DramatistDreamer

Soaps have practically been ruining themselves doing this over the past two decades now and it makes no sense. Also, some on screen deaths were totally unnecessary too.

My response to the ATP Dubai tournament this week. screen-20211230-234422.mp4

Ethan Wayne seemed have have good chemistry with all the actresses and could have had good romantic chemistry with Johnson, Linn and Kozlow but seems woefully underutilized. At least with the paternity case, he got a chance to see his character put in an active storyline, but it was weird that he was only ever teased as a romantic interest. Perhaps he made it known that his time on the show wouldn't be long-term? Or else, why wouldn't they have Storm at least date one of the main characters for even a brief amount of time? I always assumed Wayne got fed up with his character getting short shrift and left, lol.

Tennis as a sport has made a lot of miscalculations in terms of cutting off access to the sport. They have made it much too challenging for fans and potential fans to watch. When the sport was more accessible to basic cable (not just ESPN) and broadcast television (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX TV) people can just click on any given weekend and catch some tennis on television. Those days are over and the audience has dwindled as a result. Many of us picked up racquet (myself included) for the first time because we a Monica or a Zina playing on television. I mean, the ATP doesn't even want fans to create GIFs to post on social media and has threatened those who do, in the past. It wasn't always stars and faves who sold the sport (it certainly helps) because there were times when the Tours were in transition periods (Martin VerKerk getting to the Roland Garros final) and when only hardcore fans knew the names of the players contesting big titles (Coria vs. Gaudio for the RG title) but people still tuned in in larger numbers than some matches featuring today's current #1 players, simply because people happened to click on NBC on a Sunday morning in early June and become interested in what they saw. We don't have that anymore. As nice a person as Barty seems, she's not compelling many non hardcore tennis to get up at 3:30 am EST to watch her keep her head down and work her way through a match. By the look of the current crop of Top 50 players, tennis is going to need a different approach than trying to use "stars" to promote the sport. There's only a half-dozen or so of those anyway. And tennis with its numerous fiefdoms seems unlikely to coalesce around a single multi-tiered streaming platform where tennis fans (even in the U.S.) can go to watch non-glitchy tennis matches from every tournament.

Clarke is the very embodiment of the word hubris. I feel like very early 1980s Craig Montgomery (ATWT) was in a similar character vein- a cad who became mired in his own chaos, except Craig's troubles spiraled to the point of him going to prison, so it was more pathetic than amusing. Both were the architects of their respective misfortunes. I know that it was done to accommodate Kozlow's pregnancy but I still think the story could have been written more artfully. I think it was a missed opportunity to add more complexity to the story by adding another thread. Margo and Bill had a pre-existing relationship that the writing revisits anyway, so it would not have taken much to add that connecting thread a little earlier. TBH, leaving those scenes where Margo and Clarke would have consummated their relationship off screen, makes me wonder whether the writing wanted to leave things a bit open to a possible retcon, just in case but perhaps was dropped when the principal characters (Margo, in particular) left the canvas.

So many in their early 30s passing away these days and it's so sad.

She was also at Grigor's match, with Serena in tow. Uh, did anyone see this match?

@JaneAusten and they have such ardent supporters, it's inexplicable to me. People were joking that, after the pronouncement that Camilla was on the track to one day be Queen, the Cornwalls had decided to put their foot on the gas. With the disgusting situation with Andrew's settlement to Virginia Giuffre without admission of guilt, of course, and Charles' honours payola scheme, it should be clear how trashy these folks truly are.Of course, royalists will always spin it as outsiders and commoners being the problem. I wish that other islands that are in the Commonwealth would follow Barbados' lead to becoming a republic. Great Britain has done absolutely nothing for them but extract the wealth from their respective islands (including human capital) to build the United Kingdom. I get so angry every time I think about this.

Really??? 😂 Was Terri Conn on there too? Both Venus and Serena have been spotted in Delray Beach taking in the tennis earlier this week.

From a writer's perspective, I am enjoying seeing Clarke Garrison try to extract himself from every predicament that he gets himself into. Also from a writer's perspective, I do take issue with the aspect of hiding that Margo and Clarke had consummated their relationship until the reveal of Margo's pregnancy. It seems like a cheat, especially on a soap opera where romance and betrayal are totems of drama. I get that they wanted to surprise, even shock the audience but it also undermines Margo's claim of having a loving, serious relationship (one in which she believed was leading to marriage) I saw no evidence of Clarke even pretending to have anything close to a serious relationship with Margo, so I don't even know where she draws that conclusion, other than she ran away with some fantasy. It made me wonder if the possibility of pulling out Bill Spence as a father were not under consideration and honestly, it would have added an interesting wrinkle if Bill were genuinely a candidate for Mark's father, but Margo didn't want to even entertain that notion due to her desire to have that long lasting tie to Clarke. Decades later, I think it would have been much more interesting if Mark were a Spencer rather than a Garrison.

It's an interesting discussion. We had the era of "peak TV" (are we still in this era? That is up for debate) and some say we are in the era of 'too much TV' and the proverbial wheat is being separated from the chaff, so to speak. Six months to a year from now, who knows? It feels as if television as we know it has been in the midst of a dynamic period.

What was already suspected when Charles and then Camilla had both tested positive for COVID-19.

Somebody said this might as well be a summary of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. 😂

Points well made @Errol. This tweet made me wonder whether some type of TGIFriday could be revived or would that truly be broadcast suicide?

An interesting aspect that I have been encountering in the copious broadcast reports that have been finding their way to my inbox (most of which I haven't yet read) is that industry executives seem to believe that FAST is the future. FAST stands for Free Ad Supported Television. Netflix does tend to cancel series relatively quickly these days, compared to the past, when they would take much more time to cultivate an audience for a show. Netflix also has raised subscription fees more than once in the past five or six years. And Netflix is no longer the only game in town. Disney+ is gaining considerable headway, not to mention HBO+ and Paramount+ just had a rebrand in an effort to further boost their visibility. I'm not sure Netflix's strategy of dumping shows will turn out to be such a successful one, because I know for a fact that many creators have begun to bypass them because of their restrictive contracts. Most creators don't want their hard work to go the way of ODAAT, trapped on a streaming service with very limited options for a second life for their series. Yes ODAAT did eventually find an alternative that Netflix found acceptable but the series lost a lot of momentum in the meantime. Nobody who cares about their creations wants that.

Ha! What I was really thinking at the time was, "Well, why doesn't he try to go over there and get a job? Like, dude, you can't even remember the show you work currently for?!" It kind of galls me that people speak of him as if he was the best thing to happen to the show and he didn't have enough respect for the show to remember it's name onstage at the Daytime Emmy awards?? And I could have overlooked the mix-up had he not been so flippant about it. And he likely needed the health benefits as he was dealing with illness, on and off, in that last decade.

It's so strange that live-viewing is still regarded as being more important than time-shifted viewing, given the world we now live in. It seems as if cable has given more weight to time-shifted viewing for years now, while for broadcast networks, live viewing is still valued more. I know that cable has a somewhat different model, as they tend to rely more on the subscription model and aren't as dependent on sponsorship and ads as the traditional broadcast networks, but still... All American is on the CW, right? Maybe because it is geared towards a younger demo, for some reason, I think the CW places value on streaming and time-shifted viewing, that's just the sense I get. I have these broadcast reports in my inbox that report on the grim state of television ratings (which I have yet to read) and it seems like lower ratings are par for the course these days.

I was going to say they made him look like a clown but I figured that would be too 'on the nose'.😂 I just remember him declaring his love for All My Children as he accepted the award for As The World Turns at the Daytime Emmys and wondered why he wasn't writing for AMC.

Good for Ms. Rowell. She didn't give up, kept her profile up and kept working, even creating work when opportunity was scarce. She really could teach a course on resilience to other actors.

By then, I don't think the writers knew much about the show's history. Hogan Sheffer himself admitted to not having watched any ATWT before he began working on the show. At that point, I doubt he had much time or desire to watch what came before his tenure as HW. I am not sure if he was the sole or the last writer to resurrect James Stenbeck but whoever it was by then had made what used to be a dashing, charismatic and malevolent force into a caricature. I do agree, it was a device to plug holes in the story that illustrated a lack of creativity.

This show seemed to get a lot of initial buzz when it debuted. I wonder what happened? I still haven't seen it but I have simply stopped trying to keep up with every series out there. I mean what happened besides the obvious ratings drop, lol. I sort of feel for Naturi though because I think she's talented but hasn't really had much opportunity to show what she's capable of. If colorism weren't such an issue, I feel like she could be a central figure in one of those romantic sitcoms, where she's a songwriter finding her way around the dating scene as a divorcée while trying to revive her career after being a stay at home mother for five, ten years.

The difference being though, that Holly and Roger teetered back and forth between enmity and romantic situations. James and Barbara never had that. They never slept together after James resurfaced "from the dead" in 1986 or when he returned afterwards. In fact, James was perfectly willing to let Barbara rot in prison for a murder she never committed, a murder that never happened. I liked when Barbara once told James that she was no longer afraid of him because she was an even match for him, James' eyes lit up as he told her she was never more beautiful than she was after telling him that and Barbara smirked in response. That was the most sparks we saw between these two after their bitter divorce. Not the same type of tension between Roger and Holly, imo. I still maintain that James never should have been resurrected after Paul practically drove a stake through his heart with those bullets in 1989. Those scenes were so powerful, which really should have "done it" for James Stenbeck. I realize that Anthony Hererra was a very charismatic actor and James had been involved in some of the most dramatic stories during the 1980s but the storylines that he was brought back for in the '00s were demonstrably worse, even the spa story was m several steps down from what he'd previously been involved in when on the canvas.

I realize that many times, actors do some 'out there' maneuvers in their campaigns for the Academy award but I don't understand this one. At all.

Wonder what will become of this?