DramatistDreamer

Please let there be an end to this ever rising death toll in Maui. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/maui-like-a-war-zone-as-death-toll-from-wildfires-reaches-93/ar-AA1fdTIH

I just finished Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and A Call For Change In Hollywood. It was proved to be prescient concerning recent events. There was also food for thought in that the author contends that while studios tend to rationalize keeping problematic people (studio executives, producers, directors, showrunners, etc) by saying that they have the skills and expertise to keep these shows running in an efficient manner while keeping costs down, there are equally talented, non-problematic people who have the exact same sets of skills and expertise, with equal ability to keep shows running efficiently and lower costs. This made me think about the scandal at Days Of Our Lives and the rationale that has surely been given for holding on to Alarr, likely the same rationalizations for keeping many problematic producers, executives, etc., on daytime soaps over decades. This makes me wonder had these studios made different decisions with producers, directors, even some showrunners, might they have saved more money and made even better shows for a longer period of time, buying more time for many of these beloved shows? It’s an interesting hypothesis,which the author seems to believe and I also believe.

The same group that went after Affirmative Action is now coming for a venture fund geared toward Black women and marginalized groups. The amount are modest by venture capital standards yet here we are. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/fearless-fund-ceo-on-racial-discrimination-lawsuit-brought-by-conservative-activist/ PBS has its definite blind spots but it is a sure sight better than the news and information presented on traditional network television. One last postscript on the conservative group’s lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, I knew they wouldn’t stop at Affirmative Action, they’re already gnawing at workplace hiring protections, so of course they want to restrict all perceived pathways to success to historically well connected groups.

That Doctor Who-like music at the very beginning took me out!🤭

After I made my post earlier, I started to think about Olivia and what it meant to both not have her around, even for brief periods of time, and then to have Nate no longer be connected to the medical field. To me, it felt as if they were disconnecting Nate from his past, disconnecting Nate from Olivia. It felt sad to me. I definitely agree with those who have said that Nate lacks an identity and just seems to be there. From what I saw, it seemed like he was there simply to service Victoria and the Newmans.

Honestly, I don’t know what the heck that was about!

Speaking of sets, I understand budgets dictating what sets are constructed, maintained and showed and it obviously dictates storylines and how they play out, but I found it odd how the show wants to do a story like the one that led to Sally’s stillbirth without a decent hospital set. They had her in a clinic that looked like it belonged in a rural area, rather than the cosmopolitan city that Genoa City was supposedly known to be. As unlikely as this will sound, maybe they shouldn’t do any stories that involve hospital scenes unless they have an appropriate set? The other thing that my sense of logic just struggles to comprehend is Nate’s foray into business. If he was going into business, I would have thought that biotech would have appealed to writers as a way to connect Nate to the business world without completely divorcing him from the profession that he obviously spent so much of his life dedicated to. It would have been better had Newman acquired a biotech division, as many conglomerates have biotech divisions . Nate could still have been shuffling papers like he does at Newman media, etc and maybe the the tension would come in if/when Nick suspected that Nate wanted to extend his reach into Nick’s territory and was angling for an executive position in the main office then Victoria’s decision to temporarily remove Nick just adds fuel to the fire. Maybe things have changed since I last watch- I stopped watching again awhile ago but I still find it sad that they completely disconnected Nate from his medical background in favor of a fairly generic career path.

Oh I understand, but I feel like I noticed she was pregnant months ago. I don’t know why but I just knew and assumed that some announcement had been made several weeks ago, if not earlier. I’m trying to figure it because I figured she was pregnant way before the official announcement. I am laughing because I honestly hardly watch this show and somehow saw that she was pregnant for some time.

Oh how the mighty have fallen! 😂🙃 Remember when soaps would actually use real roller coasters?

Why did I think this had already been announced? 😂 Am I going crazy? I thought this was common knowledge.

I understand. I find myself trying to put myself in the position of others who weren’t watching the show at that time, who might not know or struggle to imagine what it felt like to have to wait months for Barbara to get her comeuppance for her latest scheme or to even wait from Friday afternoon until Monday, anticipating what we’ll see when an emboldened, assertive Barbara finally encounters the ex-husband who used to torture her. Back then writers seemed more adept at piecing together a character’s history and backstory and merging it with the evolved character in a way that made sense. Today, they’re more likely to scrap the character and make build a new one entirely, even if it confuses the viewer. Ooh, wow, thanks @lilyredd. I would love if they would bring back Peter Boynton and a few others to join. I hope Locher adds some clips. I know many of the clips aren’t in great condition but he’s done it with GL and it really added to the discussion. Larry Bryggman needs to be there too.

The problem I have with these type of character videos is they neglect the impact from the actual storyline. You can’t get a true of Barbara in action with just a couple of scenes or one-liners. It has to be done through revelation of an actual story, so you can see how calculating Barbara was back then and how she did things, step by step to vex her rivals and those that she targeted. It would also be a mistake to look at the character through the lens of today’s daytime soaps, most of which don’t take the time to build characters and stories. Many of Barbara’s most savage moments are contained in episodes that aren’t even posted on YouTube.

Kind of weird for soap fans capable of posting on an online forum be so rigid about a character. I think that vixen aspect of Barbara’s history holds up incredibly well, even all these decades later. She could be venomous but she wasn’t completely evil, to me she was pretty complex. There was the side of her that reveled in being aggressive in business, in satisfying her needs, but she also loved her son Paul and could be insecure in her role as mother and protector, and like someone upthread mentioned, she cared deeply what Kim, Lisa and Bob thought of her. I loved those scenes after James returns to Oakdale and Barbara confronts him when she encounters him at Fashions. She tells him with a smirk that she’s no longer the doormat that she was when she was his wife, that she’s an even match for him now. James is mesmerized by the thought and tells her that he thinks she’s more beautiful now than ever. That sequence is an example of why I gravitated towards the soaps as a kid. Today’s daytime soap writers claim that viewers don’t have the patience to watch a story build the way it used to when daytime soaps were at their zeniths. Viewers say the writers don’t have the skill set. Either way, I don’t see that type of storytelling happening again in daytime soaps. So many things have changed, most notably creative standards and the fundamental business model.

I don’t think any viewers at that time could have imagined or predicted that these shows would start to deteriorate the way they eventually did. Even as actors left, part of me imagined that most would eventually return somehow. Of course, I didn’t keep up with the bts stuff back then, so I usually had no clue until the announcer would say something like “…the role of * will now be played by *…” Those actors were getting so many outside opportunities to do primetime shows and movies, it really must have thrown the show off somewhat when roles had to be recasted in the middle of an ongoing storyline. And I guess, with the recasting of Margo, it was probably decided that it would be easier to take the character in a different direction. It’s a shame because after the departure of Margaret Colin, the show was lucky that HBS worked out so well, especially once they paired her with Gregg Marx. Only to lose Marx and then eventually HBS. By the mid to late 90s it would have been logical to evolve the Barbara Ryan character again but not into that slapstick mess that they had her doing in the early 00s. They lost the entire plot there.

You might be asking the wrong crowd. I don’t know a single person who didn’t enjoy the character during this time, even those who loved to hate Barbara. It was such an intriguing shift in character and looking back at these episodes (I was a kid at the time 80s bad byotch Barbara was in her prime) as a writer, I really appreciate how the writing allowed the character to organically shift to a vixen from a put upon quasi heroine who had been victimized one too many times. And since the 1980s were known as the decade of decadence, Barbara as the well coiffed fashion designer (as Margo once quipped “Not a hair out of place”) selling clothes that were out of reach to all but the rich ladies and boldly mixing business with pleasure personified ‘80s excess to perfection. It was a timely character turnabout. That frenemie to rivals dynamic could have lasted longer than it did had HBS stayed on. There were a lot of coming and goings during the 1980s, so many that it’s a wonder the storytelling managed to sustain such a high quality so consistently during the decade.

Oh man, do I ever agree with this statement! Such short-sighted thinking by the production companies behind these shows. We could likely cite other examples of shortsighted thinking that could fill pages of a topic thread.

Count me as one of those people who thought that Ashley and Brad were gross. It feels as if that was the beginning of casting Traci as the one who would be stripped of all that was closest to her. She is, after all, the only Abbott who has lost her only child and was expected to bounce back and be the bigger person, giving Colleen’s heart to Victor Newman, who never had much use for her in her final years. When Ashley terminated her pregnancy, that sent her into a tailspin of grief and mental breakdown and instability for at least a year. Traci was never afforded that type of onscreen grieving experience. Ashley was portrayed as this great noble beauty but she built a life with her sister’s former husband and Traci just had to learn to deal with it. If Ashley hadn’t been so ill when the affair (or was it a ONS?) between Olivia and Brad happened, I doubt I would have felt as sorry for Ashley that her marriage to Brad went south. If anything, I expected better from Olivia in terms of valuing her friendship with a woman who she had described as her best friend and it struck me as sad that one of the few close friendships between two women would come apart because of a man (Brad always seemed flexible morally, so I never expected much from him). Otherwise, I never expected Ashley and Brad’s marriage to last-not by a long shot, which was fine by me. I thought that EF and KSJ had an easy chemistry, seemed like the actors trusted and enjoyed working with each other but it seemed as if the show put the, together as somewhat of an afterthought, seeing how both characters were unattached at the time and the two actors, who seemed to have great respect for one another and got along well, took up the opportunity with gusto.

Congratulations to Coco on winning the Citi Open. The tournament organizers must be pretty pleased with the results on the WTA side of the tournament, at least as Coco was promoted as one of the marquee players in the tournament. It will be interesting to see what this result yields for the rest of the summer season. To be that the tournament got saddled with Evans as the winner on the ATP side. Some of these guys need to do better.

Ironically, I have been listening to the audiobook of Burn It Down by Maureen Ryan and there are references to Sony Studios and man, is Sony a studio rife with chaos and messy scandals, especially their television division.

Sierra slaps again. Another great episode, with a lot of foreshadowing that longtime fans would recognize. As big a fan as I was of Craig and Sierra and as much as I had longed for them to get together, Craig was out of control in this moment. Here he was, wanting to have Sierra, right there in the barn on the property of his girlfriend Iva Snyder’s family farm where she could have walked in. Sierra, still married to Tonio (a marriage she once described as the biggest mistake of her life) brought Craig back to earth by slapping the sh*t out of him. Craig and Sierra eventually got together, like six weeks later but Craig’s reaction to the slap was indeed something else. Also, a bit more context. Sierra had declared her love for Craig to her then husband Tonio, along with her wish to end the marriage. Tonio threatened to kill Craig if Sierra ever left him, so Sierra was desperate to try to put some distance between her and Craig but they just couldn’t seem to stay away from each other.

Another exposé article on Clarence and Virginia Thomas’ prolific grifting. As the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court deprives others of getting their student loans forgiven, it is obvious that the Thomases did not have to pay back their $267,230 loan on their luxury RV. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/clarence-thomas-267230-rv-and-the-friend-who-financed-it/

Fi-core is just as it sounds, it is a financial system. It is not about credit, which is basically a WGA system, but a money agreement. In other words, a fi-core writer is a “gun for hire”, a “hired hand”, so to speak, it would make sense that there wouldn’t be much consideration or thought given to whose name is on what script- that is an acknowledgment for the guild. Part of what the WGA’s benefits is to offer protection of who did what on a script. That protection is given to members and nonmembers alike but if you violate their rules, obviously you being guaranteed full protection is no longer a given. A scab having their name imprinted on a work and enjoying protection where their names are being attached as part creators of a work is no longer guaranteed once they’ve run afoul of the rules.

Not sure about Trudeau, as for Baitz, do you remember the dispute between the WGA and talent agents over how they were negotiating certain deals a few years ago, resulting in termination of agreements and the firing of bunch of agents? Baitz refused and went on to write an open letter heavily criticizing the Guild for their language and I guess, what he viewed as heavy-handed rhetoric. His refusal, I think, is what ultimately resulted in his parting of ways with the Guild. It appears as though Baitz’ career may have tapered off a bit, he hasn’t had many productions after 2015 and his latest play got negative reviews.

Yes, that is indeed OG Sierra, played by Finn Carter. And she was one of my faves because she played every single beat of the progression of Sierra.

Of all the so-called trade papers, Deadline has got to be the worst.