Vee

They've interacted but not at length.

They have got to recast Tomas if they want anything to happen there. Which is why I feel they're heavily hedging their bets on any heavy new romances/non-established couples - they are waiting to see what happens with some of their younger and very green cast. Tomas is terrible and needs a recast or to go, and several others are stiff, bland or just bad. The only new connection that revs my motor so far is Andre and Dani, which is clearly not meant to last and keeps repeating the same beat as they sort of tread water trying to figure out what will work chemistry-wise on the show. I think they put a lot of thought into the Dupree family and establishing that vs. setting up any major young couples. Which I can understand to a point, but a lot of anything romance-related feels like a testing lab right now vs. anything overly pushed or predestined. And that's good to a point, but couples need to start to emerge and I'm not talking the boring and wooden Jacob/Naomi, Tomas with anyone or the perils of Ashley. Equally awkward is the fact that Eva has significant chemistry with both Andre and Ted, and her scenes/fantasies with Ted are very charged. The fantasy she had was like she was his new younger bride a la Hayley. If she turned out not to be a Dupree and something happened with those two I would not hate it. Also, it was mortifying for me to watch Martin tell his kids about 'their grandmother' and it took a few minutes to remember he was referring to Nicole and not Anita. This SORAS is too much, he should be Anita and Vernon's youngest. @Darn said this first but I will not squawk if they decide to have Martin and Nicole turn up tomorrow suddenly talking about brother and sister instead of parent and child. Just have Daphnee Duplaix turn to the camera, glare and be like 'what?'

Maurice was sexy in the '90s. It takes nothing away from criticism of Sonny since to note that.

She sure does look like Carolyn Jones when she goes for it, which makes sense! Thanks.

She was talking about Scott Kinworthy (Josh #1).

I think Cady's often affected post-ATWT acting works for this character, tbh. Arch and posh.

At least you guys didn't get Frank Valentini forcing the worst (but supposedly 'hottest') contestant from I Wanna Be A Soap Star onto your show, like we did at OLTL a few years later. Mikey Jerome was unspeakably awful and Frank and Higley tried to fob him off on poor Melissa Archer. Fortunately, Higley was out soon after and Ron Carlivati came in gangbusters at that time, along with creating John Brotherton's Jared. Still Natalie's best pairing, and I blame Brian Frons for what happened there.

Yeah. I can't remember if I mentioned this in public recently but Gottlieb used to get credit for using movie scores, whereas they're clearly around before her in the '80s ( @DRW50 noticed I think Loving using Tangerine Dream's score to Sorcerer). I think she may have re-popularized it at ABC in the '90s though, as LOV and some of the other shows regularly used wonderful, evocative music from films like Jennifer Eight and Presumed Innocent in the early decade as well.

Megan and Dena Higley both have done a ton of terrible work and both have atrocious personal reputations, but Higley has never had a fraction of the good let alone classic things Megan actually had a major hand in at AMC.

He was stunningly bad.

Eh, Hayley took Dani's husband. Dani then literally broke into their damn house and got smashed, lol. It's not quite an equivalent crime but it's all fairly typical messy soap behavior. Nobody is approaching pearl-clutching territory for me yet, putting aside Silk Press' standard higher-level crimes.

Not Kat out here working Shining Time Station.

It hasn't.

There is no evidence Bill and Dani raised Hayley or knew her as a child.

I'll bite. Serial Killer Ted Big Bad Bill Bradley (I refuse to call him Smitty) AHN-dre I guess Martin would be here but he is so robotic and off-putting to watch. Same problem with Tomas and Derek, who are dreadful. I do like Doug! Jacob comes off too weak for me to register right now. Hopefully that changes. Both he and Naomi are boring/remedial to me.

Buchanan was always mid, and she was never big or charismatic enough a star to compete on the GH of the late 90s-early 2000s. But JFP was arrogant enough to believe it would be just another show for her to steamroll with her favorite actors. IIRC Jill did use her briefly at Y&R. Before that whole drunk driving thing.

Haven't been to DL in over a decade myself. It got sad and I have no clue how to post now with its weird paywall crap. Donna, I keep you blocked and rarely look at your posts or acknowledge you directly for the sake of my own sanity, but because I've made aware that you've been going from thread to thread saying this about a beloved longtime poster and complaining that you're not getting enough credit for this topic, I'm going to say this exactly once: No you didn't. Both of your posting history is readily available, and I checked it. Eric posted about Megan's memoir first, on Thursday of last week, before you. You then piggybacked off that by discussing Eric's mention of it in the AMC thread in your own post in the Retro thread, and talked about the PDF file. You never posted it. It was Eric himself who first brought the memoir up, and it was Eric who posted the PDF itself in the AMC thread. Now you are claiming you brought it up first and are clearly annoyed Eric is getting attention that you feel is due yourself. Except your version of events is totally wrong based on your own posts. Eric is a longtime poster going back a lot of years who many people here care for and respect. You are someone many of us have blocked because of your attention-seeking behavior, thread derailment and constant spamming. I am sorry you cannot handle being the center of a busy conversation and not feeling important enough to this forum. You are just going to have to live with it.

It was posted here by EricMontreal in the AMC thread a few days ago before DL. We've been discussing it at length.

Their one fan, everyone.

I knew it would tank trying to run her game at a show with as many big stars as GH and installing frankly middlingly popular people like Jensen Buchanan from another show, but even I wasn't sure it would tank JFP's creative career as hard as it did. Once Guza came back she was done in terms of having any real power at GH. Richly deserved.

He absolutely was not strong enough to be an A-lead, and everyone but JFP learned that when she tried. The year of Roy and Melissa in 2001 was painful. GH was the flagship of the network, and Jill couldn't play the same favorite games she had at other soaps including OLTL.

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.