DramatistDreamer

The Luke effect. Unfortunately, General Hospital found success with turning a rapist into a leading man (I still can't figure out how people accepted that) so it opened the path for other soaps' attempts at it. I wish I could say that it stopped at Luke but we know from Roger Howarth's character on OLTL, that that unfortunate "phenomenon" continued. Martha Byrne's Lily was what happens when the teen scene is so small, Lily became an avatar for every 80s teen scenario involving a self-absorbed whiny angsty young woman. The Molly Ringwald effect or whatever characters Molly Ringwald kept playing during the 1980s. It wouldn't have been so bad if there were other teens, particularly teen girls on the show (other than Meg, who didn't stay a teen for long). Having all these adults going to a teen's birthday/graduation party struck me as ridiculous. This was also done for Dusty and Meg. I think though that Lily was supposed to represent all the fragility of a sheltered, self-absorbed poor little rich girl but it often got to be a bit much. One reason why I'm always more interested to hear from writers because I'd love to know how many of these stories/characters were by the writers' hand and how much might have been pushed by executives with clipboard in hand citing market research.

That seemed very detached compared to the episode they did for Chris Hughes. I'm surprised at how cool Bob was. When Don McLaughlin passed, he was choking back tears, it felt so genuine. Nancy was on longer, her episode should've consisted of more than a cluster gathering of black clad characters in small room but these were the waning days, the show had probably been packing up the set, so it was what it was. I'm indifferent to the Katie character but I wouldn't blame her for taking the focus from Nancy. If anyone did that it was Chris' ridiculous story.

I had stopped watching too but isn't that episode posted on You Tube somewhere? I feel as if I saw it. I don't believe there was a funeral. I was surprised at how minimal it all was given Helen Wagner's long tenure and Nancy Hughes' overall impact on the show. The soaps always hide behind budget when they are called out for doing the least but they could've done better than what they did. Also what I could never understand was, given the fact that TPTB knew that they had declining ratings and there were other P&G soaps that had recently been canceled over the last several years and given the age of the actress, why couldn't they take the time to film brief scene, in advance, of Nancy saying "Good night, Bob". It made sense, since she delivered the first lines "Good morning, Bob". Once the actress hit 90 years of age, they should've made some type of plans. They could've added it as a part of a tribute and part of the show's final episode. I was really mad at ATWT for not bothering to think ahead. Then again, that had become the show's M.O. in their last decade-no respect for the show's history and no foresight for what could happen in the future.

He's done a lot more TV than theater. His last theater credit is in 2007. Eric Sheffer Stevens

I don't know if anyone has seen this but the compilation of these statistics are quite interesting.

Watching Luke Cage on Netflix and I see Sean Ringgold (Shaun, OLTL) who portrays Sugar in the first episode.

Didn't Campos-Duffy basically turn her back on Pedro Zamora when she discovered he had AIDS? She and her husband deserve one another, both idiotic bigots. Speaking of another idiotic bigot, wasn't this man's summit with Kim supposed to render the nuclear threat completely over, according to him? To say, he changes like the weather would be an insult to weather and meteorologists everywhere. Is North Korea a Nuclear Threat or Not? The President Now Says It Is

@Soapsuds Martha's not pictured there. That's Ann Sayre, and even though I like Sayre, I would still pass on this livestream. That's a definite.

Oh, okay...I'm not on FB. I'd really like someone who is outspoken to answer what it was truly like from the production side and the writer's room, as that's something I've always been interested in. How much autonomy did a high-caliber head writer have? How much interference (there's always a degree of interference) did they have to deal with? How did this affect specific storylines and/or specific characterizations?

Yikes, that would be a strong pass for me. It would've been interesting had there been a gathering of actors, a writer or two or a production person that we haven't really heard from in awhile. Elizabeth Hubbard will forever be interesting (I'd love to know if she's kept in contact with Ann Mitchell). I'd really love to hear from someone like Susan Bedsow-Horgan who tends to be more candid about the dynamics in the writer's room and whether a headwriter of Marland's renown actually had full autonomy and if not, how much did the executives try to intrude? I'm not interested in some people that we always seem to see in social media trying to promote themselves, especially if they had sucky storylines.

I thought I'd seen and heard it all.

Have I taken breaks from watch? Of course I have. Every soap, I've ever watched, I've taken breaks. Either because it was no longer worth my time or because I just became too busy (college and grad school). I'm a big believer in not watching something I don't enjoy but if you're going to write ten miles of bad story, then don't complain or try to guilt the viewers when the show gets canceled. I sense a lot of that from some fans of some shows, particularly soaps, which is why the 'O.J. defense' that the soap industry likes to use is just not a good one. The writing quality severely declined and many soaps lost audience and could not (or would not?) do enough to get them back. (By the way, wasn't it the Star Wars franchise that has recently decided to pull back on putting out more movies in the series? From what I understand, the quality was not good in the last movie so it has caused them to rethink how they will write/produce the next film. Wise move. Haste makes waste.) Many of the fanboys in science fiction ground their complaints based on misogynistic and racists reasons. Perhaps some soap fans do this also but as a woman of color, that would never be me. I'm far from traditional, except when it comes to writing a consistent character and a storyline grounded in logic. TBH. I avoid watching most of the last decade of the show because the way the characters and storylines were written struck me as poorly written and sloppy and painful to watch. I'm not a nostalgia nut but I believe in writing a story that makes sense. When I was in grad school, had I submitted some of these premises that were dramatized in the show's last decade, the professor would've told me to start over. @adrnyc and I've got a M.F.A in Dramatic Writing, by the way. Some of my work has popped up on stage with some talented actors. I've been trained to write scripts for film, television but my passion is for the stage, which is probably why I'll never be rich, LOL.

I never had any preconceived notions about Henry's sexuality, tbh. Hey, I'd lived in NYC and knew guys who were heterosexual, metrosexual, bi-sexual and polyamorous. In the arts, I'd realized that identity was not as cut and dried as others made it. I was open to see different aspects of masculinity from the ones that had been dramatized on T.V. in the past. The problem for me with how Henry was written was that he was all over the place. No consistency, nothing to really hold onto. He was written as a utilitarian character and the problem was when they tried to write him into a kind of leading man. This didn't work for me. I thought that Henry had a kind of chemistry with Katie (early on) and Vienna. I don't know why but I didn't get much of that with his pairing with Barbara. To me, it seemed a bit contrived and the Henry as Stenbeck's son bit seemed to be yet another attempt to tie these two characters together somehow by happenstance. Maybe the problems started for me when the show decided to parade TD around as his female cousin. I really couldn't take the Henry character seriously as anyone's love interest or ideal after that. Maybe I'm just too picky and I know it's a soap but ATWT had always been more grounded in its storylines and how it wrote it's characterizations(it wasn't Passions, a soap I tried to watch and knew it wasn't for me) and in the last several years, it appeared to have become completely unmoored in how characters and storylines were written. Audiences can accept new directions for a character or a storyline if it is grounded in logic. Even in the worlds of science fiction, the characters and stories must be grounded in some type of logic. In other words, there are "rules". To me, it just seemed as if logic went completely out the window within the last decade of the show. Characterizations went bats*t crazy and very little was grounded in actual logic. Call me old school, I care not, but to me, from a Aristotelian dramatic prospective, the storylines were just not well-written. They lacked depth, consistency, cohesion and were mostly unmoored from logic. I'd loved to hear an opposing perspective that specifically addresses how any of these specific storylines and characterizations in the last several years were well written. Or even defensible.

Yeah, I was comparing the past overall, not just Barbara's pairings. I think CZ is a real trooper and I'm not saying her opinion is invalid but but I'm not sure why people are giving an actor's opinions ultimate sway on what makes a story great. They don't write the story. Havin Gunnar return to announce that he slayed James once and for all would alone, have made a return worth it. Also, if it could happen right before Barbara was set to walk down the aisle with Henry, you generate some intrigue. Henry and Barbara's disco twirl just didn't do it for me, in terms of interest.

She is beautiful, I've seen their wedding pictures as well as several of her appearances at his matches. The camera definitely loves her!

No offense, but from what I've gleaned of most soap actors, they don't really care about service the overall narrative of the show. They want big drama or big fun, lots of lines and screentime for their characters. It may be good for them but it's often fatal for the shows that they're on. ATWT in it's last years is one such cautionary tale. Babs and Henry were pushed as this exciting couple and no doubt there were aspects that CZ loved, like the younger man dumping the beautiful young woman (Vienna) for the older women and the ode to Dancing With the Stars but had Benjamin Henrickson still been alive, there is no writer worth her salt who would prefer Henry and Barbara to Barbara and Hal. The show didn't have a lot of options for pairings at that point and the show didn't have a lot of options for much surprises either-- Henry and Barbara offered a compromise solution to both those issues. CZ is talented enough to sell it and TD can be serviceable, at times, so the show took one of the few options they had left to offer the 'happy ending' option. Let's face it though, compared to what the show had been able to accomplish in the past, this compromise pairing was a comedown. Vienna could be annoying, at times but she had usually had some vitality to her character. That was all stripped away in order to make Barbara and Henry serviceable. As a writer, this option definitely would not have been my choice. That was also so stupid!

Both parts of the Korean peninsula seem to be making the most progress of all of these summit meetings.

The good thing about the Gunnar character is that he basically disappeared with the assumption that he later died. There was no jumping out of airplanes or something that the viewer would have to suspend disbelief to make his return plausible because no one ever truly found out what happened to him. Any good writer worth her salt could make it happen, especially is the groundwork is laid (without a reveal) at least a good nine months before his return. And written well and effectively, the payoff of having Gunnar declare that after discovering James' role in his circumstances (and having a final confrontation with James where Gunnar ultimately 'puts down' James for good), he rid everyone (especially Barbara) of the menace (the irony would be that she informs Gunnar that she hasn't been afraid of James for years as she's no longer the frightened woman she used to be). Sadly. Benjamin Hendrickson died years before the show's end, so I would not have recast Hal. The part of the story where everyone mourned his loss- I would not touch that in any re-writing of the show's final years. There are plenty of other things about the show that I would absolutely have written away but this wouldn't be one of those things. Although, I usually dislike the concept of a 'Sliding Doors' storytelling device where you have an alternative reality, if I had the chance, I would apply some variation of it to go back in time in the show's timeline and re-write some things out of existence. Some of the stories in the last decade were so atrocious and contrived that it could be done quite seamlessly, if done carefully.

OMG, yes to this! I've been rewriting/undoing so many ATWT storylines in my mind and this is one of them. I would've have written them as not making it to the altar--I would have written an alive Gunnar show up, reminiscent of when Duncan showed up at Shannon's wedding to Brian McColl. Gunnar could say "Hello Barbara" similar to how James said it when he showed up from "the dead".

There are several episodes of ATWT from the 80s that having singing (Lyla for example) but not tracks by recording artists. If you group some of the episodes by some of the big storylines like the Tad Channing murder mystery, I don't remember much music by popular recording artists being used during those episodes. There are a good number of episodes from '86 and '87 that use muted instrumental music in the music (e.g. an organ instrumental version of Billy Ocean's Suddenly with no vocals at all). I think 1988 would be a huge problem in terms of recorded music because there are scenes in Lisa's club, The Cellar where you can hear a lot of very popular music blaring in certain scenes. 1988 was a writer's strike year, so I would be willing to forgo that year, LOL. I understand how that episode from GL would be a problem because the music is threaded all through the scene and it is LOUD! It may come down to being able to sort through episodes and that would take a LOT of manpower. Years ago, I also communicated with Roger Newcomb through the WLS blog and at that time, it sounded as if they had a small band of people working on the project. It sounded difficult to sustain. This may not be comparable but it sounds like they need experts, like the people who do film restoration and again, I'm not sure how much value PGP really places on these soaps to bring in digital experts and film restoration people. UCLA is a film school but having attended a famous art school on the East Coast (that also had a film school) you'd be surprised how academic institutions can allow certain items to sit and rot unless there is some deep-pocketed alumni steps in and renovate and refurbish. The school will spend its resources to maintain more 'high priority' areas and neglect other areas unless some group raises the issue. UCLA may not know/care about what they regard as some canceled soaps and game shows vs. some early films by John Cassevettes, for example.

Definitely not a "Be Best" moment. Someone in that Trump cabal is being honest for once. I definitely believe that Melania simply doesn't care.

Congress can be wishy-washy but at least there's Mueller and this man-

It's a shame that more people don't watch PBS. The NewsHour is really the only TV news that I watch, (otherwise I just read the news). The NewsHour would be the type of program that goes in-depth, spends at least 10 minutes on a story in a town or small city to see the socio-economic and cultural factors when weighing them against the local politics. Then they would revisit the town or city later on for a follow-up. I can't abide by most network & cable news that only seem to operate within soundbytes.

I remember those times. Even though he offered some details on the challenges of digitization, he was pretty vague on other details, perhaps he didn't know much about the particulars of the other aspects. Those two guys are likely to have more information, especially the specific aspects of dealing with PGP, as well as building the streaming platform. Who would that be though? Actually, IMO, one person wouldn't be effective. It would have to be a sustained team effort, supported by multitudes. Although, if I were an alumni of UCLA and a ATWT fan or a fan who lived in the vicinity of UCLA, I would certainly try to pay a visit to the archives and ask the archivist what is being done (or not) to preserve/restore these videos. I used to work with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and had to deal with people wanting access to the archives. There is usually a permission request process, an acceptance (we rarely rejected written/oral requests), then a date and time is set to go on-site to view the archives. If there is a fan near the UCLA film library or an alumni/fan, I would suggest they start there. Even better if a team takes this on, as it would seem to be a lot for one person. I may have to duck and hide for saying this but I don't think the effort to save ATWT/GL was nearly as cohesive as the one to try to save AMC/OLTL. Okay, I'll run and hide now, lol.

Another similarity between Bibi Netanyahu and Trump has been that it appears that others around them will fall before they do.