Vee

I do think Jacob and Hayley have real chemistry, I just have yet to find him (or Naomi) very compelling. That's a couple you wanna start busting up to see if they work with others. Jacob's corrupt father is much more interesting, and I would like to see them introduce his family (no way is REG ever coming back to daytime, lol) which they clearly are working on. In part because the only non-related options on canvas are Derek and Tomas the synth! And I just do not buy it when Bill asks 'where's my fire-breathing dragon of a wife?' and Hayley weepily replies 'right here 😢' lol. MG is a nice girl but I have yet to be convinced she can play Hayley as more than a doormat. I hope she surprises me in future. I'll save the rest of my 1 month report card for the end of the week. I think it fits Hayley. I'm not convinced Bill would be into it, but I can totally buy him going with the glam home furnishings picked by a young wife half his age. I do think the living room looks the size of a sorority house's, lol.

It's on the last page.

Hayley's costuming and decor for the house is like drag. It has to be deliberate, but it is tacky.

The difference is that Frank tried for years to off Julian/WDV. At the earliest (if not earlier, depending on some stories) he was supposed to be gone when he tried to kill Alexis with the dagger that killed her mother. Allegedly the network intervened bc of Julian and Alexis' perceived popularity over and over.

I think that may have been where things really got wild and woolly BTS. Because Mulcahey was clearly prepping to dump Valentin.

That's nice, but this isn't SoapZone in 2005. The rest of us are not here to see archival couple clips posted in the daily 2025 episodes thread and we can report them if necessary. I promise you I will not be the only one.

A hundred Internet bucks to the first person who can make me a GIF of Tomas expressionlessly nodding his head like the Latino Howdy Doody. I feel like he's done it a dozen times in the last week.

I believe they're referring to Nia Long, per Robin Strasser's anecdote on the last page.

A bit of idle gossip crossposted from the GL thread. Seems like Nia Long may have been warning Robin off of JFP.

This seems like Robin Strasser is discussing JFP per Nia Long and an EP they shared.

Oh, wow.

I wouldn't go along with Jason/Liz for a lot of reasons, among them being I don't want to reward their delusional behavior online but also I just don't think there's anything left there. It's not 2006 anymore. What beats are left to play after how she humiliated herself for him in 2012 and 2015? By contrast I think Lucky and Liz as adults are still genuinely untapped, and I think they did a good job cleaning up some of the ugly stuff from the Guza II era in some of the recent dialogue over the holidays and in January, when I do think they sort of addressed the scene mentioned above.

A soap generally does not wait to see what the fans think if they feel internally they need to recast for whatever reason. Certainly not a new soap. They just do it. I'll miss MJ but I never expected them to check with me, lol. There are plenty of people I would rather see go first but I am not going to fuss over this when we are what, less than 30 episodes in? I don't see Cady's character as a huge problem, and I expect most of the actors I don't care for to get culled.

But did a short-term actor getting recast materially hurt those shows? Generally, no.

The truth is like somebody else said above: Nobody is gonna remember in 6-9 months. That's just how it goes with actors who get dumped early from a soap. I would not be surprised if they wanted someone less warm or sympathetic for Ted given the story but I really have no idea. Nor have I seen Robinson before, who may be lovely and charming.

Because Donna thinks SON is her blog.

Same. He just generally mortified me. At least his (very brief) role as the incoming arch-villain on OLTL 2.0 was meant to be that and nothing else, unlike Alan who had a richer and more complex character that was ultimately winnowed down to, well, Ron Raines playing to the furthest boroughs.

I don't think they have to make any statement, I think they just have to keep it moving. The reason this is happening is largely just the novelty of a new soap, and a semi-new audience reacting to things that happen in daytime that are typically business as usual. The other issue here is that an American soap has never launched in the social media age, when this kind of nonsense is spread around from randos who can't handle facing accountability for making up rumors and clickbait. Generally soaps never make statements for actors they fire or replace to use, there's no reason to do so here. The new audience will just have to get used to it.

He's always been pathetic. Yet somehow Frank will go to the wall to keep JPS every time.

Yep. Wait til one of the actors that just bought a house or condo in ATL gets fired. Happens constantly in soaps - an actor will move up stakes and go across the coasts, then end up fired in 13-26 weeks or whatever. That's just the industry.

It's not wrong or unusual. It's a first recast. And they've happened quicker than this before, lol. There is not going to be a big press release on why they did it. Just the way it is.

There's several re: original castings where they had to put in a placeholder initially and then dumped the actor, yes. The immediate names are escaping me because my mind can only hold so much data at once and it's been a long Monday. I can also think of a couple offhand that are similar situations; for example, IIRC Elaine Princi only got Dorian at OLTL because Robin Strasser flat-out refused to return when asked. So they went out and got Princi, a ringer who was a near-physical double, and as soon as Robin became available again the next regime dumped Princi flat and fairly unceremoniously BTS. Regardless, we have no idea whether this kind of situation was even the case with Johnson. It's all speculation. All it is right now is simply just another soap recast. Which definitely always happens in the first months, weeks or even days of any new soap. That's just how it is.

Anyone more interesting in that family than Jacob works for me.

I'm not going to go chapter and verse through all of the examples, but it's happened a number of times at many of the classic soaps lol. And certainly it's happened like this at the beginning of a show's run, with some actors never even making it onscreen after taping and others being replaced within days or weeks. I like Johnson, but them's the breaks with any new soap or any soap period. Recasts and firings happen. And will keep happening.

Lots.