DramatistDreamer

Any word from the Blue Lives Matter folk about Officer Goodman? Or do they, as I suspect, only care about White officers who mow down Black people in a hail of bullets? Goodman may get a commendation but I doubt it will change anything, any more than things were changed when that Black woman officer saved Scalise's life. I'd like to be wrong but history proves the rule, not the exception.

Shocking!! They did storyboards on the soaps??!! They must have done away with them by the 90s.

On one of the recent reunion livestreams, Hillary Bailey Smith talked about how Larry Bryggman, who played her onscreen father John Dixon (ATWT) told her about a storyline that happened sometime around the late 1970s or very early 80s, before she was on the show, that John found a dead body behind the sofa in his living room. HBS said that Bryggman told her that when the show returned to Joh Dixon the next week there was no mention of the dead body, they simply moved on.

I agree. One storyline that got made after Purdee's departure, the Keesha storyline had a number of problematic aspects, despite the fact that it gave TLW some very memorable, meaty dialogue.

About a year or so, I watched some GL episodes from '94 and it struck as sad how much Hamp had been marginalized by then and it only got worse after the departure of Kat. Had Y&R not put Nathan through character assassination, Nathan Purdee probably could've been brought back some time in the last decade, provided the storyline were good (a big "if").

These soaps have left so much money on the table by refusing to adapt. Again, I use Downton Abbey as an example as it is a period piece that can't exactly tell the most modern of stories, yet still found ways to be relevant to a contemporary audience. And do you realize how much merch they sold?! They never left one single dime on the table.

And always seemed to personify grace and beauty.

It does sound like we do indeed agree on the main points. It will be interesting to see how long these daytime soaps can hang in there with this type of provincial mindset. Seems as if they are barely hanging in there by a slender thread nowadays.

As a Black woman, I am not going to speak to the supposed skittishness of white viewers. I'm merely stating the ridiculousness of this assumption. By that assumption, Bridgerton should be racking up the threats. Only in daytime do people assume that nothing changes. Except ratings, of course.

This is egregious.

I'm all out of kudos to give to a genre that, in 2021 still can't bring itself to push past the idea that the mythical Midwestern house will catch the vapors if she sees anything that wouldn't get past a 1940 censor. I mean, soaps are still afraid to have a black man in bed with a white woman onscreen?

ATWT 30 years after the fact (the Reagan years, at that) gets a lot of criticism for what it/Marland did and didn't do, while look who slips under the radar-- Y&R, B&B, still on the air, neither has featured a relationship between two men. Y&R, which features a relationship between two women, finds this more palatable. I ko longer actively watch either show so I couldn't tell you what goes into the decision making on that end. It's laughable that two soaps that heavily feature the fashion and the cosmetic/skincare industries feature no gay men among their characters.

In a nutshell. The sad fact of the matter is that every single P&G soap has been off the air for a decade yet the problems of representation still persist.

At the risk of belaboring this topic, I wonder how much the daytime execs considered their viewers who were gay men vs. their fans who were women? It seems as though many of these writers/producers/network executives were catering to what they believed their core audience wanted, which is why you had a Hank, a confidante to Barbara (not a threat to Hal) and Iva (not anywhere near a romantic possibility) , defacto big brother type to Andy and Paul. You could argue that, to bring up that mythical Midwestern housewife who they often cite as the reason they put the kibosh on certain storylines, tptb probably assumed that characters like Hank could best be introduced to that audience as the milquetoast confidant with no possibility of being anyone's romantic rival by presenting them as close to a asexual as humanly possible.

SoapClassics streamed some ATWT and GL episodes on a dedicated website as they sold compilation sets in 2012-2013. Also the SoapClassics streaming website was available to viewers in the Netherlands and South Africa, I believe, although oddly each region didn't always stream the same thing.

Definitely understandable and I thought about that. One never knows how others will perceive something. Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor thought most Americans would find Archie Bunker repulsive and were shocked at the reception he got. So you just never know and in the case of daytime soaps and that mythical Midwestern housewife, the stakes must have seemed too high.

The Biden-Harris administration YouTube channel doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of action these days but it really is a useful resource for getting up to speed on cabinet picks and proposals and this idea seems a natural progression from what has been started from the DNC convention, through the inauguration into the present. It sort of reminds me of a digital version of the letters that Obama would get from constituents that he would read every night and often responded to.

It's a waste of time but Biden knows the optics of dismissing someone with a platform, if a platform of diminished value like Ice Cube's. Hopefully Ice Cube will at least take the time to read up on the issues and solutions that the Biden administration has already proposed so he doesn't look quite as ignorant as he did the last time. Ice Cube is likely trying to save face from all the mockery he encountered the last time. If he comes off as badly as he did last time, there will he no chance of ever looking like anything but a dumb muthaf*cka from hereon out.

Same. He always seemed so vivacious in public appearances.

These networks and soap production companies didn't seem to have much confidence thst anyone but a straight White person could garner much compassion from daytime viewers, from the sound of things, irrespective of show or network, it seems.

Who was the first onscreen character to have AIDS on a soap? Was the character heterosexual or homosexual? I ask because it seems like Daytime TV was very conservative in who the genre chose to represent certain aspects. Jessica Blair (Y&R) a straight White woman was portrayed in a very sympathetic light. Stone (can't remember his last name/GH), a straight White man, who was cast as a hearthrob, was also portrayed in a very tragic and sympathetic light. "Charles" preceded both characters, in the '80s when the virus was highly stigmatized and even cast as a type of moral judgement on certain people, chief among them gay men, and minorities soon after-- unless he was a star basketball player like Magic Johnson, which didn't come along for another two years after the AIDS storyline on ATWT. As tame as the story seems today, Y&R and GH may not have decided to write their own stories had ATWT never written one, maybe?

As I posted days ago, y'all let me know who Y&R casts as Chance in about six or seven weeks. It was obvious that Y&R was dumping the actor, not the character. They must've seen the reaction to Gaston and knew that they wouldn't be renewing Boaz's contract, because they could do better without all the problematic behavior.

That, I most definitely agree with. Perhaps when one of the Phillip Chancellors come to visit, they stay with her. Maybe even Nina. The show can have a long-running gag that Jill always invites Nina to stay at the Chancellor mansion when ever she's in town. Then they start bickering over some minor quibble, (or a larger issue-could be Chance, e.g.) leading Jill to complain that she doesn't know why she keeps inviting Nina back, leading Nina to chide Jill about them being family. Jill rolls her eyes, knowing, deep down, that Nina is right. She could even look up at Katherine's portrait/picture, convinced that the old dame is laughing at her, and gives some response like "she is not like me, and I am not like you!"

Interesting that this came up while I was scrolling. I remember when I saw this thinking that Sabrina was likely good practice for Moore doing a British accent here, she was so natural with her manner and speech.

From what I have heard, Marx got tired of the grind of doing soaps and wanted to focus on singing and voice over work. I once worked alongside a V.O. artist and it is a lot more laid back than doing a soap gig.