DramatistDreamer

That's great news @Taoboi ! Please continue to be vigilant in taking care of yourself. Thanks to everyone who has been sending me kind condolences. I've actually been talking about it with mutual friends and acquaintances, so I am no longer keeping feelings inside, which has provided a bit of release.

Barbara was never and could never stay a vixen, just like she could never remain a heroine/ingenue perpetually. It is par for the course that the character would have a reset. All I'm saying is why not embrace the journey while you're at it? Technically, JR Ewing was one note but that didn't stop him from embracing the role and all that came with it. Which is likely why Larry Hagman landed on the covers of magazine and decades after Dallas went off the air, people still remember the character.

Speaking of bringing all the smoke, this lady wasn't afraid!

Where would Ivanka run for Congress? Surely not NYC. Maybe a wisp of a chance if she ran on Staten Island before the demographics thoroughly change, as has already been happening but nobody else can stand her in NYC. Better take that to Florida or somewhere else.

See, I didn't see it as Barbara trying to get Tom back. At all. I saw it as Barbara burning through the vestiges of her former life as a doormat and put upon wife. People seem to forget that she interjected herself even more between Brian and Shannon. Now, you can make a case for her wanting Brian back, even going so far to plot a surprise to bust up Shannon and Brian's wedding. If you saw the scenes between Barbara and Margo where Barbara accused Margo of bringing about the trouble in her marriage, by not being a good wife to Tom, you'll see that it was more about her relationship to Margo, rather than Tom. If it was about wanting Tom, the tension and enmity would not have continued when Barbara was with Hal, but it did. AFAIC, it was more about old wounds between Barbara and Margo bearing fruit. Another thing, these actors contradict themselves. In an interview, Colleen said that she spent her first several episodes apologizing to various characters, because apparently, the character previously caused a lot of tumult and promptly left town. Apparently, Barbara was no angel even from the earliest incarnation of the character, so Colleen should've known what time it was, 😂. Now, had she won an Emmy (and quite frankly, she should have been nominated for her performance), she likely would've felt differently. It's likely the reason why unfortunately these soaps usually deferred to the men to play the most complex characters-- most of the women just seemed as if they didn't want that smoke, lol.

There has been some talk about not seating those electeds in the convening of the new Congress. I'm going to need less talk about it and more 'be about it'. There needs to be clarity on the consequences that will result from such an action and the consequences need to be steep.

This should be implemented in every state.

America's inhumane, overcrowded and little-considered prison system is really buckling under the weight of the pandemic.

Lucinda and Barbara had an interesting relationship, especially in their early years. You got the sense that Barbara looked up to Lucinda (and became a sort of protege) and Lucinda seemed to genuinely like Barbara, so much so that Lucinda held back from any retaliation when she discovered that Barbara had been having an affair with her son-in-law Tonio. Things changed when Lucinda's "It's just business" ethos caused her to do to Barbara what she essentially did to Steve Andropoulos, which was to take advantage of a vulnerable proprietor and vulture the company. On most other soaps, this type of storyline would likely be written for men, but I like the fact that it was written for two women and in such an organic way.

The optics of this... Certainly not a vote of confidence for Johnson.

Thanks for the well-wishes, @Khan @DRW50 2020 was a tough year for all of and the loss of live has been unfathomable. It's probably a combination of that and feeling momentarily overwhelmed. We will all get through this. From the looks of it, Great Britain barely knows what it's doing as well.

Don't want to use the word "disaster" but this vaccine rollout has been far from ideal, to say the least.

Just found out that a colleague died of COVID-19 a few days ago. I hadn't been in touch with him for a number of years. At first, I felt oddly numb and then I began to remember be bits, hos personality quirks and moments of kindness and generosity and it made me smile, even giggle but now, I feel inexplicably and unbelievably down.

I'm sorry but every time I think of that storyline, I keep hearing Helen and Christian Slater yelling "Fair is Fair!" 😂

The writer who came up with the idea for the "Oakdale Three (or Four)", now that's youth obsessed.

Being that P&G, like most soap production companies, seemed to be chasing the youth demographic, I think most writers on the daytime dramas could be said to prefer to write for young love, because if you don't (or of you seem not to), you might find yourself looking for a new job. In Still, with Bob and Kim having some of the most consequential storylines in the mid to late 80s, Lisa not hurting for romantic pairings, it's hard for me to say that Marland preferred writing young love.

Every time I read about how much Liz liked to play fast and loose with scripts, the more it floors me that she is the same woman who once dated Paddy Chayefsky, who was notoriously controlling over his work in a way tha Marland could only dream of being.

Welcome From what I have been able to glean, it seems as though some interviews may have been out there years before the reunion live stream, but I admit, much of the talk recently stemmed from discussion that came specifically from those reunion live streams.

Maybe she would have? I could see La Hubbard believing somehow that being written as a bipolar kleptomaniac might have made for a sympathetic portrayal. Sometimes an actor's POV can differ drastically from that if a writer's.

Just the other day, I was reading a post complaining that Melody Thomas Scott was practically being shunted off to the background on Y&R these days-- I think MTS would probably appreciate a role that gave her something legit to do, something that showed more than one superficial side to her character. Something that showed some type of complexity or depth. Lucinda never wanted for complexity. Also, would Hubbard rather have the type of writing that Sharon Case had to endure a few years ago?

For as much as I like Susan Flannery and appreciate the class she brought to early B&B, the show positioned "Stephanie" as a cold, calculating, somewhat asexual woman "of a certain age, which could've been Lucinda's fate, under someone else's pen. That was usually what women in that age group had to work with on soaps.

That's fair, it's probably not the easiest task to keep the writing fresh material for a character that had so much screen time for at least half a dozen consecutive years. Liz did get a really juicy, meaty role that many actresses half her age will never get. If anyone has a true reason to genuinely complain about a character trajectory, it is Eileen, whose character would get crumbs toward the end.

Did Sofia Kenin get dumped by her management company? After the type of year she had, it seems quite unusual that a company would want to cut ties unless the company somehow found it borderline impossible to work with her. Her father seems like he makes a lot of issues wnd might be thoroughly unpleasant.

Perhaps Liz really wanted to be regarded as a heroine of some sort but the show was already chock full of those, Lucinda would've been lost in the crowd, lol. Also, there was no way that Lucinda would've been able to wrest the title from one Kimberly Sullivan, lol. Hays was fantastic at her portrayal of a heroine of a certain age by the time Lucinda came along. Lucinda had some of the spiciest dialogue and scenes in the show's history. It escapes me ad to why she fails to see it that way. Eric Braeden doesn't waste time saying "Well, they made Victor look very mean when they had him feed that guy rats". In her defense, Barbara had been a heroine of sorts prior (so maybe that was what she was comfortable with?) but, by the looks of the character trajectory, the heroine characterization had sort of run her course after Gunnar departed. Hillary Bailey Smith agrees with me that the transformation of Barbara to a vixen was one of the best transformations of a character on a soap. It strikes me as unfortunate if she doesn't want to embrace such a memorable part of the show and character.

Perhaps not. I mean, Eileen Fulton seemed to embrace her early 'bad gal' status. She was a pioneer!