DramatistDreamer

I wasn’t able to click on until almost the very end, where Colleen was holding back tears talking about losing her son, about the same time she lost her mother and advocating for mental health care, while Alan ends the livestream with a “that was fun!” or some such remark. My. God.

Perhaps other leaders will now feel “safe” to crawl out of the “global sewer” but I really don’t understand why some people didn’t recognize how truly awful a human being is Musk until now. Why didn’t these folks leave X when Musk took over the platform last year? He was just as awful last year at this time. It reminds me of all those folks who insisted that we all have a “wait and see” attitude when Trump was rising to power and even after his hideous inauguration speech, while some of us continually cited evidence of his racism and predatory behavior. At this point, I doubt that people will ever learn. The optics of Musk and Netanyahu together in Israel are truly awful. It really appears that Gazans and Israelis have the worst leaders possible at this moment, leaders that seem bound to making sure that the people will be in continuous conflict, if not all out war. I peeped who Netanyahu was in his treatment of Obama ,who Netanyahu seemed to regard as being beneath him. I am at the point where I barely want to read a newspaper because I feel like I am constantly reading about leader after leader making ruinous decision after ruinous decision and then the people who keep them in power or threaten to elect even more extreme figures to replace them.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, announced her very public exit from “X”, referring to the social media platform as a “global sewer”. What took her so long to leave? How has Musk and his platform suddenly become unbearable after all this time?

If Jordan can fool this Victor into drinking a bottle of poisonous water, Babs could’ve laced his wine or beer. The seduction would have nothing to do with romance, if we’re still talking revenge.

Barbara Ryan would be a lot smarter than Jordan, especially 80s Babs. She would have juiced Victor to finance her latest venture, seduced him and let Nikki discover the affair, this driving her back to the bottle organically, all while befriending Victoria on the side and kept it going for months before everyone discovered that she and Victor had not actually slept together, she just bamboozled everyone, including Victor,

Aha, thank you. It could be an alias then.

Iconic song. May Ms. Knight R.I.P.

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.