DramatistDreamer

Also, they were competing with the likes of cable television, not to mention MTV, (which was only expanding a large fanbase among that demographic) which had more freedom to air more risqué content. I suppose that B&B, being a new serial at the end of the 1980s, might have been seen as an easier vehicle in which to push the boundaries than its predecessors, which were likely already being held to stricter standards. Yeah, but B&B made it fairly obvious where they believed their bread and butter were. In the first episode, if memory serves me correctly, Ridge may have even stated that sex sells while grousing to Margo his disapproval of his father's conservative design practices.

Speaking of which, a couple years ago when she got into that legal trouble, I went to look for information on the conclusion of that case and stumbled upon (much to my chagrin) legions of fanboys lusting over those scenes in Tremors where she was down to her skivvies. There were GIFs and guys gushingly expressing their long-held crushes for her. So the implications of a poster that Finn was not attractive enough to somehow 'compete' with Emily for Tonio, which never happened, by the way, (although I think there is some confusion with Jennifer Ashe, who was sporting a short 'do during that storyline), but there are clearly fanbases of dudes who'd disagree with that assessment. I'm actually glad that ATWT was never really one of those soaps were just looks were an avatar for desire or attraction. I mean, if a character like Hal Munson (no offense to dearly departed BH, who was a highly talented actor with vast range) could be desired by three women in the course of a year (two which expressed a willingness to fight for him), I think people should use that same lens when discussing the spectrum of attraction and desire for the women characters.

Yes, I remember seeing a scene where Ridge is lying down and the camera pans over his silhouette and in a very obvious way lingers over the outline of his body and uh, bulge, for lack of a better word. Thinking back, B&B was the first daytime soap in my personal memory where sex was "sold" in a manner that was so blatantly obvious.

It's indisputable that it was harder to win twenty years ago when almost all the Top 10 then is now on the HOF or headed there. Dementieva and Safina likely wish they had these draws. I don't believe that the ratings bear out her argument about the supposed difficulty with selling women's tennis.

Speaking of Raducanu, Flavia Pennetta basically say "I'ma let you finish, but..." By the way, ratings seem to have disputed Flavia's assessment that women's tennis is harder to sell. The WTA may not have the sheer numbers of charismatic players that they had two decades ago, but I hardly think there is some dearth of WTA players with personalities.

Thanks for providing background and context to this concept @JaneAusten. Yeah, the insistence on reducing workers to consumers is... unsettling to me. I wonder whether, in the wake of these mushrooming strike actions, this stance will shift. I also feel as if I need to do a bit of reading on this topic. I'm really on a memoir/autobiography kick but maybe the next book I read should be a non-fiction book on policy. On the contempt of Congress charge for that crony of the former administration-- I need to see some demonstrable action before I get my hopes up.

Cool @Vee. It's an interesting concept, that's for sure. The article did stipulate that it wasn't the same as UBI though, so it's definitely a concept I've never heard before. On these programs that are up for debate/negotiation, those home health aides are incredibly low-paid, so I hope the ACA can at least have some funds that can help because it is immoral for those workers to work hard and continue to be so severely underpaid. In my area, the group home employees are on the verge of striking. It wouldn't surprise me if the home health aides were next.

This is an interesting concept, although I am not crazy with the idea of this the amounts rising and falling with the fate of these businesses. OTOH Big Business usually tends to do very well financially and even when they don't, they have a propensity to bounce back quicker (depending on the industry, I guess). The nature of a dividend-I guess that's why it's named as such. What do you think of this @JaneAusten? I would be interested to hear what others think too @DRW50, @Vee, @marceline, if you feel so inclined.

Yeah, I'm not even talking about casting in this case (though I agree about Gareis being miscast, although the writing for Donna became far more problematic),this was strictly about the writing. I will never understand why it became so vital to strip the Logans of their identities the way they did. There are way to evolve the characters without taking a hacksaw to their characterizations.

Here we go:

Coming from someone who once worked behind the scenes of a live television show, most television shows are hellholes.

While I admit, I never followed B&B as closely as the other CBS soaps, I grew up watching, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say, when she married her mother's sweetheart. Pretty early on, it was obvious that the writing was setting Brooke up for drastic changes. Over the weekend, I watched an episode where Brooke's fiance Dave told Storm that he thought her obsession with the Forresters was unhealthy. It was obvious too that she was, in a way, using Caroline to gain entree to the Forrester family when she snuck into Caroline's hospital room, so we already had a sense that Brooke wouldn't make a loyal friend to Caroline, so I had low expectations there. Brooke was, however, portrayed as a dutiful daughter, who was loyal to her mother and siblings, even really loved her grandmother, so that betrayal to Beth, snatching up the man who her mother had once hoped to marry, felt like "all bets were off" where Brooke's character was concerned, from then on.

POS is trending and you can probably guess who is being referred to as such.

Yeah, I think Canada had been doing this for months. What they need to fix is the boosters, so they are flexible enough to protect against not only Delta but the variants that come after Delta.

It actually makes me a tinge sad seeing the earliest episodes, knowing what's ahead for Brooke, Donna and the rest of the Logans.

I do appreciate the use of light and shade in these early episodes. They used it differently in scenes that were meant to be exterior scenes than interior ones. Of course, all were likely filmed in the interior but I appreciate the contrast.

I definitely meant more accessible. Y&R, at least in the 80s, when I began to watch as a little girl, had these sweeping romances that featured scenes best suited for the cover of a Harlequin novel, (No offense meant to the genre at all, which can be an art form, in and of itself), while on ATWT you had glamorous characters and story settings but the majority of stories were just as likely to take place in a hospital or a police station or a construction site, as they were in a ritzy restaurant or Fashion's boutique. Think about Y&R's tent pole couple, Victor and Nikki and compare to Tom and Margo or Bob and Kim. Victor and Nikki's wedding to Tom and Margo's. Which wedding would most of us be most likely to attend?😉 Accessible. Even glamorous characters like Lucinda and Barbara faced cash crunches with their businesses in the 80s. There were no Colonnade Rooms at Oakdale. Everyone went to Diana's or the Mona Lisa, where everyone could see everyone and Steve was just as likely to traipse through wearing his construction clothes, lol. I didn't use earthy because I wouldn't use that term for Barbara, Lucinda or even Lisa or Kim. I might say that, for many years, most of the storylines were more grounded than daytime serials that emphasized a fantasy type of life. But my main point was that the actors were attractive, some even sexy in ways that were accessible. Very few fit that "impossibly beautiful" model type that became all the rage on some other daytime soaps. You occasionally had your slice of beefcake (how else can we explain Frank Cooper on GL), which I never really found all that alluring, tbh but I understand the impulse to throw that into the mix. And if one or two or five other competing soaps were doing this, others felt compelled to follow suit in some way. At least ATWT didn't go full B&B, 😂. They recognized the need for all types.

It would be interesting to get Heather Tom's perspective on this, knowing that the last time she portrayed a character that was in a high-profile interracial relationship on a soap, she and the other actor (Kristoff St. John) suffered a tremendous amount of blowback.

He was on more soaps than we all realized!

Corbin Bernsen also had a brief role on ATWT in the mid 80s.

And BBC is known to be quite stingy about licensing their content. Now that you have Netflix, Hulu, Britbox and Acorn, it will be easy to leave PBS stations out in the cold. For example, Sesame Street went to HBO for first-run episodes, leaving PBS with, what is essentially repeats.

People are pushing back, so there's that, at least. Hopefully, there will be more media that will now offer context to this news, now that they have been and are still being roundly criticized.

I know that when BB tried to make Brooke into B&B's Valley version of Reva Shayne (even having a sort of 'baptizing' of Brooke as the "Slut From The Valley" similar to Reva's literally baptism as the "Slut Of Springfield"), the show truly began to get further away from its origins. The character that once had some complexity morphed closer to caricature, imo.

B&B From the beginning seems to have well over a hundred episodes on their YouTube page. The fact that their episodes uploaded to YouTube has higher quality ads than what they're likely to have on network television really sends me!🤣😏 ASOS fashion, AppleTV+, Hulu, HBO Max, the entire trailer for the new Batman movie for Warner Brothers. CBS could never!