DramatistDreamer

I watched last night, really on account of CZ. If people are complaining that she is a cartoon villain, they need look no further in the writing, it’s all in there. The fact that this woman Jordan (is that really her name?) waiting forty years to take this type of revenge, going through her “niece” to reel the Newman family in, first through Nikki and luring the others through creating this odd kidnapping and drugging of Nikki, to poisoning the others through bottled water…well, how else is CZ supposed to portray the character within this absurd chain of events? She’s playing it for all the absurdity that it’s worth.

Like I said, are we sure this character Jordan won’t pull a James Stenbeck? I am not talking about returning two or three times, I mean a brief disappearance. Just a thought.

So, is CZ basically wanting to be a James Stenbeck type of character that continually wreaks murder and mayhem before disappearing into the ether?

Can victims of abuse ever be made fully whole emotionally? Or do they learn to live with the scars? I don’t know whether any writer worth his or her salt would simplify a character into being completely “fixed” from therapy. I don’t think a writer would want a character to remain in a permanent state of brokenness but the idea that a rape, especially at the hands of someone the person once trusted and liked, ever really goes away. At the time. I originally watched these episodes when they were first aired on television, I probably didn’t think too deeply about the psychological scars but while watching again on YouTube as an adult, there were scenes that jumped out at me. I guess Iva’s intense therapy could be viewed as an alienating force behind her and Kirk’s breakup (were they fully broken up when Kirk and Ellie started seeing each other?) or Kirk and Ellie could be viewed as intensely selfish people who wanted what they wanted at the time and jumped into a relationship without thinking of Iva or whether they were even compatible. There were some odd family dynamics between the Snyder siblings from the get-go. Holden and Caleb seemed to go back and forth on coveting each other’s women. There was an odd jealousy that Meg had toward Iva (Meg, even admitted once that she was upset that Josh had been close to Iva (before the rape, which Meg didn’t know about at that time) and he paid Meg no attention when she stayed on Uncle Henry’s farm. Of course, it was obvious that because Iva left the farm when Meg was so young, they had no bond. Meg seemed to resent the prodigal daughter status that Iva would eventually receive from Emma, once their initial issues were resolved. Neither did Ellie and Iva have much of a bond either. (Meg and Ellie were the two Snyder that never seemed to have any guilt over leaving the farm). Ellie was portrayed as wanting to have what Iva had, at least in the men she had serious relationships with after arriving in Oakdale. I guess people could look at Iva as an example of someone sabotaging themselves or that the writing was punishing her somehow, but I wonder why people don’t pay as much attention to the selfishness of some of the people around her. I am not sure that some of those therapy scenes were so much about Iva punishing herself as they were about her struggles to shed her guilt over actually having a good rapport and friendship with Josh before he raped her, which no doubt led her to doubt her own judgment. Those scenes of her questioning herself seemed realistic, for the times anyway. I also think that soap writers, for better or for worse, tended toward the melodramatic and Iva’s emotional struggles with self esteem and how they impacted her romantic relationships were highly melodramatic.

The daytime soap opera is so limited in the way they characterize women in general. Do you think any one of them could write a character like a Jane Fonda or even a Lily Tomlin? Now mind you, I am not even referring to the characters that they have portrayed, I speak of the real life women that really appear to live active vital lives in their own rights, irrespective of their marital or maternal status. I don’t think that anyone would ever limit either one as a talk to. Yet, they still embrace their ages, they are not trying to relive any type of adolescence or ingenue period. I just don’t understand why soaps are incapable of writing their longtime characters as mature without ossifying them. It’s not that hard to do and it doesn’t take any extra money out of the show’s budget.

Whoa that is one racy trailer, it makes Tudors series look like a Disney channel show! Seeing this made me wonder why Moore had never been asked to portray Mary, Queen of Scots. I know this series is not about Mary, Queen of Scots but the fact that Moore’s own mother was Scottish, Moore probably has a good handle on the accent, not to mention, Moore’s famous red mane. Perhaps Moore had been waiting for a role that was more out of the box? Least expected?

The celebrities are grabbing the spotlight for this but the majority of the cases being brought by the Adult Survivors Act have been brought by women who were former inmates against prison guards, prison doctors and other workers at prisons and jails. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2023/11/19/sexual-abuse-lawsuits-new-york/fd5aa9ac-86a8-11ee-924c-6e6807155e36_story.html

🤭😉

Thank you. As you can probably tell, I have a bone to pick with how the soap opera industrial complex deals with women.

Well, I did suggest that the show bring back Heather Stevens with Vail Bloom in the role, to complicate Daniel’s relationship with Lily because I thought Stevens and Graziadei had good chemistry and they did it. I am not giving any more ideas for free.

It just seems like Y&R has a recent history of hiring writers who either don’t know the show they are writing for, (its history, character development) or are simply incapable of writing good stories. I realize there are challenges to writing for a series that has been on the air for several decades but why are the stories simultaneously bland and outrageously nonsensical?

Nalbandian. SMH. I cannot say that I was a fan but this is a big “ew”.

Why am I not surprised? Having lived in Harlem during the late 90s, early ‘00s, I can tell you that any guy that worked for Bad Boy thought they had the city on a string. More than once I had to tell a guy “So?” when he would bother me and then proudly proclaim that he worked for Bad Boy, as if that was supposed to mean something huge. I would say, “that’s very nice for you, but please leave me alone “. Creepy.

Even Saladin K. Patterson has to have sharper comedic capabilities these days. A lot of sitcoms have fallen into the one-liner trap, paying dust to a proper B and C storyline.

Personally, I don’t believe in the aspect of a woman aging out of being a viable protagonist. Aging out of an ingenue yes, aging out of vixen, which has a longer shelf life, perhaps but the idea that a woman (and apparently not a man?) has a sell-by date is well, ageist and likely a function of fans being brainwashed by years of terrible soap opera writing. But I digress… If I were to play along with this Lichtenstein game (Anecdote: my first real world job working at a performing arts institution in Brooklyn, my boss showed me some posters that Lichtenstein had created especially for their arts festivals that had been held at least a decade before I had arrived), then Rosanna Cabot might fit the bill. Even though the character had been unevenly written at times, I had somewhat appreciated that Rosanna was single and child-free, a perspective that existed in real life but was usually M.I.A. in soaps. As much as I like Cady McClain, I thought the writing for Rosanna during her stints was pretty atrocious. It got so bad at one point, that even McClain became disgusted with the way the character was being written and left. They had stuck her wit her sister’s child temporarily, than began to give her a sort of baby fever and gave her fibroids with only a hysterectomy as the solution, which made her even more desperate. The writer decided to give Rosanna not one but two botched adoptions, one of which ends up being illegal. Both at the hands of the men in her life. Her happily ever after involves a sudden reconciliation with one of those men (who had previously run her off a road, causing her to get into an accident) and deciding to co-parent one of his sons.

Last night, I finally got to the episode where Bebe Neuwirth makes her guest appearance. She and Kelsey Grammar still have chemistry, their rapid exchanges injected some much needed energy to the show. It must be the “Lilith effect” because it was the first time since this new iteration of the Frasier series that I felt as if Grammar’s instincts were reined in. For the first several episodes, it felt as if Grammar’s instincts veered into comedy that had been overly broad. He must have felt as if he had to sharpen his instincts to keep up with Neuwirth. The writing needs to get sharper too, it’s too plodding and is making it harder on the actors to make things work.

The Victor Newman syndrome. Victor on Y&R hasn’t been allowed to lose at anything for two decades and counting now. One of the reasons, I lost almost all interest in that show years ago.

Also, Craig, having a cop as a sister usually served as deterrent to really pursuing the worst of his ambitions, even when he was doing some bad things like trying to burn down the Refuge. He was horrified when he discovered that Margo had gone into the burning building. Not to mention, he didn’t want Lyla to find out what he had done. Craig, even at his worst was usually portrayed as never wanting those he loved to find out what he’d done. The fact that he’d later be portrayed as brazenly flaunting his illicit behavior seemed highly ooc.

Cybercrime, cyber espionage is a huge deal and could be a part of private investigations/security. You have forensic pathologists who exclusively work in investigating financial crimes. The problem is in the lack of ability to write these types of stories and kinds of characterizations. There is much that Chance could do as a PI, a number of whom are gainfully employed in big cities, particularly in drug and domestic crimes but Y&R has not demonstrated any capability to write these types of stories. Look at the mess they made on the human trafficking story they tried to do years ago.

There is a thread but it is pre 2000 soap slaps, in the Cancelled Soaps thread. This could be a Post 2000 thread, so there’s no confusion, just a suggestion, maybe.

Argentinians claimed to have been dissatisfied with both of their presidential candidates, so over half of their voting population decided to vote for the most extreme- a man who campaigned on a abolishing abortion, although the people recent voted to legalize abortion. And that isn’t even Millie’s most extreme proposition. There’s also his proposal to legalize the harvesting and sale of human organs. Millei, a man who runs neck and neck with Trump for the president with the worst hairstyle in the 21st century. We’ll see how this goes. Argentina has always had a predilection towards fascists and despots. They do, in fact, have a active legacy of providing hospitality to Nazis and their spawn, after all.

The Carter Family just announced a few days ago that she had entered in home hospice with President Carter. R.I.P. Mrs. Carter who leaves her own legacy as a former First Lady and humanitarian. A life spent in true service.

Maybe in ‘84 but by early ‘85, Barbara was seemingly all over town complaining to Kim and Lisa and anyone who would listen about Brian and apparently how insensitive he was. I remember that weird incident that happened before the infamous costume ball (too bad most of those episodes are not on YouTube) where Barbara and Brian had broken up for five minutes and Brian asked out his colleague at the Argus and oops, Barbara decides to accept Brian’s invitation to the ball and promptly announces that Brian asked her, right to the crestfallen colleague’s face, then proceeds to blame Brian for mishandling the situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if in previous years, Barbara was in a bubble because James kept her pretty isolated for awhile, and even her storylines with Gunnar seemed fairly self-contained. At least with Brian, that seemed like the beginning of her world expanding. It just doesn’t seem like there are that many episodes with Kirk on YouTube though. Although again, Barbara and Lisa were business partners and Kirk spent a good amount of time at Lisa’s when Marcy lived with Lisa. And didn’t Marcy also work at the boutique?

They probably did since Barbara was engaged to Brian and Kirk was Brian’s little brother, not to mention the fact that Barbara’s younger sister Frannie was once the love of Kirk’s life, but we’re unlikely to see those scenes on YouTube since so much of 1984 and 1985 episodes are missing.

Welp, that anecdote was from Zenk herself. Apparently, there were three actresses before CZ. Has anyone ever interviewed Judi Rolin to find out what her experience was on the show? I think I will do a quick check to see if there is anything out there. I am intrigued.