DramatistDreamer

Courtney Hope performed well in her scenes for today’s episode. There really wasn’t much of a storyline for her but she did what she could with the material she was given. Geez, those scenes made Sharon sound almost bloodthirsty, like driving a stake, uh knife into Cameron was somehow thrilling. I don’t know what to say about that dialogue but Sharon Case commits to the material. How is Eric Braeden managing these days? He looks a bit like he’s trying to conserve energy at times. Today he looked a bit drained. Hopefully he doesn’t feel bad. CBS.com’s site’s description for today’s episode seemed a bit off. They mentioned Nikki supporting Sharon, or something. Well, I didn’t see no Nikki!

Many people were confused yesterday. I saw her name trending and went to do a search under the News tab and MSNBC came up, so I figured it was that Rashida Jones, no kin to Quincy.

Quincy Jones’s daughter must’ve been highly irritated when her publicist told her why her name was trending on social media yesterday.

@Fevuh Have you seen this?

Not yet having read the article, I must admit that I am not surprised tbh, considering what I had been reading about the case. An appeal is likely to come.

I think you’re right. It just annoys me when they do this, it just uses Sally’s pain as a vessel for his emotional “journey”. Honestly, this really should be about Sally but judging from the preview, I also believe it will be more about Adam.

It also makes no sense that Sally wouldn’t have discussed some advanced medical directive and even appointed someone to ensure that her wishes were followed, considering the fact that she and her OB-GYN both knew her pregnancy was high risk. Even though Sally was admitted to the clinic, Elena would have called the office of Sally’s OB-GYN and found out what her advanced directives were. I am having a hard time believing this turn of events.

A dig at pickle ball? Does the Tennis Channel know about this?

Those numbers are unsurprising. Tennis viewership in America continues to bleed but not hemorrhage ratings numbers. This piecemeal coverage between TC and Peacock TV is definitely doing the sport no favors. For whatever reason, neither TC nor Peacock TV seems especially equipped to handle a full fortnight of coverage in a way that presents an attractive, intelligent and comprehensive way. If a sport is claiming to try to sell new stars of the game, especially when many of those new stars are not particularly magnetic, the sport should at least make matches and big tournaments more accessible to the general public. Playing peekaboo with the coverage windows will not help. The slight rise in viewership in the men’s final from last year seems to indicate that people may have regarded Nadal’s victory in last year’s RG final as inevitable but gave the returning finalist a little more of a chance this year.

Did anyone else notice this?

Oh, I didn’t realize that you were also looking for those on the East. I don’t know whether you will find such a list but have you checked their website? The East and West have two separate websites. It’s WGAE, not WGE.

From what I saw of this storyline, the entire thing just didn’t sit well with me. Maybe it was due to me just hearing about the U.S. Olympic track star Tori Bowe having died alone in her apartment after going into labor at eight month in her apartment. And the issue of infant and maternal mortality being especially high among Black women in the U.S. This storyline felt rushed and it seemed like it was in service to the Adam, Sally and Nick triangle than anything else. More like a plot device. On the heels of her emergency hospitalization, the writing had Sally flout the advice meant to stabilize the health of her and her baby and most viewers will be discussing that, rather than the actual loss. Also, it’s ridiculous that the choice came down to Adam to decide what happened to Sally and the baby. Do the doctors have no agency? Were no health directives discussed between Sally and her OB-GYN, knowing that Sally was already at risk? There were so many ill used story devices and plot holes, it cheapened the story imo. I know it’s probably meant to be some sort of Emmy fodder but it just didn’t seem to be very thoughtful.

Have you checked the link posted upthread? Errol posted the link and I posted again afterwards. It has the list by year, including 2023, there appear to be only 4 writers listed as Fi-Core so far in 2023.

Were they serious when Sharon was teasing about the twin? I thought she was proposing the idea and Linden sort of went along with it. I took it as more tongue in cheek than anything else. I didn’t take them seriously. I still think that Sharon Case was so thrilled to have gotten a story that she wanted to extend it or revive it in some way.

Since I have been out of the television writing pipeline loop for several years now, I have a question and it’s a genuine question, not meant to be sarcastic: do writers, particularly those fresh from pre-professional programs really want to write for a daytime soap these days? One of the comments said something like ‘hire new writers’ but I wonder, where would they get them from? I am not sure if anyone who really cares about their ability to work for other genres would want to write for a daytime soap where they’d have to resort to Fi-Core, it is a status that marks you for the rest of your career. If writing for a soap is your only ambition, it won’t matter but it seems like a career stranglehold if you want to eventually write for other genres of television.

Well, in the latest episode, Sharon shanked Cameron with the knife strapped to her thigh (which Nick seemed to enjoy affixing it there) so she must have gotten over her fear long enough to take action.

It’s a somewhat complex issue, for sure. I can’t speak to actors but from what I have gleaned with, for example, animators, they are allowed to engage in sympathy strike action with the understanding that they can also be temporarily replaced if they are doing work for a production. Their union also bars them from doing work that is WGA set aside. My estimation is that if the actor is unionized, they would need to look at the precepts of their particular union’s guidelines. As far as striking, with the soaps, they are already so “bare bones”, short of a total walkout by the majority of the actors, I don’t know what action it would take to shut them down. Speaking of workers outside of the WGA picketing in solidarity, this- https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/15/business/janitors-wga-strike/index.html

For about 15 years at least, I have been wondering if these soaps have a director. Someone will probably claim that both Nick and Faith were frozen out of shock or something but Chance the professional also seemed to stand there with the gun in his hand, pointed, at one point after Sharon made the first cut to Cameron and he’s the trained professional. I did get the impression that the actors may have been left to work out their marks on their own for this sequence. They don’t get much time to rehearse blocking and choreography, and it definitely showed. I guess JG must have heard the complaints of having Sharon be saved by a man and sort of over corrected by paralyzing the men and having Sharon saved herself. I did sort of chuckle when Cameron questioned what Sharon really enjoyed about her life when it seemed like all she did was sling coffee for some losers at the coffeehouse.

👀Ooh, I am definitely interested in hearing about that when the time is right.

Thanks for filling in the blanks @Errol. I was curious about whether WGA members would picket or not. Looks like they are.

Oh not Carl. R.I.P.

According to the WGAW, writers who go Fi-Core surrender their membership in the WGA. https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/wgaw-financial-core-list This tracks with what I was once told by an instructor while in grad school. This instructor was a former president of the WGAE. One day in a screenwriting class, he warned us that in the event of a writer’s strike, if we crossed the picket line, even if we weren’t yet members, we would never be able to join the Writer’s Guild. So it makes sense the crossing the picket line means that you are no longer regarded as a member. I am guessing that these soap writers who go Fi-Core at this point are no longer interested in utilizing the resources of the WGA as this will be the extent of their career, perhaps this is the only job they will have until they retire? Also, I am guessing that they no longer care what colleagues in the guild think of them.

The first time I ever click onto Y&R on Pluto TV and they were showing the tribute episode to Kristoff St. John. Having just lost my brother this year, and his birthday is just a few days after Kristoff’s birthday, man, that episode made my eyes well up.

For the past few months, I have been following the ICWA case. The U.S. had a history of not abiding by the treaties signed with native peoples, this is a course correction of that, imo as well as centuries of damage done to native people with families being forced apart. The same folks complaining about the U.S. actually abiding by a signed treaty with the indigenous nations and recognizing their sovereign rights are the same people who will romanticize the militia groups who trade gunfire with law enforcement on illegally occupied government land.

Thanks for posting @Soapsuds. I am watching this now and already LA is dropping some tea on one of his previous gigs, when he was on Loving. He called out a producer who thinks did a lot of damage while there. It’s incredible (albeit unsurprising) how many of those types embedded themselves in the daytime soaps industry. I think at the time when there were so many soaps on the air and many were flourishing, people in the industry were probably willing to overlook the toxic people, believing that results justified their methods without thinking of the lasting effects and the consequences it would have farther down the road. That’s a discussion for another day though. Interesting video discussion so far. Sharon Case looks thrilled to have gotten an active storyline.