DramatistDreamer

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!

Oh Prager is absolutely disgraceful. He has those insidious rants masquerading as ads on YouTube. Despite complaining about those Prager "University" ads, Google and YouTube still runs them on occasion.

Unfortunately the CDC and WHO (with their sometimes muddled messaging) have been no match for the likes of What's App and Facebook. Even YouTube just recently started disabling accounts that had been promoting snake oil cures and misinformation. And most of the earliest headlines mentioned that he was fully vaccinated without mentioning his multiple ailments and how that could figure into things. The media is also not helping the fight against misinformation.

He also had Parkinson's, but that will get lost in the narrative, where the vaccine resistant are concerned. The Caribbean and Jamaica, in particular (where Powell's family line is from) has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the Western Hemisphere. There are, unfortunately, deep pockets of vaccine resistant people and misinformation circulating through What's App (a social network which I despise) makes it worse. I have already gotten calls and had to chide relatives who now believe that vaccines don't work. And these are fully vaccinated people. We can't dismiss what impact this could have, especially with the misinformation networks working more effectively than official organizations like the CDC and WHO, that, on occasion have transmitted muddled and confusing messaging. Remember, this is a virus that started among the wealthy and well-traveled and spread to the lower-income and poor with less consideration about education and mitigation. It is also a virus that will never truly get under control until a large enough percentage of the worldwide population gets fully vaccinated. And we're nowhere near that marker.

Our weekend discussion in this thread made me think about what different groups of fans consider attractive. The photo above reminds me that ATWT was not like Y&R, B&B, or even GH, in the types of actors they were known to frequently cast. Jon Hensley and Melanie Smith were more likely to be the exception, rather than the rule on a soap like ATWT, while on B&B, etc., it was more likely to be the direct opposite. ATWT had attractive actors, who were attractive in a way that seemed more accessible, rather than some of the fantasy types that were on most other soaps. GL was also like this. Maybe it was more about what P&G shows believed their viewers would find appealing. It seemed like they relied more on a combination of allure and attractiveness, rather than out and out "sex bomb" qualities of their characters. There were moments (Hensley, Smith, Lamman Rucker) but they were not in the main. I think the acting showed us why one character might appeal to another beyond pretty looks. I also appreciated that you could have a character like Smith's "Emily" have awareness of her sexual power, but you could also have Jennifer Ashe (Meg) also have an awareness of her own sexual power, yet the boundaries of the limits of each seemed quite realistic and stories built around this seemed more accessible. Nothing against those soaps that delved more deeply into the fantasy aspect but it was always the more realistic aspects of P&G shows that appealed to me as a fan.

A surprise and a shame.

How very unfortunate. Breakthrough infections, both Gen. Powell and his wife, who recovered. This is going to set back vaccination efforts in some communities that are already vaccine resistant. When that headline alert came in, it truly hit.

It was said that PBS stations edited out specific scenes, not the episode itself, which still ran. I don't remember any disclaimers before Tales Of The City on my PBS channel, but they had also previously shown films with gay characters and themes before then.

Oh, Out Of This World was a terrible show and I felt sorry for Donna Pescow, it was a filler show for me. I think I used to catch DJH repeats, or something, I can't quite remember what, but OOTW was a tie over program. I guess I could have turned the television off but that was like surrendering television time to my older brother and he was not going to snatch control until 12:30pm, lol. I was a little past the target age group for Steampipe Alley and I didn't find Mario physically attractive but I found him really amusing. I especially thought it was funny how almost none of the kids picked up any of his Broadway references. It all went right over their heads, lol. Honestly had I not watched shows like That's Entertainment! on PBS, I probably wouldn't have understood either, lol.

I'm not going to judge when I was watching the likes of Out Of This World and Steam pipe Alley 🤣. Maybe due to the pandemic, there has been some pretty interesting BTS content on DJH/DH in particular. It's fun to watch, particularly the actors themselves talking about how those episodes came together. Seems like a much organic process than even what the show would later become, with the actors all being professionals with agents. Back then, I think Dayo Ade (BLT) was the only actor with an agent.

Man, has it really been that bad??! I really have missed it all. In case I didn't make it clear, I enjoy Ron's posts in the ATWT thread and even though I haven't been watching much tennis, I often find myself dipping into that thread where he's one of the few board members actively posting, which keeps me up to date. I don't really know the extent of what's going on, I hope things can be worked out, as I said before. Although, everyone has to do what's best for their well-being too. Mental health is no joke, especially in these very stressful days. If something no longer gives joy, it's best not to engage in it.