Vee

It seems so stupid to have it be creaky old Cyrus again. I still think this will eventually tie back to Sidwell somehow. This show loves a cardboard character actor villain who lingers for years. But whatever, anything that gets rid of this shambling old man.

I agree. I was just saying how unusual it was for Frank. That said they haven't done nearly enough and they clearly didn't let PM purge anyone in the spring. Now they're doing a little with their back against the wall, I suspect. I still think the idiotic Sasha thing was largely to try to retrench/protect Sofia Mattsson in addition to giving Tristan a (bad) sendoff appeasing his fans, I hope I'm wrong re: Mattsson.

I suspect they're just that tight for money tbh. I'm so used to Frank letting played-out characters run on for many years out of his fondness for the actors or their FB fans at this point. I do think CM is next, and not far away. I've been suspecting Who Shot/Killed Drew at the holidays or over NYE for a month or so now, and tbh it would be the right move.

I've said it before but I think Eden is tolerable in doses. She has great real BFF chemistry with Tabyana, she can be funny and I think can do screwball or vixen stuff but she can't be an A-lead. For that you would eventually need a recast. But I can handle her in a smaller role like she's had for much of the year. I don't want to deal with her howling and grieving for weeks or months. I do think the PM era tried to make Dex and Joss more palatable to the writer's own tastes by moving him to a cop role, which IMO was the right thing for that character and he came off sincere and good-hearted in that arena with Anna, etc. But ultimately I never cared about Dex and won't miss him. It's time to do what OLTL '91 did: Purge! Start throwing up an opening sequence where 50-70% of the actors in it have already been fired! Here's what you do when you don't find the rainbow's end! Don't cry! 🪓🪓

Bye!

Girl, we don't need to just be posting "oh?" Come on now.

Oh, that is ridiculous.

It's ridiculous. I feel like she's spent the bulk of her scenes for 2+ months just packing and vowing to leave town and then returning and heading back to work! In other news Michael Malone is officially here, and it's good to know some things still prove out through the years; this show got real horny real quickly and that intense psychosexual undercurrent ran through his show in both eras in many storylines (Malone II opened on Troy and Lindsay having kinky and pretty explicit sex before Nora's eyes). I highly doubt Jason and Stephanie sporting matching scars (due to Carlo's domestic abuse) is unintentional - and of course echoes Todd later - and their scenes are both hot and vaguely kinky. After months of drippy teen love with Kevin and Stephanie set to Miami Sound Machine, a sexually frustrated Stephanie goads the street kid her abusive uncle hired until they get down to business. You don't get this shít on GH today! Griggs and Brettschneider are pretty fiery together but I assume by this point they'd already decided to can her which was probably for the best, Stephanie had limited potential unless she went full spoiled vixen (which seems to be closer to who RG was off-camera based on some cast recollections). Still, an impressive shift. Probably a lukewarm and well-worn take, but based on these early weeks and months Jason was at least a proto-Todd experiment for Gottlieb and Malone. Obviously they never had any inkling of creating Todd at this time or what he'd become, but a scarred town bad boy with a wounded heart and animal passion? That's Jason Webb. Of course he became a much sweeter and more earnest character later on who I'm more familiar with and always liked, but it's striking to see the sexual frankness on display with Jason here and then have him switch on a dime when Stephanie initially refuses him and have him say 'no is no,' until she reengages. Makes you wonder what could've been if they'd stuck with him and not Todd. It must be said: Nicholas Walker's whimpering goodbye scene with Little Al was giving Zachary Levi Instagram Live. @DRW50 knows what I mean.

Eternal moments in time: Another stylish, intense sequence on 9/12 where Lee Ann is in turmoil with all the voices in her head (including her dead mother) during the stormy night after NW's Max walks out on her yet again (she usually does most of the walking out, actually). I feel like Lee Ann and Max have dumped each other and gotten back together like half a dozen times since July and it's gotten very old. His rationale is kind of nonsensical this time - he understands her sleeping with a dude while they were on a break but she didn't tell him and took Asa's payoff, so now she's just like Gabrielle, sleeping around on him. Okay?! Watching Lee Ann once again pack her things for like the 10th time makes me think she's on a schedule - 'if ah leave town forever now ah can be back in Llanview again by Sunday!' It still trips me out a bit when Gottlieb/Malone (who this clearly is by now, with Tina's fortune cookie foretelling 'a mysterious stranger will drop into your life') reference Rauch stuff like Gabrielle, or Sheila noting the Daughters of Llanview have to accept Brenda McGillis as Michael Grande's rich widow. It's a pity Gabrielle's final eps are not (to my knowledge) on YT, but we can't have everything. The Dorian fantasy sequence with Jason is silly but also pretty sexy - they have heat. Even he and Robyn Griggs have some. "I came for take out!" was hilarious. If you weren't around for all of them together (which I wasn't) you don't know just how close Tina, Megan, Cord and the kids were to each other. I've watched less of the Rauch years so I don't know if Andrea's Tina sat around with the kids in the kitchen like this too; I hope so. It was lovely to see her do just that sometimes in her return stints in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Also notable is the new regime having Karen's Tina reflecting on wanting to be her own woman outside of Cord. I assume by now they knew Loprieno was leaving but who knows. I know there are stories that he and Witter didn't get along but I wish they'd had a real run under this regime because they are good together. Not that I didn't like Cain and Tina, but he's not Cord. Of course if I'd seen more of the Rauch-era Cord and Tina maybe the chauvinism would turn me off. Also great: A drunken Asa and Nigel singing a melancholy Scottish song. Asa being weirdly obsessed with still claiming Max as his heir (who he now knows is not his son, and will inexplicably repeat this entire plotline again under JFP in '99/'00 for no good reason) is written so strangely and I do like the new writing team correctly having Renee and Cord point out that his obsession doesn't make sense. But it became such a throughline for both characters, given their future conflicts in the Luna and Blair years, the past family beef I don't know much about with Wingate Holden and the love/hate relationship that persisted into the 2000s. I guess in hindsight what it was about (though it's not often well written onscreen via the prior team) is that he thought Max was closest in identity to him than his own sons - a rapacious schemer and power player - and kept trying to make that fit work, while Max was torn between embracing it and rejecting it for a variety of reasons including his own family. It's fitting Max turned up for Asa's funeral that last time. Amusing too: Just like the infamous Storm of Change in 2003, Malone's first run is augured by a Llanview thunderstorm the night before Luna touches down. Sorry to spam, y'all.

I'm sure this has been in another thread, but Valarie Pettiford (Sheila) discusses her daytime career at length (and she is a big soap fan). She starts in about OLTL around 17 mins. I love her more and more every time I watch as I've revisited the '90s and specifically the rape trial saga - I mostly only remembered Stephanie Williams' blander Sheila from when I was a kid. I'd like to believe Hank and Pettiford's Sheila are back together today.

A very haunting scene with Bo and the grieving old man in the park (cemetery?) with the addled man having a soliloquy about his wife and birds covering her body, in her hair, etc. in the ground in the 9/9/91 episode. Between that and the pathos and later intensity of the Sheila/Troy scenes after she's ousted from the play you can't tell me Malone wasn't already in the building on these scripts. That and Carlo turning much darker again the next day - backhanding Stephanie with his ring hand when she calls Charlotte a whore.

No, because I said up front it really shouldn't have gone on and was for the best lol.

Joss is annoying but she is in no way comparable to Leo lol. She's not on nearly enough and unfortunately she does have a fanbase, unlike Leo.

Exactly. No need and it's insult to injury.

I agree with all of this. We've talked about this stuff and ways to modernize it for the mid-'90s before (going a la thirtysomething or Picket Fences, etc.) and it's a nice thought experiment, but ultimately this was a show with a middle-aged cast that was going into a fourteenth (and possibly fifteenth) season. They had failed to make the next generation central and even then it would've been a crap shoot at that age. The show was just too old to keep running perpetually and while it had adapted well to the new decade from what I've seen in bits and pieces, it's not Bonanza or Grey's Anatomy. It was just old hat and considered done. It would've been like Fox running a show all about Jim and Cindy Walsh and their friends. I'll say this: The only way I think it could've maybe worked (and it's a very slim maybe) is trying to pull a David E. Kelley Chicago Hope/The Practice or a Scrubs-type maneuver. Turn KL into a legacy brand, publicize it as that, do a big handoff and say this is KL for the '90s. You come back, there's been a year or two timejump and it's a largely all-new ensemble of young people, similar to what other posters have suggested. Maybe Karen and Mack are still there or Gary and Val, one couple or the other as mentor types but that's it. Maybe Abby or Sumner or others guest from time to time. See if you can bribe Pat Petersen and Tonya Crowe to return as Michael or Olivia with new spouses, or beg Nicollette Sheridan to stay on but otherwise it's all new people. People like Carla Gugino, who was just starting to become ubiquitous on primetime around then and particularly CBS, Billy Campbell, Tom Verica (later of Central Park West and How to Get Away with Murder), Lauren Velez, Michael Beach, Erika Alexander, maybe Mitchell Anderson as the gay guy on the block lol. Any number of young cute, more diverse LA people striving in a cul-de-sac they can't all afford, you name it. OTOH you look at what happened to almost all of those shows above when they tried to overhaul. Chicago Hope and Scrubs never made it. So there you go.

Let's not say things we can't take back about Erica Kane.

I adore Erika but I don't think that would fly. I think people are (understandably) beyond tired of OLTLers on this show and I also don't think anyone would ever see her as anyone other than Viki given the proximity and many crossovers. I had once wanted Viki to appear as a guest in a major umbrella storyline in which (in her role as an esteemed American journalist) she would interview the villain of the story in Port Charles but that's another discussion. As it is, despite a recently thriving primetime career I fear Erika may not be in good physical health (on top of the tragic loss of her daughter) to appear judging by her appearance on the last Locher Room. I dearly hope I am very much mistaken.

Maybe let's not post the videos in the thread.

Oh God. I had no idea there were so many. I do vaguely recall the first but I am most used to seeing the opening with the third shot which makes him look like rubberfaced Lucky.

For years I couldn't retain any of it after the first few words. The gag I had going for a long time was it would just run on like 'here's what you do when you go with to find what you know when you do what you give when you rainbow's end....don't cry!' I'm glad someone confirmed the shot existed. It truly is bad, but of course all those old '80s photos with the sepia treatment look like everyone has jaundice and will soon die. Crazy they made time to add him but no one else (I think).

I don't even know what The Soul Survivors is. More fool me.

You can tell they were setting story up even before the parachuting-in of Luna and Malone's name being officially on the show - I don't know if he was involved in the material (I suspect so) but Megan is notably under the weather at Hunter and Andy's wedding in late August, Alex is kept on after her planned exit and the spectre of Sarah is raised all around the same time. In addition to Jason being added in early August, which I think is all Gottlieb.

I could've sworn Mark Brettschneider (Jason) was the last addition to the Tour of Llanview opening. I've yet to see him though, I'm a few behind in '91. Always was baffled that he made it in but not Luna, but again maybe I imagined it. I think OLTL dumps Robyn Griggs in the fall and then brings her back after Carlo's death in the spring to wrap the murder mystery, but don't quote me, I'm not sure. It is hilarious seeing half the opening populated by already-fired people. It's also hilarious that it took me til this month to realize the reedy, weaselly guy up front in the opening is in fact the chameleonic Nicholas Walker as Max and not Jake's annoying friend Lucky or whoever. I'd spent years wondering 'why isn't NuMax in the opening?'

The part that still cracks me up was the 2013 anniversary interview with her, Kin, Tony, etc. where Jane triple-checks with the interviewer that both Gloria and her sister Norma are dead, dead, dead before discussing it. I didn't know Jane was in line for Samantha. Her clashing with Liz Hubbard would've been a sight for the ages.

I have a hard time buying that Jeanne Cooper was going to ATWT. I can see her floating it or threatening to move. I have heard the JE story about ATWT before but I've forgotten who she was supposed to play.