with all of Jack and Erica's family, and I was so sad when they got rid of him.

Erica's talk show(s) were awesome! I loved New Beginnings, and I especially loved The New Divorce! Jack and Erica were at their best when they were allowed to be funny, and the divorce show was full of that: Erica pretending to be a couple with Tad, them sniping at each other in front of the cameras, them reconciling but pretending to be apart for the show. LOVED IT. I even loved their brief He Said/She Said. I'm not sure what happened to He Said/She Said, but I know New Beginnings was canceled by the network when Erica was arrested and went to jail. It's a shame they dumped the show for jail because the whole Erica in jail storyline was awful.

I'm most interested in anything Erica, if you have it.

I still like the idea of Kendall waking up for her 5th coma with amnesia and not remembering who Zach was... but immediately falling for the hot doctor taking care of her.

Who else was worthy of the front row? Darnell and Debbi? Jill Larson? Vincent Irizarry?

Who do you think would have gotten the front row had tptb kept on the trajectory they did pre-cancellation? Cameron Mathison? Thorsten Kaye? Jacob Young? All actors and characters that did not come into prominence until the MMT 2003 reboot.

I guess my question to the group is along with Susan Lucci, who would have been the new "front-row" in 2012?

Susan, MEK, Debbi Morgan, Darnell Williams come immediately to mind. In terms of longevity after the four of them... Walt Willey started in 1987, but he's usually in the back because he's so tall. Jill Larsen has longevity as well and could go near the front.

If David Canary, Julia Barr and Jennifer Massey had stuck around, I'd put them near the front. If not, then I guess the next row of longevity would be Cam Mathison, Rebecca Budig, Vincent Irizarry, Alicia Minshew, Thorsten Kaye...

But really, there are cast photos where the front row is all women because they're shorter. So if you're factoring in height, Walt Willey is still going in the back, and Rebecca Budig, Alicia Minshew, CBL, SG, Lindsay Hartley, etc. would go near the front.

Ruth Warrick...as much as I'm glad she made one last appearance, it hurt.

I felt the same way about James Mitchell's appearance in the 40th anniversary show. I did a double take when I saw him because I almost didn't recognize him, he looked so bad.

SOD has been really slacking on their fact checking. Or perhaps just AMC, I cannot speak about the other soaps because I do not known as much about them. In not one, but two photo captions, the wrongfully identified Dr. Grant's second wife Caroline Grant (Pat Dixon) as his first wife, Nancy (Lisa Wilkinson). Nancy and Caroline look very different from each other.

The grade 4 color scheme of the pages does not help. Though, guess I should find some solace in the fact that they even cover AMC anymore.

I think the 1999 (actually 2000-2001 photo) is the best of the lot as everyone can be clearly seen and they are all looking at the camera. AMC seems to have a tradition of unfortunate cast photos. The first one especially, looks like a candid joke. Susan's mouth is open, and poor Agnes is falling over.

The 1973 pic they used is an outtake. I've seen another version of that photo taken from the front, not from the side like that, and everyone is looking at the camera. I'm not sure where they got that particular photo, but then again, soap magazines have never really been known for their amazing journalism.

Thanks for sharing the SOD article.

I think this is 99/2000 for Crystal Ball Celebration, I remember being in love with Brooke's dress.

The next set of Crystal Ball Photos (with FH in red velvet dress) was 2000 into 2001.

The cast photo of the Crystal Ball is 2000 into 2001 where Bianca was publicly outed by Donald Steele, thanks to a tip from Greenlee.

The second set of photos with Alex in the red velvet dress is 1999 into 2000 because David and Erica attended that ball together, and she saw him at the bottom of the stairs and freaked out after Alex pushed him. Finola was on maternity leave at the 2000 into 2001 Crystal Ball, and Alex was written as disappearing mysteriously from the IncredibleDreams.com party where David dumped libidizone in the punch. David attended the 2000/2001 Crystal Ball with Dixie, and Erica attended with Dimitri - they ended up in the hunting lodge together after the ball turned into Bianca's coming out party, and Dimitri consoled her. It seemed like there might be something there, but then Edmund showed up with cigars and killed the moment.

Greg Vaughan could have come in as recast Tim. Im also upset they kinda did nothing with the character. Amanda rarely ever mentioned him

Yes because TPTB were really into Amanda as a self-destructive whiny girl who was all on her own and was constantly victimized by others and by her own bad decision-making with no one to guide her. If Tim had been a constant force in her life, Amanda would have had to grow up and take responsibility for her bad choices, instead of blaming it all on being alone and being Janet from Another Planet's daughter.

I wasn't as disappointed, if only because I thought Tommy J. Michaels was all wrong for that particular part. AMC needed to recast a lot sooner than they did (and with someone better than that Fergus person).

This. I was never a fan of his, although he did bear a slight resemblance to the actor who played Alex Hunter, so I guess there's that. But to me Tim always seemed like this random kid Trevor picked up somewhere and less like Natalie and Alex's son.

I don't think ellabelle meant she asked that they kill off Trevor, just that she didn't want to work with him.

Yes, this. KC was willing to come back but only if she didn't have to work with JK. IDK if she asked him them to kill him off or not, but IF it's true that fan mail volume was the reason she got canned and he got to stay on, you bet your ass I'd be petty about that, even a decade later. Besides, TPTB wanted crazy Janet, not sane Janet, and no one did crazy Janet better than KC. I could see them writing Trevor off to get KC back even for a short-term story. What did they care? Trevor was off camera and had been for years. No big deal to kill him off, and killing him off would get Amanda plenty to cope with, whereas if they've divorced, at some point it would have been reasonable for Trevor to step in and help Amanda deal with the constant bad decisions she made in life. On top of that, I just can't picture JK and Chrishell Stause working together as father-daughter.

I think what set apart the good HWs from the bad HWs is that they knew how to listen to fans; it is not something that has a clear set of rules or criteria. People may love a certain character, or couple, but if there is no organic story left, it may be time to move on. The integrity of the character has to come first. As you water that integrity down, or stretch the character out, he becomes unrecognizable and isolates the very viewers you once attempted to cater to.

I think this is a very good point. Unfortunately, AMC had people like MMT who were both a good and a bad headwriter all rolled into one. I thought she had some good stories and some years that were better than others, but she is also responsible for the abomination that was Josh the unaborted fetus, and I have a hard time forgiving her for that. When MMT was good, she was very good, and when she was bad, she was horrible.

Eh, Greenlee was only bearable to me when she was with Leo, and even then I thought Leo deserved better. For the most part, Greenlee was a spoiled, selfish, whiny b*tch I hated... which is kind of odd because I LOVED Erica the first moment I ever laid eyes on her and never stopped loving her, but I absolutely HATED Greenlee with a passion.

You know, it's a fine line in terms of listening to fans. On the one hand, you don't want to alienate a huge fan base by writing off a beloved character, but on the other, if you listen to the fans too much, you get stuck in an endless loop of the same pairings because the show is listening to a small cadre of active fans who email, snail, mail, call, vote in polls and otherwise threaten to watch if their favorites aren't together... and when AMC listened to that, it stifled the show. How many years did we have Greenlee/Ryan over and over again? How many years did we watch Erica and Jack run in the same circle? How long did we watch Zach and Kendall go back and forth with each other? If one of those couples had been on an endless loop of get together, fall apart, it could have been bearable, but to have three doing it at the same time made the show feel stagnant, like the writers had no new ideas and no new pairings or plans in mind.

An Alex/Dimitri/Erica/David story would have been epic, especially with the proven chemistry with the actors in all four pairings (of course Vincent/Finola's was not discovered until her run as Anna). I as a viewer, did not pick-up on hints of this as David/Erica were broken up and she was spending a lot of time with Jackson again. I do remember Erica spending a lot of time at Wildwind again with Dimitri. Dimitri had grown to think of Bianca as his own daughter.

A good portion of the Erica/David scenes are available on youtube if you're interested. When Erica got the news that Dimitri had supposedly died, David came over and comforted her as she talked about her memories of DImitri (complete with flashbacks), David took off work and spent the rest of the day with Erica after Dimitri's memorial service - they had a picnic and then ended up in a quaint bed and breakfast type place where they slept together for the first time... as their relationship went on, she constantly compared him to Dimitri, even getting angry with him for mentioning Gillian's prior slutty behavior because how dare he speak that way about someone in Dimitri's family.

Erica and David were officially broken up when Erica walked into his office and found Dimitri standing there, very much alive. She was beyond pissed that he was staying with Alex, so she trashed Alex's half of the office, and then David came in, they had a huge fight, and then they had hot sex on top of Alex's desk. Jack was spending more time around Erica because Bianca was there, but it was clearly David and Dimitri who held the bulk of her interest in fall 2000.

I always found Dimitri's interest in Bianca to be rather peculiar. It was sweet that he cared about her, even long after he and Erica had divorced for the last time, but it was odd considering how he treated his own children. He didn't have much of a relationship with Anton, and when Anton left Pine Valley, I don't think he was ever even really referenced again, despite being the firstborn son of a count. When he thought Maria was carrying his baby, he was fine with the child being raised as Edmund's and living the same destructive lie that his own father had made Edmund live. Despite planning to remarry Erica, he wasn't overly thrilled when Erica found out she was pregnant, and then when she miscarried and was beyond devastated over the loss, he had the gall to suggest that they just adopt instead barely a week or two after their baby died. I mean, I suppose there are some titled royalty who don't give a damn about having an heir, but the way Dimitri freaked out over having a brother and wanted to "protect" Wildwind and the Marick name from Edmund didn't really match how he seemed to react to the idea of fatherhood. So again, I thought it was odd how close he was to Bianca. Frankly, I also found it odd the way he pushed Erica to be a mother to Kendall and make her part of their family too. There was something vaguely creepy about the Dimitri/Kendall interactions with SMG's Kendall, well before she falsely accused him of rape.

^ I definitely think Erica matured over time, but I saw Nick as taking on more of a paternal role in Erica's life, to the point where them being physically intimate again would have felt very weird to watch.

It seemed, from the way things were written in 1999 and 2000 that TPTB were setting up an Erica/David/Dimitri/Alex mess of epic proportions. Erica was supposedly over Dimitri, but him getting closer to Brooke and then "dying" had Erica remembering only the good things about him and not all of the crap he did to her, which cast a huge shadow over her relationship with David, and then of course you had David saving Dimitri but keeping it from Erica and Alex, and you had Dimitri and Erica bonding over Bianca coming out while Alex was AWOL. It could have been a really interesting story to watch, had Michael Nader not been a raging drug addict. Maybe if he'd been able to get his act together and keep it together, we could have watched a great quadrangle story instead of the awfulness that was David/Dixie/Tad/Leslie Coulson.

So many good posts in the last day or so! I didn't feel that Dimitri had the right chemistry with Natalie, and IIRC, it seemed like Natalie was just going along with a relationship with him because she was mad at Trevor.

Re the Kate/James feud, my understanding is that KC refused to come back to AMC in 2006 if JK was there, and that's why they killed off Trevor.

I loved Dimitri with Erica right up until he secretly helped Kendall search for Richard Fields. I could not understand how someone who claimed to love Erica would do something that he had to know she'd view as a horrific betrayal. I could not understand why she eventually went back to him and remarried him when Jack had proposed as well in Oct 1994.

I LOVED Erica and Adam together. They had such wonderful chemistry together. Unfortunately, trust was a huge issue for Erica, and Adam proved right away that she couldn't trust him: he lied about having a twin, he lied to her about starring in Raising Kane, and he faked his death to test her love for him, which was a big fat failure because Mike Roy was back in the picture. If Adam hadn't done that, if he'd given her good reason to trust him, they could have been wonderful together, but neither one of them was really mature enough to be together in 1984/1985. I loved their second marriage as well with them constantly at odds. I would have loved to see her eventually really fall for him. They seemed to be going that direction in 2008/2009, but unfortunately the writing was so bad that it wasn't a joy to watch.

It really felt to me like after 2004 or so, AMC just gave up on seriously trying to pair Erica with anyone. She had brief interludes with Sam Wood, Caleb Cortlandt and Ryan Lavery that were horrible to watch and the aforementioned whatever it was with Adam. They hinted very briefly at something there between her and David in 2010, but then dropped it. It felt like the writers just threw up their hands and said "whatever, we'll just put her back with Jack again."

The one relationship I so wish they'd come back to and further explored was Erica and David. The chemistry between VI and SL was just off the charts, and it was obvious from the very brief scenes in 2010 where they tied each other up and played mind games with each other that there was still something there. The only times I thought David was a remotely decent human being were when he was with Erica and Anna, and it would have been nice to have that back instead of the one-sided villain we got most of the time.

I read that KC gave an ultimatum: that either JK leave or she left and they choose JK because he got more fan mail, apparently. That shocked me. IA that they should've kept KC and gave JK the boot.

If that was the reasoning behind their decision, then this is yet another example of a fan base dictating casting and story decisions with awful results.

What was the source of the animosity between KC and JK? I have heard for years that they disliked each other intensely, but I never knew why?

That is when I fell in love with Kate Collins, in all her 80's entitled beauty. I think people did not realize how "odd-looking" Kate was for daytime. She was much taller than the other ladies on the show, full-figured and curvey. Her face was so stark, with sharp features and beautiful eyes. I still think she was one of the most beautiful women on TV. Here are some photos from that time. I love the red outfit, but her hair is fabulous in the purple:

I would have loved for Kate to stick around. Frankly, she had so much more storyline potential than Kiberd ever did. I could see her eventually finding her way back to Dimitri, maybe even pit-stopping with a romance with Edmund along the way.

When they did "dress" Janet up in Kate's 2006 run, you could see the beauty was still there. There was a seen with Janet and Erica at the docks where Kate acted very Natalie-like mannerisms wise.

It made me sad to see Kate during her last few returns to AMC. She really was so stunning in the 80s as Natalie. I realize that Janet was heavier than Natalie had been, but Kate just looked SO different. It was hard to believe that was the same woman.

I just didn't see anything appealing in Trevor. Sure, every soap occasionally needs an odd and quirky character, but I found it hard to believe Natalie would go from men like Adam and Alex and Jeremy to Trevor. Dimitri definitely seemed her "type" - rich, powerful, domineering, handsome. I didn't think she had great chemistry with Michael Nader though. Susan Lucci and Finola Hughes were definitely his best pairings.

It would have been interesting to see the sophisticated cool blonde Natalie (the one before Trevor got his hands on her) with someone like Jack, and given how much Erica and Natalie disliked each other, Natalie with Jack could have been fun. If they hadn't killed her off, Natalie with Caleb Cortlandt could have been intriguing as well.

I loved Natalie during the saga with Jeremy. I thought Kate Collins did the vapid, selfish blonde thing very well. Once Natalie was paired with Trevor, I lost interest in her. I liked Janet, especially when she was being crazy in a humorous way - but I found it hard to believe that both women were THAT into Trevor Dillon. Uncle Porkchop just didn't seem all that appealing to me.

^ I just loved him on both SB and AMC. I HATED what they did to Edmund toward the end of his run.

Man, I loved Brooke and Edmund. Maria who? Adam who?

Same here. I loved that she finally had a man who wasn't a castoff of Erica's!

I still maintain that AMC missed out on a grand opportunity by not marrying Brooke and Edmund to each other back in 1992. Erica, Dimitri, Edmund and Brooke, all married, and all living at Wildwind together had comic gold written all over it.

Some of my favourite shots of Ms. Barr as Pine Valley's most tortured soul:

Vintage, showing off her youthful elegence and edgy attitude

Mid-90's sexy, but classy.... no one wears a white shirt and jeans better

Julia aged very well. She's always been a very attractive woman, and I didn't think she really started to look like an "older" woman until she and Adam were reunited in 2010 or so. Her eyes looked wider in that "I had a facelift" kind of way, but even so she still looks damn good.

Brooke had some awful harsh short haircuts in the mid-80s, but I loved that short bob she had in the 90s. It was very flattering on her.

AMC has a long and obnoxious history of defanging their bitches. Brooke, Natalie, Gillian, Kendall, Bianca, Greenlee... how Erica managed to last that long on that show and still maintain her self-centered bitchiness is beyond me. Thank goodness for it too, because I always adored her for it. Aside from Erica, it was almost as if someone decreed that all bitchy female characters must be made fragile, nice, dependent on a man, or otherwise unbitchy after a set period of time.

And yes, I would have liked to see Gillian stick around much longer. I thought she was a great character, and I HATED that she was killed off to save whiny Laura English. What a waste.