BetterForgotten
Member
-
Joined
-
Last visited
Everything posted by BetterForgotten
-
Not only this show, but GL and GH too. -
-
I haven’t listened to the album in full yet, but the reviews are very strong so far. Probably her best reviews since Confessions on a Dancefloor (2005).
-
All I remembered was how much I missed Heather Rattray during that time when I saw that...
-
MAB forced Jess Walton off the show and quietly let her contract expire. It was JFP who convinced Jess to come back (if only on a recurring capacity). MAB stupidly thought she could use Genie Francis to phase out BOTH Jess Walton and Melody Thomas Scott and it backfired. Jess talks about her love for JFP here, and yeah, she was not a MAB supporter, lol.
-
Man, Patrick Mulcahey does not hide his dislike for Jackie Smith and John Conboy, lol.
-
-
-
-
I gave up after a month, but did check in occasionally. I appreciated it for what it was, but I never felt this was actually what JER had in mind when he created it and when it launched in 1999. I always felt he could never get what he wanted off the ground and gave up after a certain point when he realized it was a losing situation. That's when they started to sell the show as a "parody of soaps" something that it was never promoted as when it debuted. As I mentioned, I do think the premise of the show can work in more creative hands.
-
NBC owns the show, unless they want to license it to someone else (which they did with DirectTV), there will not be a revival. I don't know if they care much about the show to offer it via streaming. Though, it would actually be interesting if they rebooted it with a brand new cast, a writer who specialized in gothic storytelling, and a stronger and more creative producer who could bring that to life. There was nothing wrong with premise of the show - it was the execution that left a lot of be desired.
-
-
-
It’s not Lisa’s fault the show ended up the way it was. She’s actually quite well-liked in the industry. She was merely stuck on a show where she had absolutely no creative control and was simply an executor of JER’s supposed ‘vision.’ But, hey, she got paid very well for 8 years, so it worked in her favor.
-
Somewhere along the way the narrative NBC and JER were portraying for this show changed. It was never initially sold as a “parody of soaps.” The supernatural element was talked about, so we knew it wasn’t a traditional soap but we were lead to believe it would be more in the vein of a Dark Shadows mixed with JER’s DOOL. After a while, JER just gave up on that when he realized that was NEVER going to be the case and people were laughing unintentionally at his creation. That whole “parody” element was then the selling point long after the show launched. Say what you want about him and for all his own issues, Tom Lagan strangely knew how to interpret Reilly’s DOOL material. At his own creation, JER didn’t have someone like that who could check his material and somewhat execute it in a believable way. He had all the power and Lisa de Cazotte was his workerbee producer.
-
-
Passions was never as tightly run of a ship on JER's end as some would want to believe. There have been numerous stories of JER giving his breakdown writers only enough information for one episode, with the direction to "stretch it out for a week or more" and nothing else. With that kind of lazy management, is it any wonder why this show was the way it was? There were talented people on that writing team (many of whom wrote for JER/Curlee/Demorest on GL's early 90's team), but they were given piss poor direction, and JER clearly had no idea what he wanted to do with his own creation after a while.
-
-
If a remember correctly, one of the big internet rumours had been P&G wanted to keep Linda Dano and move Felicia Gallant to GL when AW ended. At the same time, ABC apparently wanted to buy the rights to the Felicia Gallant character but P&G wouldn't sell it to them, so they had to drudge up that forgotten Grethel 'Rae' Cummings character Dano had played almost 20 years before when she inked a deal with them. It's amazing that an older actress like Dano was in such hot demand on daytime after AW wrapped. That's unheard of today. I also wonder how Felicia would have faired on Paul Rauch's GL (he's the one that hired Dano at AW) had she stayed in the P&G family.
-
-
In many ways, the crap writing and decimation of Sharon's character over the past 15 years mirrored that of the show. Sharon was Bell's last big/popular heroine who he invested A LOT into. She may not have been everyone's cup of tea (much like the show), but the tearing down of that character coincided with the tearing down of the show itself and ultimately what Bell established.
-
Perhaps Irna should have thought about another setting - how many towns supposedly based in Illinois can you write about without retreading somewhat? I guess she had intended for AW to be an even stronger companion show to ATWT, but when CBS couldn't find room on its daytime schedule for it, she had to tone those ties down a bit. I wonder how much that hindered her initial development of the show. Didn't Agnes juggle writing for GL and AW for about a year, and then she also juggled writing for AW when her own creation (OLTL) also debuted? Credit to her for juggling multiple shows at once and keeping the quality in-tact on all of them.
-
-
-
Ugh.
