BetterForgotten

It's probably a passion project for her and something she's probably wanted to do for a while. At her heart, she's a singer-songwriter, and I think she knows that's her strength more so than contemporary pop.

😢 Hopefully, he will resurrect it in some other form...

Nancy Curlee has been very honest about how "forced" and "shoehorned" the Tangie character was, but also said MW had a lot of talent and deserved a better constructed character. I think JFP just considered MW a big "get" and tried too hard to make the character work and fit in, but none of it ever worked.

Sally and Sheila didn't share that many scenes from what I remember, but these ones are great. God, I miss Darlene Conley/Sally so much - she was really the jolt this show always needed. "You know Sheila, I never thought of myself as any kind of an angel before, but standing here next to you like this, I'm beginning to feel like St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, and Mahatma Gandhi all rolled into one!"

MW was a breath of fresh air to AMC when she returned, it’s too bad they also later turned their back on her and wrote so terribly for her in the end.

I wonder how things would have turned out had the Dobson's stayed a few more written and gotten to write Roger's exit. I also don't think they would have struggled writing for Holly like Marland seemed to. I think it was @vetsoapfan that said the Dobson's seemed to write Ed/Holly as more of the endgame, and with the hope that they'd probably find their way back to one another. I wonder if that's what they would have ultimately done.

Jenna wasn't even supposed to stick around - JFP offered the role to Hutchison without an audition and with the understanding that it was for a limited run. Hutchison had no intention of sticking around either and wanted to try her hand in LA (and after her first run on OLTL had ended very badly). But I know she said she fell in love with Jenna and playing her earlier on was a "fun relief" as by time she left OLTL, all Gabrielle did was cry according to Hutchison.

I wish it was Buzz who died instead of Jenna.. Apparently, it was MADD/Rauch's retaliation against Hutchison after she publicly spoke out about Zaslow's firing. So stupid - she didn't say anything the entire audience wasn't thinking.

Oddly enough, I think by the time he left in 2002, Rauch had started to tone down the Walmart lighting and the show was starting to look good enough again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.