Vee

Steve Burton looked beyond disinterested in mouthing those lines about coming to better appreciate Edward and the Quartermaines in those scenes with Ned and Tracy the other day. In fact he looked kind of pissed. It's odd, since he did give emotion to the scenes surrounding Alan's death years ago and has allowed Jason to be a little closer to Monica and the Qs at the very least ever since his return in the late 2010s, to try to mirror Billy Miller's Drew who embodied a 'Jason' who was much more closely tied to them. Seems almost like Steve is annoyed with the 'Jason moves in with the Qs' plotline and is phoning it in, and that's saying something given his low standards.

It did, for years. I don't know when they started getting more money again awhile ago, but the years of grey paint and everyone living in the Metro Court (to the point that IIRC Finola put giving Anna a house into her contract or something) until the late 2010s were rough.

No, I think you're right. And I think they were banking heavily on crossover viewers who had grown up with both shows. I think ultimately they were only half-right about that, but it didn't matter in the end because they did save the show that year. I can't fault any solo GH viewers for finding it extremely off-putting. Overnight the longtime dialogue staff was gone, the look and tone of the show changed dramatically to become much more overly bright and cartoonish, and it was clearly being groomed as the new harbor for all things ABC Daytime, back in the years when Frank and Ron were riding high from too much critical praise and really believed they could re-craft GH into a kind of 'megasoap' for the network combining all the soaps. (FV still does some echoes of that today with the people he puts on the show like MEK, Susan Batten, etc. but it's a lot less of a thing.) We've dissected the pros and cons of the larger crossover experience in 2012-13 many times so I won't go back over that. I think there were things that worked and many that didn't and I think it unfortunately poisoned the well for more reasonable crossover choices since. (I happen to think Blair Cramer would make a fine recurring guest antagonist for Deception/Lucy a la Skye in the past, but does anyone watching this show want to see more OLTL characters in 2025? Hell no.)

I understood how it was done at the time. OLTL was a popular show with heat on it, ended relatively strong (IMO) despite a slew of dog-ass storylines in its last year, and they wisely promoted the OLTL stars jumping to GH within days, maybe a week or two of the show's finale. Love it or hate it, it got eyes watching GH in a year when the show critically needed it, and I think those initial crossovers, the Robin resurrection mystery and the subsequent water crisis saga in the summer-fall helped save GH from the other two soaps' fate. (The other dreadful new stories RC introduced - Kate/Connie, Trey and Kristina, etc. - sure didn't do it, but he knew how to keep an audience engaged back then with a lot of shocks.) Anyway, the timing made sense to me. A lot of ABC Daytime viewers had seen OLTL end with Starr, Cole and their child together, and a lot watched both shows or all three previously. So within a couple weeks they picked it up with Starr, Cole and their child passing through Port Charles. It was a fairly seamless transition to me. Did I think they needed to spend months on Starr going around PC demanding justice for her baby in material Kristen Alderson was not great at playing? No, and I say that despite being the man who once wanted Dr. Sarah Webber to come back on the show married with three kids, one of whom would turn out to be the long-lost Hope Thornhart lol. GH fans would put me in the bear suit from Midsommar for that today!

That's kind of standard practice for many soap opera crossover characters, though. Vicky Hudson, heroine of Another World, was brutally killed off months after the show's finale to free up Jake McKinnon for ATWT. I believe Robert Delaney's family got slaughtered when he moved to AW from Somerset. Genie's Ceara Connor got it when her husband Jeremy Hunter moved to Loving (in part to force Genie to return to GH). The inconvenient family or love interest often gets axed, it's soap tradition. I didn't love Starr losing both Cole and her daughter (though I never liked her having them on OLTL anyway, really) or Tea Delgado losing her baby on top of her husband, but I understood it. Frankly OLTL fans like me are lucky Natalie and Blair didn't also get torched offscreen like those many classic examples.

I love Mark but he should not have been on this show. Like most OLTL stars.

Leave Brody alone! He had great chemistry with Melissa and Susan Haskell, too.

It was part of the whole weird French-Canadian fetish thing Ron or Frank or whoever started with Nathan West. Someone on staff either got off or caught onto the audience getting off (usually Ron in those days, who was Very Online and would write in responses quickly) on wooden Ryan Paevey's flawless French pronunciations, so he started doing it onscreen all the time. Suddenly his ex-wife(??) is "Claudette Beaulieu". As I said on the other page, I still think it was an outgrowth of RC's likely plan for Stavros and Lulu having a rape mutant child c/o surrogate captive Robin or something. Instead, the next team gave Lulu a rape mutant spawn created via Valentin and Bree Williamson. Hooray!

I will go to the mat for her having serious chemistry with Mark Lawson and yes, hambone Forbes March, whose character's violent death I did not regret. But she is very limited.

I don't think Bree is untalented. She was never my Jessica Buchanan but she has some talent. But she also has a limited range, and OLTL learned that the hard way but kept leaning into giving her bad stories, or they'd skew her important character's personality around her range instead and those would be equally bad stories. With a better writing team and the right kind of character (maybe another scheming doctor, a la Lisa Niles but y'know, not Lisa Niles), in another era, BW could've done okay on the show. But by the time she was foisted on the GH audience they were already very tired of OLTL performers in unnecessary roles, and yet there were still more to come. The whole thing where Frank kept giving the (previously) little boy who played Sam Manning airtime as Boy Scout Wyatt, even making him Jake's BFF as this sweet kid aged up to adolescence and clearly was not an actor and was just wanting to go do ice hockey or whatever IRL was mortifying lol.

It felt so random. She has this bizarre name, is the ex/whatever of not one but two incredibly boring males (the forerunners of Chase, who is only slightly less boring than both of them) and it's another OLTL star. Just the dumbest idea I'd heard in awhile, and classic overcomplication c/o Passanante and Altman. It later got even worse with Valentin's even more convoluted origins, which rival Miles Laurence from OLTL (who has a similar background). JPS is only still with the show because FV inexplicably considers him a major get and tilts the show's schedule and storytelling around his primetime outs. (JPS is on a kind of contract-adjacent recurring like several key Sheffer-era ATWT stars were, including IIRC Cady McClain as Rosanna.) Like that endless period where Anna, Lucy, Valentin, maybe others were all hanging out at a house out of town pretending to be dead to trap someone while JPS was off doing some other show. I think the last several writing teams were also in love with the character, or at least Altman/Passanante and I think Korte were/are. It is beyond me. I don't understand Pikeman at all either. Mulcahey made it make sense for me with Valentin and Brennan, but then he quit/was fired and suddenly Anna is saying Brennan covered his tracks with the WSB and pretended he had been undercover to stop Pikeman in order to escape prosecution. (Except I think the show now wants us to believe dayplayer Brennan actually was undercover and is a great guy after all.)

Charlotte was Passanante/Altman. All to cement their and Frank's precious Valentin. But Ron also had a love for surrogate magic babies. IMO RC had likely been setting up the captive Robin carrying Lulu and Stavros' freeze-dried kid or something before he was fired based on the multiple embarrassing Stavros-related capers he did in 2013 and (I think) 2014 - he had Stavros obsessed with Lulu as his new 'Ice Princess' bride he wanted to impregnate, and they faced off with him the second time at the Crichton-Clark clinic where IIRC Drew/NuJason was also being held with Robin (pre-Billy Miller casting). Anyway, thank God that didn't come to fruition. It's amazing to me how quickly she came and went, for someone who Frank adored. They must've gotten feedback on Claudette that rivaled anthrax because she vanished. I think she's supposed to be dead offscreen today? That character is even stranger to me than Jessica Tuck's art dealer/crime boss/whatever, who unlike Claudette/Bree did keep coming back. And Jessica Tuck could've actually played an interesting villain on this show. I think it's partly intentional, to show how impulsive and rash she still is. I don't love her journeying off to find the mutant hellspawn but I understand it.

Broderick was only rehired to close out the show. The network regularly refused to use her or any of Agnes' creative stable (outside McTavish, and that's a whole other can of worms) unless they needed to placate the fans - first with the brief run for the Los Angeles reset to write Adam out with Brooke, then for the final months of the show. Had the show gone on Frons would never have allowed anyone from Agnes' inner circle to take over.

Speak for yourself.

Exactly. We've all gone around these same points lately, but it drains the life from key characters who are still active and should be passionate and bed-hopping. Except GH shies away from a lot of these key soap staples.

Eh, Rory was a block of wood. I never had anything against Gio, but there are some overzealous fans out there for any pairing.

I do think that's likely, unfortunately. And I think that's all true. It's just a sickness at the show. But I don't begrudge the new actors, who I think are fine. There's plenty of useless and tired white characters on the show but I'm not gunning for Emma and Gio. (Joss can stand to stay on the backburner for awhile.) And hey, I'd love to be surprised if Trina gets something truly substantial again.

The girl playing Emma seems solid, if slightly old for the part. I guess she'd work as a contemporary of Nicholas Chavez and probably William Lipton. It is hilarious the lengths they will go to to avoid ever pairing Trina with anyone white again, though. Gio gets a few more unexpectedly well-liked scenes with her and boom! New white girl hits the scene! I like Gio and I have nothing against NuEmma so far (Brooklyn Silzer was adorable but could not handle dramatic acting as an adult, a recast was inevitable) but I don't care about them together. You're not gonna put over a very new guy like Gio and an all-new recast that easily. It just feels like something to cement him (and keep him away from Trina), and I'd rather see both parties tested around with others. Alexa has really brought the spunk back to Lulu, without the hardness that JMB had to go with it. No, I don't love her quest for her hellspawn but the scenes with her breaking into Wyndemere, etc. really had spark and good chemistry with DZ.

Silzer couldn't act. Past time. You know it! No one would expect Emma to be the bad girl.

I think ultimately it just comes down to inertia, Frank being too wedded to most of his own hires/friends, and the belief in maintaining meager survival by not rocking the boat or changing too much by believing their core audience is Facebook seniors who fear change and require the most bland stories and characters possible. Which was not a belief system in 1994.

A cute family portrait:

A lovely tribute as always.

It is deeply stupid for Joss to have two dead boyfriends so young. Dex couldn't have gone off to train with the FBI or WSB? Sent her a Dear Jane letter? It's not that hard. It must be exhausting for Eden to do this stuff too on the heels of her recent iRL losses.

I think the Anna thing is still in play, but yes, both are desperate last resorts. Why they sent Jake off is beyond me other than BTS bias, probably Korte-related re: her preferred characters and their relationships to Jason.