DramatistDreamer

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?

Absolutely. Amelia Marshall as an actress was just woefully underated. I still have difficulty understanding why she didn't get more opportunities. She and Rick Hearst should've been a no-brainer but I'm thinking there there was some resistance to that pairing from executives. Silly, really!

ABC was better for awhile with their AA characters but they too tended to marginalize their characters in subtle ways. What I don't understand is the notion that 'there can only be one young African American female or male character on the show at a time. Or that all the African American characters basically have to be related. On ATWT, why couldn't Jessica and Heather both existed when we had Barbara, Margo, Betsy, Frannie, Lisa, Kim, Lucinda, etc? Honestly as a Black woman and a writer, as much as I loved ATWT, I resented this. I understand that the subject matter makes some uncomfortable but I think, had people truly brought the matter out in the open, discussed it honestly, changes could've been made that might have brought these shows more in line with reflecting the real world and might have resulted for longer runs for some of these shows by bringing in a wider pool of viewers. It's no mistake that the shows that have the most longevity (Y&R used to have one of the largest AA casts in daytime, Grey's Anatomy in Primetime is still on) and the movies that do the biggest box office have the most diverse casts. People do tend to be more engaged when they see people they can identify with in some way on screen. That's just reality. I do agree that quality should take precedence over quantity but I don't particularly find a lot of the stories written for many of the minority cast members to have been complete stories. I liked aspects of the writing for Jessica Griffin but she had a lot of unfinished stories (virtually any of her stories not connected with Duncan). Heather and Tucker didn't even get a proper exit story. Duncan could talk about curses and murders at his castle every five minutes and his Scottishness to the hilt but Roy talking about his father's anti-cop bias due to his brother Lenny's death was somehow uncomfortable for people to deal with? Oh.

I just couldn't help myself.

Forget about blocking. It would be good if today's soaps could just put up coherent storylines. I guess that's off limits too.

Tomorrow in the Telegraph:

From working in theater, I can tell you without hesitation that those types of scenes require blocking and rehearsal, also an active, knowledgeable director, things which soaps dispensed with in later decades and can't be bothered to do now. I KNEW it was you who complained about Lyla and Casey. I'll agree to disagree with you on that one but I always enjoy reading your posts. Luke's coming out story would've been done a helluva lot better and with more detail and sensitivity had Marland written it. He wouldn't have been as bogged down by network standards as he was in the 1980s. I bet he might have even convinced the actor who played Hank to drop in for a visit. I thought Marland was a top notch soap headwriter but he was not perfect and I do think that almost all daytime soaps had/have a blindspot when it came to minority characters. Tucker's exit was not on Marland but Heather Dalton's exit, Roy's exit, both left a bad taste in my mouth. Especially as both characters were portrayed by terrific actors whose talents seemed largely wasted on the show.

Well, Casey was a little bit arrogant, in the beginning anyway. Remember when he used to jump on Bob's last nerve with his growing list of improvements for the hospital? Don Hastings expressive reactions were so hilarious to me. Of course, Casey's character had room to evolve, which was great because it was character development that focused on the character alone. Someone in some other thread said that ATWT didn't seem to do super couples. To a certain extent, I could see what they meant in that, until Lily and Holden, the stereotypical Luke and Laura "we're gonna save the world while holding hands" type of super couple wasn't really a part of ATWT's DNA. ATWT was more known for individuals who happened to come together because they eventually fell in love. Tom and Margo certainly had their own storylines and sagas before they got together. So did Bob and Kim for that matter. To me, in terms of the big 1980s supercouple, the closest thing that came to that prototype were Betsy and Steve. And even then, I sometimes think that the big splashy Greek wedding (as wonderful as it was and it was a fantastic spectacle!) was more of a reaction to the Luke and Laura phenomenon. Then there were popular characters like Craig and Sierra and Lyla and Casey who became highly popular couples and unfortunately ended all too abruptly for various reasons (Scott and Finn just got other offers to do a great many other projects, unfortunate for the show). I really think P&G should've given their most popular actors more flexibility to do other projects and just rotate the characters and storylines in and out-- the mini-version of the way a Netflix series shoots scenes. The character of Simone- Wasn't the conflict because Cal (you're right, he was engaged to Lyla) wanted to drill for oil on her ancestral tribal land or something? The nation (I feel weird calling it a tribe) Simone was a part of was fighting the big oil company from encroaching on their land. From what I remember. It's too bad, they couldn't seem to integrate the character into regular life in Oakdale. It seemed as if once the cause was fought/won, the character was finished with no effort made toward her doing much of anything else.

Here's another one to add to that list, @marceline. Apparently this man has a law firm that has done property tax appeals for Trump. It's raid city today!

Yeah, I never believed that Mueller was deliberately delaying anything in this investigation. I believe that he is being meticulous, which is necessary for him to do his job properly.

I know that some have said that they thought the couple was boring, but I liked Lyla & Casey. Perhaps because the 1980s became known as the era of the Super Couple (a term I've come to resent), people's expectation of a soap couple was slanted toward some couple that looked lifted from the cover of a Harlequin Romance novel, or something but I thought it was a couple that was grounded much more in reality and realistic problems, although I thought the majority of the couples on ATWT were closer to a realistic portrayal than a lot of other soaps. One thing that I could appreciate, something that today's soaps seem fairly inept at, is that time was taken to build Casey's character on his own. Lyla had a longer history on the canvas so we'd expect her to have a fully-formed character by the time she and Casey got together but I enjoyed the fact that Casey's character was built on its own, outside of a pairing first before he ever got together with Lyla. And their pairing was something of a surprise. Nowadays, from casting, everyone can spot a mile away, who will end up being paired off with whom. I remember watching an episode last week where Lyla was in NYC and Casey was unsure of the status of his and Lyla's relationship. Frannie, who'd just broken off her engagement to Seth, encouraged Casey to call Lyla and sort things out. Casey called but ended up feeling frustrated when he could only leave a message with Lyla's "Do Not Disturb" answering service. I started to wonder how many fans at that time assumed that he and Frannie would get together and how many thought he'd reconcile with Lyla? Even the thought that there was a little suspense surrounding a relationship made me appreciate how many possibilities Marland created with these characters--a few times, it seemed, almost too many! I vaguely remember the Native American woman, I think I was likely watching less at that particular moment. Was this after Casey had passed away, or was he still alive? I think this had to be years after, right? The actress who portrayed the character, Kimberly Guerrero, is more memorable to me for her stint on Seinfeld that that storyline on ATWT.

He also said he had no business deals with Saudi Arabia, which is a whole lie.

@JaneAusten Nothing about the NYT surprises me these days. The AP, tbh, did surprise me a bit but they won't do so, in the future. The New York Times made the mistake of sending me a "random" survey to fill out and boy did I let them have it! Their misleading, click-baity ledes, their obvious lack of diversity in staffing of reporters, etc. and their obvious 'caping' (I didn't use that word exactly) for right-wing and Trumpists' perspectives. I went "awf"! I also have to add that both the NYT and the Washington Post have tried so assiduously, over recent years (before Trump) to paint the GOP as trying to cultivate diversity, Blacks and Latinos, in particular. I can remember articles painting Mia Love as an example of the efforts by the Republican party to embrace ethnic, racial and gender diversity within it's ranks. Also, there was more than one unfortunate piece naming Tim Scott as the conscience of the Republican party for supposedly tut-tutting at Trump's obvious racism. Well, we see what all this has come down to. Stevie Wonder can see the collusion a mile away but Trump's lackeys and fans will continue to drink the Kool-Aid and deny deny deny.

Reading the article last night took my sense of disgust to an even new level but one interesting aspect was the fact that CBS' arrogance in its decision to take on Shari Redstone in an ultra-aggressive manner seems to have provided an extra impetus for Moonves' eventual downfall because the investigations began in earnest as a result of the legal fight that ensued between Moonves and Redstone. The way that sleazy manager used his female clients, particularly Phillips, to leverage his career is beyond the pale. LaRue may be a B-lister (which yes, an actor who has never had a big movie career is regarded as one step below) but at least, she had the integrity to dump the sleazy manager. Wise move.