DramatistDreamer

Praise be!

Someone actually admonished people to refer to what is happening in North Carolina as election fraud, not voter fraud. This person claims that calling it voter fraud gives credence (somehow) that the GOP's complaints about rampant voter fraud are legitimate when they aren't, and that what is being attempted in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan is actually an attempt at election engineering by way of fraud. This kind of makes sense but what's being attempted amounts to fraud, no doubt about that.

That would've been lovely. I've thought that, in my wildest writing fantasies, if ever I had the chance to refashion a 2.0 of ATWT, even briefly...I'd open with Kim saying "Good morning dear", to her granddaughter, (Oakdale Memorial hospital's newest resident) Dr. Hope Dixon.

Yes, thanks for posting, this is what the tweet is in reference to.

Hey @Juliajms speaking of women and science, OMG at this!

The DVD sets themselves, seemed like they were on sale for mere months so maybe part of the time was taken up by selecting which videos and then preparing the videos for sale? From what I remember reading, the videos sold very well. Of course, some of those videos were scooped up quickly, then re-sold on Amazon for twice and three times the price for which it was originally sold. By the end, almost all of the DVD had been sold out. What seemed to leave many of us perplexed was the final note that SoapClassics sent via e-mail, which seemed to indicate that they were taking a brief hiatus and that they would return. In hindsight, this is probably what many companies say when they want to quell followup inquiries of any kind. It's just a shame because a lot of people felt like they were left hanging. Even if SoapClassics couldn't continue, it would be great if they could leave a blueprint as to how they accomplished what they did with P&G. Another group could benefit from SC's expertise on the matter, should anyone want to try again. Soap fans are exceedingly loyal (even when these companies don't give them reasons to be) and I think there would still be an audience receptive to the classics.

Judging from Michael Swan's comments, he thinks that IMDB expects him to do it, LOL. Since IMDB closed their messageboards and made all these changes, I'm not sure what fans are allowed to do other than submit reviews. If the fans can make those types of changes to an actor's personal page, that might be something that IMDB may want to consider changing, LOL or they could end up like those unlocked celebrity pages on Wikipedia-- sometimes the crazy, practical joke things that end up on that site! OMG, yes! There was a former soap actor who used to do interviews like this and post them on You Tube and the We Love Soaps blog. I really wish someone would do something again. I'm sure they wouldn't disappoint, none of these ladies are known for holding back.

It's a shame that those SoapClassics people just up and vanished. They were obviously able to persuade PGP/P&G to open their vaults, even for a short time. It's not inconceivable that someone on their level could manage such a feat again? ATWT had some really fun, festive party and special occasion episodes and a few were even self-contained. Is there nobody that has any way to connect with the production wing of P&G? Also, looking at that Insta of Tamara Tunie's Call Sheets makes me wonder whether if she saved any of her vintage scripts. Do the actors get access to copies of some episodes that they were particularly proud of? They probably didn't have time to watch complete episodes. LOL, Michael Swan complaining about being short-changed on IMDB. I guess that answers my question on why so few episodes are listed, I think it's crazy that IMDB wants the actor to list every episode themselves, that would be exhaustive for someone on a series for twenty, thirty, forty years! Sadly, there is likely no other way to do this, other than manually since I doubt P&G kept any database listing of every episode--that would've made everything so much easier.

Oh definitely. Sadly, I was just mentioning this in another thread about Ken Berry-- that there was a time when you used to have to possess true, discernible talent and even luck on top of all that, to make it in entertainment but now, it seems, all you need is the ability to throw a chair or a table. I continue to be flummoxed by Ben Carson. I still think he tried (and failed) to perform a lobotomy on himself and things went terribly wrong.

Admittedly, I hadn't been paying all that much attention to the G20 this year so I must admit that I missed this when it happened.

Feel free to ignore my posts, if they offend your sensibilities. @JarrodMFiresofLove I won't go round after round with you and others have expressed that they actually like to read my posts and engage with them. I won't stop posting just to suit your delicate sensibilities, so feel free to avert your gaze. I remember you stomping off in a temper tantrum from this thread the last time someone disagreed with you and you were unable to bully them into dropping their post, so feel to resort to whatever reaction suits you best. On to more interesting comments, thanks to Carl, for this Eileen Fulton interview. Only when I started to venture onto the soaps messageboards, had I heard about the 'grandma clause' and the ramifications. We all know that soap fans can get out of proportion with their reactions to...well, everything! If people wanted someone to blame, why not look at the writing? Why go after the actress? It's a shame that Gregg Marx wanted to leave since he and HBS had such great, sultry chemistry and personally, he was my favorite Tom.

To those legal eagles and others who may be interested.

Was Michael Park at Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas' wedding?

Yes, there is certainly a base level of intelligence and skill for the scientific field in which NDT is but it is far from a true meritocracy. One of my aunts is a scientist and there is rampant sexism and misogyny in the scientific field. Even in whose papers get seen and promoted and who rises to the top of their profession within a given scientific field. I have a friend who used to be a researcher at Sloan Kettering until she got absolutely disgusted by the level of competition, backstabbing, infighting, territorial disputes and politics involved in whose work gets promoted. At the time, there was also the problem of mostly male superiors taking credit for the work of some female underlings/assistants who did quite a bit of the grunt work. I don't know if people keep up with what goes on at some of these institutions but Sloane Kettering recently had a mini-scandal with one of their researches not making proper citations in his work. His had mostly to do with where the money was coming from but all of his research papers are now being combed through to see whether his findings have been compromised by his corporate ties. Science is actually a very tough field in which for women to get ahead. There's a lot of talent there, they are just very slow to recognize and very slow to promote. Does anyone remember what the former president of Harvard once said about women in science? Look up his remarks. Everyone talks about Crick and Watson but Rosalind Franklin was every bit as instrumental to what we know about DNA but she goes practically unrecognized. All I'm saying is NDT can indeed be a brilliant scientist, but there may be a woman who is just as brilliant but never even got the chance to prove it. The top talent doesn't always rise to the top.

@Soaplovers but Days is in 3rd, 4th place, right? They may feel as though they have nothing to lose. They may not care about how they get viewers to watch and shock value might be an easy way to get them there, but how long will viewers stay? I've heard some disaffected Y&R viewers claim that they've defected to Days, so Y&R's loss might be Days' gain, in spite of the ridiculous storyline. There are now only 4 soaps left, so diehard soap viewers tend to scrounge around for any soap that they can tolerate. I've given up on them all but I know many haven't and for them Days' storyline may not be an entire dealbreaker for desperate soap fans, whereas when there were more soaps on air, Days might have been punished in the ratings for this type of thing. In terms of the Sharon/Adam thing...I don't know, I think Sharon suffered some blowback down the road. MM inexplicably has a very vocal band of fans but there are Y&R fans who to this day, used to like Sharon but cannot stand her over the past six, seven years or so now. Some will claim that it was because the character was married to all three Newman men or that she held onto the baby that Nick thought was his (but really belongs to Adam) but considering the fact that Sharon never burned a fetus in a fireplace, I think people have turned on her pretty harshly. Adam seemed to have suffered less fallout than her, but then again he's dead (and unlike others, I don't see any plans for his return). So, in a way, there was a price to be paid...it was just further down the road so it wasn't immediate. For Sharon, it seems that she paid a price, especially among women viewers. By the time that they'd made Marshall Travers a rapist, I think it was pretty obvious that TPTB had no interest in the character remaining on the show. After that, Jessica didn't have much to do, really. Oh, don't remind me about the Camille and Denise dynamic. It was just bad bad bad, all the way around, so very poorly written. I tried to watch some of the story last year on You Tube. It did not age well. A shame because both actresses were so solid. It's like @Mitch so aptly said, having a diverse body of writers in the room makes a big difference. And I'm not just talking racial/ethnic diversity. Also socio-economic diversity as well.

It's bizarre. It's as if every media outlet has ceded the story to the Telegram. No major sports media outlet in America seems to want to report this. ESPN is not a surprise to me, tbh. They've all but given up on tennis. Last year, they got rid of their English language tennis twitter feed. Also, if you go to their tennis section on their website, it looks pretty inactive. Yes, there are pictures and some links but the actual news items are quite stale. ESPN doesn't seem to care that much about tennis this year at all. They tried to unload a lot of their Slam matches onto the ESPN+ garbage service but I don't think it is doing as well as they'd hoped. ESPN has seemed indifferent about tennis at best this year.

Soaps have a very duplicitous history with writing rape. Most just didn't do a very good job at it because they tended to romanticize the outcome. The Young and the Restless tried to write a similar story and it left a rift in the audience with the character of Paul and Christine, mostly because social mores had changed significantly since the 1970s and 1980s and audiences (even soap audiences) were no longer interested in seeing a romance between a woman and her sexual assaulter. Jessica and Marshall was never going to work after that rape because it was no longer the 1980s or 70s, women just weren't going to accept romance between a woman and her rapist. There are people to this day who detested William Fichtner's character Josh and were disgusted by him getting together with Meg after the rape of Iva. As great as Marland was as a writer, it was tone deaf of him to try to make Josh some type of romantic hero (remember when he saved Lily?) after he'd raped a thirteen year old girl, who he believed was his cousin at the time. But I can't entirely chastize Marland because he must've believed that he was doing what every other soap had done and gotten away with in the past, but even at that point, times were beginning to change. What an audience of woman would accept in the 1970s and 1980s is different from what they'd accept in the 2000s. Also, at the risk of injecting race/ethnicity, anyone who doesn't recognize the possibility that stereotypes can play a big part in how a character is perceived just doesn't recognize reality. When I was at grad school for Dramatic Writing, we were instructed that you cannot have a character remain viable once you put him/her that far out there. You take them out to the edge but don't cross that line because you won't realistically be able to pull them back from the brink. It makes me think that perhaps one (of many) reason soaps lost so much of their popularity was because they didn't adapt fast enough to the changing mores. You can't blame women for tuning out permanently, if you continue to write tone deaf stories where you believe they'd want to see a rapist being transitioned into a romantic lead. It's not that hard to figure out why Marshall Travers' character was killed soon after--he became completely unviable. African American people can talk about a variety of topics but America has a very clear problem with race and until people are willing to deal with race and racism in America, it will be a lingering, festering topic. You can't expect people to shut up about it while nooses are still being hung and people are still being terrorized for the color of their skin. Also, African American people can also be subjected to sexism and homophobia because...intersectionality. If you feel attacked, that's not my intention but if you know you're not the problem, why be so defensive about it? IMO, I also believe that sexism and homophobia haven't been honestly discussed in America and neither will be resolved until they are. Sorry but this made absolutely no sense to me.

Be careful, so as not to engage in ticking off of those boxes though. I agree that distilling ethnicity (I don't even like using the word race, which is pretty much a social construct that was handed down by eugenicists and white supremacist theory) down to black and white seems reductive but you have to remember that U.S. network TV is like several decades behind other media and daytime is even farther behind U.S. primetime. What was done to T. Marshall Travers character makes me especially angry and disgusted with Sheffer. He took the character from an arrogrant, know it all blowhard with some charisma to a flat-out rapist. I'm not the type who expects every character of color to be a paragon of virtue (I was engaged with Rucker's portrayal of the character as something of a jerk in the vein of a Kirk Anderson) but considering the fact that Tunie and Rucker had such fiery romantic and adversarial chemistry (something Tunie's Jessica had never had on the show before), I thought the potential was there for Jessica and Marshall to be a very hot couple and it was all dashed to hell when Sheffer decided to make Travers rape Jessica. It extinguished all possibility for that. It also made me wonder whether this was done deliberately to diminish any possibility of a non-white couple taking too much of the focus off the show's favored couples.

I'm glad that I don't lionize any of these people. Success in one's field doesn't make one a moral paragon, or even a good human being. Success doesn't even equate to a lot of talent, necessarily.

It would be bizarre if Gimelstob were still working there when the new season starts but then again, I think tennis is so tone-deaf, they're probably hoping that people forget in a month so that they can sweep this highly disturbing history under the rug. He's had so many instances of violent conflicts, I don't know how that's possible but they likely will try.

I know people in the Caribbean and Latin America who got the same notice. I think it's shut down for good, tbh. They ceded to TC basically. I don't subscribe to either (both are trash), so I'm not 100% certain. Speaking of Gimelstob, did anybody read this? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2018/11/30/tennis-supremo-justin-gimelstob-facing-explosive-assault-allegations/

Here are two people that didn't walk past each other.

Tennis fans get treated almost as shabbily as soap fans. Now people will be forced to Tennis Channel, which let's be honest, isn't really having a great moment as a company right now. Will Gimelstob be getting a salary from TC while he out facing assault charges?