Vee

Alexa definitely has more grit and visceral weight onscreen as Lulu than Emme, as she always did. That classes her closer to JMB's popular version, but unlike Julie Berman Alexa has never been hard or cold onscreen. That's a big part of why she put Babe over in spite of truly atrocious/slanted writing.

It is insane. I guess the fundie life will do that for some women! But I am very happy she's here.

I do too. Missing that is very careless, Sam never got over that loss. It was a major moment in her life and she and Jason would've made sure about how the baby was remembered.

It is very clear (and has been for weeks) that it is ineffectual jewel hoarder and insomniac Sidwell a.k.a. NuCyrus a.k.a. NuVictor a.k.a. NuPeter a.k.a. NuShiloh. This is all so boring. It's the only stupid story Frank, CVE, Korte, etc. know how to do and they do it over and over and over with a series of unthreatening characters. We'll all next be expected to act shocked when omigod!! Sidwell is Natalia's ex and the father of her stupid children! Yes, as we had to hear ad nauseam at the time. Baby Lila was almost as canonized as Lila Sr. for a while due to her proximity to Jason and Frons' favorite starlet. You'd have thought that baby was B.J. in those days. Soap Twitter these days has goldfish memory. They've been redoing flashbacks on this show since at least Laura Wright's debut as Carly. Looks like more prime setup for a murder mystery, and I'm not hating it.

LMAO the cast purge in OLTL '91 is absolutely brazen and should be a model for doing these things in crisis mode today. Kerry Nichols gets bumped superfast in mid-late July, and now Andy #1 and Hunter Guthrie are being quickly cycled out of town. (And in a few weeks IIRC Rika Price is out too, and she's not alone either.) Amidst this rapidly concluding romantic B-storyline Father Tony walks into Wanda's to abruptly tell Andy and Wanda that he too is leaving. "My bus to Philly leaves in an hour." Exiting actors talking about their exits together and then GTFO: That's what I like to see! GH needs to take a page from this posthaste.

Very true! But I seem to recall his stamp being on a few eps before his official start date, namely the big Wagger speech after the shootout at the warehouse (or wherever), Dante's shooting and that fallout and Kevin's big scene with Marshall and his family re: Black misdiagnosis. That was what, a week or two before? And we know for a fact he was brought in to redo the Jason return storyline which officially started at the beginning of March and proceeded to quickly implode. So if I'm directing someone to watch that era I am telling them to head for the beginning of March (technically a few days prior actually given what I remember seeing in Quartermaine scenes, but never mind).

Honestly a lot of the PM era is probably readily available on YT. He started very early in March and while there was clear interference and mess all throughout I don't think his stamp fully left the show til maybe mid or late July (though Drew and Willow kissed around the 4th). You could probably poke around and find a lot. (Anna still cried way too often though, as she has done for years.)

I honestly have zero interest in another round of pointless Look What We Did guest cameos from old characters like Jade or her husband. I'd much rather see other new relatives or acquaintances from the AQ brought on and invested in seriously. Then down the road if Tia Carrere needs a paycheck, why not. (I always liked her in Wayne's World.)

I think it's too late, predominantly because it is clear this team has zero rooting interest in Drew or especially Nina who can barely buy airtime these days. If they were going to invest in it they'd be doing so. At least with Sonny out of her life Nina is no longer getting ritualistically humiliated by the entire cast twice a week as retribution via Korte. I do think Drew Q gives good political animal or scoundrel under either regime, but I just don't think they will invest in it or give him enough layers back. So at this point I'd let him run its scheming course for as long as possible over the next however many months, then kill him.

There you go.

God that was so stupid. I hated that couple and even I couldn't believe they did them like that. Based on what I recall from the Carlivati years I am pretty sure Brad is supposed to be related to those characters from the '80s. I would not be shocked to hear they tried to reach out to Tia Carrere or the other dude in the last decade for some pointless cameo. I think early on there was a possibility they were going to use Brad to bring on more AQ people (and they still should) but it's never happened, which is shameful.

I think Cameron plays the schmoozer Drew Q very well, at least as reconceived by Mulcahey. But my problem with it since then is the same as other posters' - they mangled the setup with him, Nina and Willow, rushed through key elements of the story and now it all just seems like a setup for a blowout climax while Drew seems actively sleazy re: Willow. It's a very fine line with a story like that to not make the man (like Ross Marler on GL, who was clearly PM's model for this story initially) come off awful, and they've gone over it since the writing change. It feels like Drew is now poised to be a full-on scheming womanizer to be killed off, and that's okay in and of itself - that's a classic soap archetype, and with his new power position he can still get into real drama before going. I'd be all for Who Killed Drew Q at this point as I have said repeatedly. But I do think it was a waste of great earlier potential, and I think this writing team won't play their current setup for the maximum drama they could either.

I remember people actively theorizing that "Niki" in the '02 story was actually Tori in disguise on USENET 20 years ago. That's how rough it got. I didn't mind the strangely poignant scenes where a much more benign Niki helped Tess give birth to her stillborn child in '08, but the fact remains the entire Tess saga should never have happened nor should the alters have returned after '95. I still remember his mortifying exit during what was something of AMC's nadir to me - the bizarre, brief and highly Fronsified Rayfield/Cascio era in 2003(?) where they literally dragged poor Jack Scalia out to some Miller's Crossing-ass barren woods somewhere just outside the city, where he got got in a very cheap looking location shoot to the strains of an overwrought Moby song that had already been highly overplayed in film and TV by then. I still don't think AMC was ever worse than that regime because it was so clearly the new network honcho putting his big fat thumb all over the show in an unrecognizable way I have never seen before or since.

I'm still very fond of that entirely too prescient Robert Altman/Garry Trudeau pilot Killer App (directed by Altman, written by Trudeau) about a Seattle dot-com firm at the height of the tech boom. I think they did it for Fox of all places, back when Fox still took some real chances. It either started at HBO or tried to migrate there after Fox, I'm not sure. Featuring (among many others) soap vets Ming-Na, Brian Kerwin and Brenda Strong, and the inimitable Stephen Lang from the Avatar films. The proto-Alexa is voiced by Altman perennial Sally Kellerman. From Trudeau a few years back:

Harmony creeped me the hell out. I love LLC; Ned and Olivia are merely just fine for me. As it is though I don't need them to be broken up. Were Robert not so terribly feeble now I'd have kept playing that angle in spite of Ned, and I did like her with Johnny. But he's not around.

He was never very strong but he has some charisma which put him over earlier in the year, though I've never been very impressed. They've got to get someone else on him, not that the FV speed-taping method helps anyone. Same here. Ned and Alexis to me were always purely and simply fine. They were two actors with dry wit and chemistry who shared a lot of good dialogue, and that was about it. I was more into Jax and Alexis, but that didn't happen (or Ned and Lois, but she was gone). It was when they got into the stuff you mentioned that I soured on them. Compared to most of today's couples of course, Ned and Alexis' material seems like Moonlighting. And I've discussed Chloe too - I liked her a lot, I even liked her with Stefan in that bizarre psychic visions story that never got explained and I'm still upset about her death. If they introduced a surprise kid of Chloe's sometime (not from one of her onscreen love interests, Korte!) to help shore up the Qs I wouldn't squawk. At this point I'd bring on a woman for Alexis. Why not. She couldn't possibly do worse with the same sex. We've been over this before, but agreed it's so weird. There was a very brief discussion of it when they first got cozy under RC and it's never been touched on again, probably because the current writers are bewildered and frightened by the prospect of having to dive into anything more nuanced like that. Not on Frank's GH! I wish it would be discussed though. I have no problem with Ned and Olivia as they are. I love Lisa and I think they're a fine tentpole couple, and Ned and Lois is never going to happen again because Wally and Rena aren't comfortable with it. But I would have them at least talk about all of it.

It's anecdotal of course, but that would track with my earliest memories of soaps. My babysitter for years was ancient when I was tiny, was from the South and she watched nothing but CBS. This was the mid-late '80s to the very early '90s. Nadia's Theme, the Marland-era ATWT intro from the '80s and B&B's theme are burned into my brain because of this.

That was Dena Higley. I hated Tess and always will.

Danny managed to grin through the eulogy.

Agreed lol. It would take too long and blow what little budget GH has left (as a sendoff for a presumed move to streaming) but I have it in a drawer lol. I will never work in soaps but it's just a fun pipe dream.

Once FV and Passanante got JPS it was over. They've all been infatuated with him from Day 1. To this day I think Helena offered up Valentin's name all those years ago as a cover for someone/something else, and that's the story I'd do.

The next time DAYS knocks SN off contract (and they will) I'd grab him. But that's me. I'm surprised GH hasn't done it before, except I think SN may be on FV's shitlist for publicly criticizing the alleged plan to bring him back in 2013. IIRC he said he didn't care for the offer or potential story so he passed. What I strongly suspect is that they intended to do what they always did back then and do only slightly less now: Nickel and dime SN by keeping him on recurring with a bunch of other returning vets, play him every 3-4 weeks in a subplot as a romantic spoiler for Luke and Laura (since Frank also wanted Genie on recurring at the time) and nothing else.

Niki and the alters should never have been back after '95.

I do think bringing back Spencer or another Cassadine would be necessary for Stefan. But yes, I'd bring him back. I do think they are potentially prepping Drew for a villain exit, though at this point with the potential Mulcahey gave him largely squandered I'd probably kill him in a murder mystery myself.

I got through about 15 seconds of Jerry Hall footage.