Vee

IIRC Sonny sent him off to work for him in Miami after Roy flipped on Alcazar to help Sonny and Brenda. Felicia turned down his marriage proposal and off he went. I actually really liked A Martinez in the role until JFP got her hooks into trying to make him the unbearable star of the show. I thought AM was very good with both Tony and Genie, and okay with Jackie despite the bad story. I even liked him with Kristina Wagner. Oh well.

The version I heard was that Bianca would sleep with Ryan to get revenge on Reese, which may be what prompted Eden to quit and stay gone. (I actually was not horribly opposed to that idea in a vacuum as a one-off thing, but it would've been an awful precedent for a show that had thus far struggled to depict Bianca with any woman.) I think Pratt's stated endgame goal there was always what he said it was after the fact, while blaming the actors: He intended to bring Tamara Braun to the show and make Reese into a 'bisexual vixen'/woman scorned after losing Bianca. Reese would then go on to mostly fúck the male characters Pratt preferred, like Zach. He pushed Zach/Reese for months. When Tamara quit he did the same with Jamie Luner's Liza. And it's not like that specific idea (on paper) didn't make a kinky sort of sense to me; a 'perfect' lesbian couple, and the bisexual woman and supposedly committed new bride having an awkward, sexually tense relationship with her brother-in-law. That is good soap IMO - for another show. But using Bianca of all people, pairing her with a major daytime star (Braun) and pushing them in promotion as the lesbian supercouple we'd all been waiting for with a big wedding, only for it to merely be a cynical ploy to install Reese on the show - single sans Bianca, as Pratt described wanting her to become basically an omnisexual Carly - was just gross. That cynicism, as opposed to being truly committed to Bianca and Reese (Zach or no Zach, Ryan or no Ryan, or some other actual third lesbian - God forbid!) was the problem for me.

I know both Erin and Simone were killed by the Slayer, but I can't remember which one (or both) died on the premises. Anyone else? I don't think so. I thought Bethea was a cold fish on AMC, but I blamed the one-note character. I think virtually all Maggie's pairings after Henry were just them circling around Bianca. IIRC she got jealous of Bianca with Lena, with Babe, etc. and that was all in '03 and '04. Her with Jonathan was just her being victimized by choosing the wrong thing over Bianca. But I agree it took forever and was tiresome long before they left. They did reunite Bianca and Maggie at one point, but then I think ended them for good when she came back with Reese. We know how that went. I still feel bad for Eden and Tamara Braun, who could've been wonderful together and who I think were both sold a major bill of goods by Pratt on that story from the beginning. Still, it is hard to accept a ready-made supercouple.

I actually was watching live on the couple days Chadwick Boseman appeared as Reggie (my college schedule was very deliberately arranged around the ABC soaps). As he said in his interview with Michael B. Jordan not long before his death CB was notably and comically far too old for the part. I just remember being mortified seeing poor Ellen Bethea (who still recurred from time to time on OLTL in that period as Rachel Gannon, since JFP had brought her back in the summer of 2000) as this henpecked social worker/doctor/whatever frowning at Jack and saying things like "Reggie is a very troubled young man!" and meanwhile Boseman looked about 26 years old. The whole routine of an 'inner city youth' being helped by kindly upper class whites was as old as the hills even then, and I found it wildly tone-deaf and old-fashioned that they were redoing Diff'rent Strokes, starring Jack Montgomery and a big guy who looked like he was starting for the Lakers. OTOH, MBJ's Reggie did become popular and beloved so there's that. I don't remember if Erica actually worked at Fusion or ended up with a stake in it. I do know they parked literally every woman under 50 there after a certain point. It was ridiculous; everyone (other than Dixie, who wasn't around long enough to go there AFAIK) worked there because Frons said so, even traumatized lifelong shut-ins like the shortlived Erin Lavery. The B or C-players like her, Simone, Di, etc. became interchangeable. I didn't even hate the idea of Kendall and Greenlee forming a company, even though IIRC they'd hated each other until the Frons concept for Fusion took hold and they suddenly became love/hate lifelong BFFs. If they'd remained rivals/frenemies at the company (over more than just Ryan) that might've worked. But warehousing every woman on the show there was ridiculous. I remember being so embarrassed for Marcy Walker in the stuff above, and in playing her with Laurie's dad. But honestly I'd been embarrassed for her for years. This is going further afield but like Julia Barr, Marcy had been styled and presented increasingly frumpy and boxed in onscreen, trapped in pantsuits or with ugly bangs, looking much older and heavier than she was while the stories kept treating both women like love goddesses for multiple hunks (Pierce, Elliott, Jake, Ryan). It happened so quickly for Liza even though MW had returned to the show young and vibrant in the mid-'90s. It's tricky to talk about this without coming off wildly sexist, because the fact is this is a women's genre and many women of a certain age can and should be able to see and enjoy the stories of women over 25 being swept away by hot dudes - that's soap. I don't blame the actresses, as Marcy only turned 40 in '01! But the disparity between how they dressed, styled and presented these women vs. what they were giving them to play got rough. I think they could've looked and been lit much better. And so when they fobbed Liza off on Fusion it felt like they were treating her with condescension or pity, like an old horse put out to pasture, as they'd given her nothing to do for ages and made her look matronly for years, and now she was the house mother to hot young women. I sure don't remember seeing her there very often after the big 'launch,' despite this supposedly being her dream. She looks good in the ridiculous photoshoot montage clip, but she is still being presented notably different and/or mostly avoided by the camera. It was just too bad. As to Henry, I honestly don't remember but it rings a vague bell. I really liked him, but not the backstory or pairing with Maggie.

Exactly. And in fairness, when she came back for the end she did commit all the way. I can buy Agnes wanting to work with guilt/trauma because as Megan said, Agnes could certainly write about guilt to fuel drama. I don't buy it in terms of her merely wanting Julia punished for it, which is what Jim Reilly's tormented, conflicted Catholic mind often did with characters. Certainly not from the woman who surely had a hand in the flawless execution of the Cassandra abortion material on AMC 2.0, with the direct address to camera from Angie to Todd Akin.

I thought the ending was fine. I didn't mind the returns, particularly Dixie and Stuart. Those deaths should never have happened. I didn't love the slapped-together cliffhanger but as a statement about Erica it made sense for who she was. I thought OLTL's network ending was superior on many levels, but AMC's was solid enough for me and they clearly did those last weeks with a lot of love.

Her relationships with Susan and Agnes at least seem to have some nuance of love/hate, but she's awfully cruel to Lucci who never sounds like she was ever anything but a typically precious/insecure actress, and always at least outwardly sweet to her. The thing with Cady got me because as I said a few posts ago, no, what she said about Cady's performances in the mid-2000s is not exactly untrue, and we've long heard Cady can be a handful. She's also a real talent and a cornerstone of the show. That's the business. She knew it was wrong to do what she did but when she did it she admits to having taken glee in slaughtering the character. Or with Jean Carol, it's the slightest offense.

Agreed.

Plus there's about 50 people to fire as is.

Yes and yes. He was in on that, but he was portrayed pretty sympathetically. Helena poisoned little Lucas. Roy and Melissa were the heroes of the show that year, but even JFP had to make them take a backseat to Luke and Laura in Endgame. IIRC Melissa stayed topside worrying over Edward. I think by then (fall/November) Angel had been written out, Jill and Megan knew they were in serious trouble and so Roy and Melissa had begun to be pulled back on. By February or so of the following year, Melissa was out and carted off to jail.

I think action/adventure is a part of GH's DNA at this point, and can be done well in certain situations and with a skillful use of budget. (As they did with the Metro Court hostage situation in the 2000s, and as Frank did in 2012 with the water crisis which probably saved the show from the axe.) But I don't think they should keep attempting it in the chintzy ways they have for much of the last 5-6 years. Either commit to something more impressive or with scale/scope and cut a few expensive people to help pad the budget, or don't do it. The Michael fire stunt in January was very impressive, but that's a smaller example. Of course, the way I'd do an Endgame kind of situation would be ludicrously ambitious, but would only be done that big in order to transition the show from the network to something revamped and more streamlined on Hulu/streaming, with grand promotion and fanfare - and it would only do so by blowing the show's annual network budget lol. Go big on your way out, I say! But it sure wouldn't be a bunch of confused boomers wandering some cheap tunnels. That's where Frank and Ron used the canvas much more effectively during the water crisis - appropriate action, for the most part, happened with appropriate people at appropriate places spread all over Port Charles (not unlike folks hunkering down at Kelly's or wherever in '81 re: the weather machine). When the town was saved, everyone was shown celebrating at various places and that's how it should be.

Zzzzz.

Yeah, she was dead. Stavros murdered her in the summer and framed Stefan, who was still into her. IIRC Luke did let him fall into the random bottomless pit that opened in a hole in the floor lol. While grinning and gloating like an idiot. It was all very, very poorly staged, shot and crafted. I seem to recall over half the cast standing around down there like 'we have to get out of here, this place is endless, it's going to collapse!' But there was zero sign of any danger or anything particularly descript about those corridors. It was so bad.

Oh good grief.

It didn't make sense for him, no. They dragged him into it because of Alexis and Kristina, I think, but also just because everyone had to be down there. Jax, Bobbie and Scott were particularly comical.

Sure, but this was also still in the period well before Tony started parroting the Guza line about Luke and Laura. Until around 2007 he was very respectful and reverent of that legacy, from what I recall. It was. According to both Megan and longstanding BTS info the original plan was for the hospital to be blown up (so JFP could remodel the hub, which she later did) and for Stavros and Helena to unleash a biotoxin into Port Charles' air supply or something. This was all scrapped due to 9/11 and hastily redone to feature the ridiculous, cheap-looking underground maze stuff where everyone including all the middle-aged vets just hung around in the catacombs pretending to be Stallone. Having Bobbie, Roy, Jax, Melissa, etc. all down there just wandering around was hysterical, to say nothing of Luke's queeny final fight with Stavros where he attacked him with pillows and a curtain or something.

A long, fairly damning interview with Schumer, both before and after this week's disaster. I think Chuck Schumer is a good man whose point of view on certain issues I can understand and sympathize with - at a different time. This is woefully out of touch. I think it's time to go.

I don't doubt some of what she is saying is true, lol. I just think the work Tony did on his original return story with Claire Labine was good, and I think Tony's off-the-cuff rewriting near the end of his run in his scenes with Jonathan Jackson in 2015 was still very good. So Imma side with him, because Megan's amateur night Endgame is still burned in my brain lol. The most I know of Tony's original concept with Irene Suver is that it apparently involved the return of Robert Scorpio.

I don't hate Jason quite as much this time and I do think Steve is putting in a bit more effort. But there's no story and nothing interesting for him to do. If Steve is serious about what he claimed up and down last year in interviews and podcasts, which I doubt (especially post-divorce) - that he wants to do a couple more years and then wind down his career and retire - I would call him on it, and give Jason a final story on his contract with a new/old woman (Keesha Ward, just to fúck with the Facebook biddies in the audience) and then write him out and kill him off at the end of his contract. That or if he doesn't like it he can go at the end of his next 13 weeks. It wouldn't make any difference to me. He costs too much and sucks up too much time (unlike, say, Lucky, who has less airtime, has begun to settle in and has a clear place to land in story/romance despite a rough intro), and his return has flopped. So Steve's in a much weaker position IMO than Jason has maybe ever been. He can play what he's told and then exit, or he can go immediately. That would be the deal for me.

I really don't think Disney owes Maurice some unrelated menial job, though the idea of Mo working a forklift is sending me right now. Maurice has been paid very, very well for decades. They are free to let him go at any time. It's not an industrial college or work release program. Do I think they will let him go? No.

Yes, I saw. Hence the desire to nuke them all (including Sidwell).

I figured he would be Eloi. I'd send the entire family over a cliff in the fictional James Lipton Express Bus that we don't even think actually existed, but no time like the present.

At this point I think Mo just likes naps and getting paid. Takin' it easy!

It was Alberti, and he was not great. Bruening came later.

They brought on Alexandra Daddario as J.R.'s insta-girlfriend Laurie, as well as Seyfried as Joni who fared a bit better. (Daddario could not act back then.) But both came out of nowhere and had a series of Saved by the Bell-style teen plots with the terrible off-brand J.R. recast of the time (I think it was poor Andrew Ridings, who was wooden in the role) and whoever played Jamie - I can't remember, there was a rotating series. There were a few weird episodes devoted to these new insta-teens and maybe Brooke, Adam and Liza? sitting around a movie theater, which I found very strange (and again, straight out of an actual SBTB episode IIRC). There was the very hard, sudden Fusion push lumping all the women under 50 together in one office/job, and the massive push beyond Frons' new chosen leading men with each female lead - the remarkably terrible Carlos for Greenlee, the early, vaguely effeminate and very weird Michael Cambias for Kendall who came off too old for her, Boyd(!), etc. Like Fusion, the new men came out of nowhere and were promoted at this time as a singular unit in advertising - 'these are our new leads'. The truly unfortunate Henry Chin thing others have mentioned was, I think, around this time and he was among the above males, which was too bad bc I liked Henry. (Did no one consider the optics of naming a AAPI family 'the Chins' and having them run a Chinese restaurant?) The endless intrigues of Cambias, Lena, etc. began to take over the show out of nowhere. There's more craziness but that's what I can remember offhand. The very sudden, very forceful stuff with Fusion, the teens, etc. felt so foreign to the show for me. It did not feel like I was watching All My Children. I remember being surprised any time I'd actually see Erica, Tad, Adam, etc. Like 'what are you doing here?' Both the videos above are from this period IIRC. It was very late 2002 to maybe summer '03.