BetterForgotten

I don't either, but maybe just maybe they would have given ATWT some much-needed excitement at that time (albeit very short term). Or Rauch would have needed a much stronger HW, which he never really got at GL anyway.

Yeah, P&G's fault was that they hired hack after hack after JFP left. I wonder if they would have seen better longterm results in 1997/1998 if MADD had hired Behr/Broderick for GL, and Rauch/B&E for ATWT as opposed to vice versa.

Speaking of, I am so glad they got rid of Restless Style and that awful set. That set and the awful GloWorn set both symbolized the tackiness of the MAB/Sheffer/Hamner/Rauch era.

This guy is such a crock, and I roll my eyes at his intro about “growing up watching ATWT and GL.” More like he only paid attention to them and can only recall history for those shows for the years he worked there...

1994 was a bizarre year with the worst of JFP's tendencies on showcase. The show also had like a million HW's after Curlee departed - at one point there were like 6 people being credited as a part of a HW-ing team. Way too many cooks in the kitchen for anything to work.

Unlike those men, I don't think CLB has ever officially "come out." Correct me if I'm wrong though. Remember when the soap press tried to treat him as a "swinging bachelor?" LOL

That "unlikely pairing" ultimately killed both characters...

The only Shayne I liked to be honest. He should have lasted longer in the role, he was kind of quirky, but looked like he could be Zimmer and Newman's son.

It will probably be a week of Cane and Lilly and Billy and Victoria.

P&G is a huge bureaucratic conglomerate. I will say that they do actually have their brand marketing more streamlined and organized than a lot of other companies I've had to work on behalf of. Their priority is on selling their products, their daytime dramas were never that high on their priority list or at least haven't been in decades. They're a CPG company first and foremost, and when the daytime dramas were no longer a financially stimulating prospect for them, they had no issue cutting it out completely. Their massive content library won't push sales of their product, so they're more than happy to just it on it. It sucks as a soap opera fan, but that's their perspective.

Nope, don’t believe so. Looking at the end credits of the final episode of that snoozefest soap, and only white writers are listed. Not entirely her fault though - even Nixon and Bell didn’t do much to bring black talent in behind the scenes.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, @mikelyons. These stories are important to help highlight the systematic prejudice much of the mainstream entertainment industry still operates under. On a side note, Promises sounds like a nursing home one might to go to live out their final days. 😄

Sonia Satra was a major FOJ, too. But damn, that voice made my ears bleed...

In another era, Rick Hearst should have been a leading man on some show. Alan-Michael was his best overall role, but he was still largely the ingenu during most of his time on GL. He never stood a chance on GH with Benard, Burton, and Geary hogging everything there. And obviously the roles on Y&R and B&B weren't meant to last... I know Nancy Curlee recalled that Rick was one of those actors who she should clearly hear in her head as she read through scripts and writing.

Rick would have been better placed in a Spauling-themed episode, or one with Melina Kanakaredes and Frank Dicopoulos.

Christian Le Blanc is looking very Liberace-lite...

I didn't realize that Morgan Fairchild and Courtney Simon still regularly touched base with one another on Twitter. It's sweet. I'm assuming the Meg Morgan is referring to in the first tweet is Meg Bennet?

This topic is kind of hilarious - the horrible Jessica Simpson talks about this at length in her trash book. She basically blamed her relative lack of pop success on coming in last after Britney and Christina, and no matter how hard Sony pushed her, nothing she ever did could compete with those two in the early 00's. Who knew back in 2000 it would be Beyonce that would the one to emerge as the pop culture icon that can still have relevant success (though she's morphed from a singles artist to an albums artist in her career)?

She also had no idea how she wanted to market herself. She mentioned in her debut era that she wanted to be the first female pop artist to combine the visual and aesthetic merit of Madonna/Janet, with the vocal impact of a Whitney/Mariah. You can't be everything to everyone, and I think she struggled with the type of artist she wanted to be and Sony later had trouble with knowing what to do with her and how to properly market her.

Not to mention Kelly Clarkson in the mid 00's, which basically took Christina's formula and had much better success with it ultimately. Christina's pop career trajectory has almost followed that of Paula Abdul's - one strong debut album with multiple #1 hits, a second successful album (though not as successful as the debut), and then everything else after that being a blur and flop. Then the singing reality show era, which helped with a public renaissance, but did nothing for the pop career. Only Paula can actually dance, and Christina despite having terrible form, does have decent vocal ability.

Only Genie and What A Girl Wants were back to back, I Turn To You peaked at #3 before Come On Over hit #1 in the fall of 2000.

Britney was marketed by her label in the same way Sony marketed Celine Dion in the 90's - as an albums artist vs. being a singles artist. Jive released very few singles commercially from Britney's first two albums. In the late 90's and very early 00's, the singles market was still huge business, and at certain points, you needed to release a physical single to even chart or to chart highly on the Hot 100. RCA released released all of the singles off Christina's debut album commercially, which resulted in high charting positions for her on the Hot 100 - Jive only released like one of two singles commercially from Britney's debut (including Baby One More Time, which went to #1). They did the same with BSB - their priority and strategy was to drive album sales, so they held back releasing physical singles to not hinder that and to increase sales of the actual albums. Christina never had the same success on the Hot 100 again after her debut, when the chart rules changed again and radio airplay became more important to chart in the early 00's. 'Beautiful' was a huge radio airplay hit, which allowed it to hit #2 on the Hot 100. Toxic would have definitely gone to #1 had Billboard had the appropriate rules in place that accounted for more relevancy of the streaming format in 2004 - it was a huge iTunes hit.

I mean, was that supposed to be anything significant? Madonna, Whitney, Janet, Paula, and Mariah had all gotten multiple #1 singles off an album prior - and 3 of those women did it with their debut albums.

The thing is, I don't remember Sophia being any of that. She was so damn forgettable and boring, like everything else from that era, even when they tried to be "shocking."