DramatistDreamer

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?

Honestly, that 1989 story really should have been the ultimate chapter (having Paul commit patricide against the man he once idolized seemed like a fairly clear indicator that this should be James' final chapter), but down the road, soap writers who were ill equipped to write a suitable story for the character, decided that they could somehow resurrect the character, which was ridiculous. And I know that later fans claim to have enjoyed it, but having James conspire with Barbara, the woman he terrorized for years seemed so stupid a concept that I really can't bother trying to analyze how idiotic that was. Who consulted on that story, Les Moonves?

You didn't even have to tell me this, because I already guessed it. And one of the lawyers from Sharapova's team for her CAS case being a judge in the Valieva hearing was some type of coincidence.

When I was a kid, I saw this and back then, this sequence was the most harrowing I had ever seen on a soap opera. I wish someone (ahem) had asked Melanie Smith and Andrew Kavovit what is was like to film this sequence when they appeared on that livestream reunion last year. screen-20220217-170255~3.mp4

It did seem bizarre but so much of what goes on in tennis these days is bizarre.

I don't have a problem with Amanda Seyfried speaking ill of her time on ATWT. Any actor who felt they were ill treated or (god forbid) suffered abusive behavior, speak on it. I have no problem with that. I have said this for years. Actors who were dissatisfied with they way they were treated or thought their characters were given short-shrift, what's wrong with being frank about it? I suspected that had more actors taken the leap to speak more candidly, some of these behaviors could have been corrected, with, maybe, as a result, a much better show for the length of its duration. Who knows?

He clarified the situation. Still, a birthday to forget. Spanish media, like much of the media around the world, seems to revel in chaos and creating intrigue.

¿Qué sorpresa, no @Soapsuds?

Figure skating has had some serious problems for decades now (L'affaire Harding/Kerrigan, misogynoir and micro-aggressions toward Surya Bonaly, etc.). As a kid, I used to be a big fan but probably over the last fifteen years, I have been pulling away, bit by bit. And hasn't an American recently naturalized Chinese citizen who competes for China faced relentless cyber-bullying by the home crowd after falling during her skating programs? As beautiful and even as entertaining as a polished performance can be, figure skating as an industry has been as toxic as all get-out for decades now. I mean, I remember not really knowing much about Tai Babilonia, with her era being a little before my time as a fan, but seeing her made for TV movie about the basic toxicity of the people in charge of the sport. I hope that some big improvements will be made but the sport has been rancid for years, lol.

The Netflix effect.

Question answered, I guess.

Oh wow. The series is not terrible. Although I find the backstory to be far more interesting than the current stories, which seem fairly generic. They seem to use that character Margaret to lay out exposition. I did like how that conversation between Lettie and Margaret was written in episode 3. Not too expository (for once) and just enough sniping dialogue beneath the surface to give the scene some bite. And in the meantime, we get to learn some nuggets about the family dynamics and the nature of Lettie and Margaret's relationship. If only all the scenes where writers needed to inform us could have been written that way. Still, the pacing within episode 3 was solid, it certainly didn't drag. Margaret's dialogues need to be improved, they often come off as somewhat clumsy, laying out exposition for the sake of giving out information, but given the ABC/Hulu situation, the writers may not have time.