Vee

I think Alex ran about as long as she could on contract, if not slightly longer. They moved her from power base to power base to keep her insulated from full crashout, and that's why it worked. At least I thought so at the time. Some/many of the stories were silly but they never lost sight of her being a psycho at core. She has always been my model for how to keep a villain like her running long-term (something I have incessantly cited in the GH thread re: Ava Jerome - maybe let Ric run for DA or even Mayor, unseating Laura temporarily, and have her be his bickering spouse).

I don't think it's going to stop her. He's still on recurring and the character has a clear trajectory down the road. LOL, they really do. I do think they've skipped a few steps re: Leslie to get her more immersed in the social fabric of Fairmont Crest and some I can forgive, but Ted deciding to go for bygones with her and try friendship was the worst of them. You needed at least another 4-6 months of story and some other good deeds from her to make that remotely realistic. They clearly love Trisha and the character and want to make Leslie more layered, and sometimes they succeed but other times it feels like even those beats are on fast forward. Which again gives B&B house style to me. The Eva/Kat wars on social media are good for the show. Those fans are ride or die for both. I do agree there needs to be a Banneker set.

Not happening in most of our lifetimes, If ever.

Exactly.

With Chad I just felt like he badly needed Zoloft and seemed adrift and despondent onscreen lol. Chandler seems to giddily piss it away at times, not unlike the easily-bored Trevor St. John. I don't think you ever recast Sami. Will Horton, like Lucky Spencer, is another story if you can't secure the original and/or they are unwilling to act.

Renee Elise Goldsberry does Soapy:

Exactly. They dress down a lot of women in that range on the show other than (you guessed it) OLTL alum Amanda Setton. To me it is deliberate. But Setton can't stop dressing like she just buried her third husband.

Chandler is the closest thing DAYS had to an Ali Sweeney or Jonathan Jackson-level talent when he was young. Now he knows it and barely bothers onscreen. Neither Ali nor Jonathan ever stopped trying on camera. If he would be around more and lock in while there I'd be for it, but he doesn't seem interested.

I don't think she (or many people) were styled well in that era. But it wasn't this bad, and she looked decent in her last stint. Now it's just dour. They have poor Alexa Havins dressed like a widow a lot too. Or a U-Haul lesbian.

She has looked better than this in the past. She just looks matronly, both wardrobe and styling.

The reality is Spanberger, Sherrill and Mamdani all deserve a lot of credit, because that's the big Dem tent for you. I am so far beyond having the time or energy for scoring daily points on the idiots on dirtbag leftist Twitter anymore, or for listening to enablers tell me how hard done by Chuck Schumer or Jeffries are from the ungrateful base who just don't understand their struggles. We don't have time for Sweet Valley High anymore. It's normal people out there tired of this shít. And it's very normal, core Dems of any race and creed sick and tired of current strategy. A lot of Democratic comms and messaging have been a disaster for years and need a massive overhaul, but so does Dem strategy. The problem is most of the tired strategists the party leadership listens to are regularly having their brains cooked by right-wing Twitter, contemptuous of 'the libs', and so they operate from a center-right viewpoint believing this is permanently 1980-84, a center-right country and that Democrats must always defend or apologize. There were more concessions to squeeze out of the shutdown. Shaheen, Hassan, King, etc. chose none of them because a) many of them are retiring, b) many of them share that viewpoint and c) they prefer the illusion of the genial Senate, and the illusion of continuing to govern, vs. facing the hell we're living in. Sorry to Angus King, but 'standing up to Donald Trump doesn't work' (a verbatim quote) is not the message a vast majority of Americans sent at the No Kings protests - because the base aside, even idiots who voted for Trump don't like his first year - or the message sent last Tuesday, and it's not a message you can sell in the midterms while ignoring everything he's done to disenfranchised people or immigrants in this country and asking everyone to please turn back to the page of the consultant tipsheet that focuses entirely on egg prices instead. But what does he care? He's not up for years and he got his. You're right, clawing back the WH or the Senate, serving one term trying to fix horrible shít around the margins then getting ousted again for more fascists is not a solution. It's an endless cycle of this for years now and it leads nowhere. Joe was a good POTUS but he made mistakes on not going after these people harder when the moment was there, and so did Pelosi. They thought the country would just right itself if led by example, and they were wrong. But we're here now, and we have to either live through it, change it, get out or die. I don't feel like dying and I don't want to live through it like this for another decade, nor do I want to leave, so to win it's going to take more than just clawing for the brass ring. It's going to take institutional changes in how the party operates. The base is ready, it's proven that twice in the last couple months. Now the leadership has to be too.

I think the writers have cooled on both Ashley and Naomi tbqh. They're nominally still 'good' people but they make a lot of bad choices.

Am I the only one noticing Jan is dressing and styled a lot better ever since bending the knee for crazy-ass rich Leslie? LOL.

I like Mayor Laura. But they've made her role a joke in the last couple years, as opposed to early in the 2020s when virtually every decision in town was run through 'Madame Mayor' lol. People weren't using the microwave without running it by Laura. I loved that. Do they think Britt looks super sexy with this mom haircut and TSA wardrobe? It's not helping.

Llanview's own Laura Harrier (Destiny Evans #2, OLTL) will be playing Motown exec Suzanne de Passe in the troubled Michael Jackson biopic from Antoine Fuqua.

Pine Valley's own Amanda Seyfried (AMC, ATWT) stars in The Testament of Ann Lee, from the team behind The Brutalist.

Because it was. The rewrite was a matter of public record from people in the know, and several actors spilled the beans at the time when the show tried to claim it was all a grand design. Matt Ashford also took other work at OLTL in the interval. He wasn't the only one IIRC. We had people here at SON at the time who were Reilly devotees since childhood insisting it was always his grand plan, but it wasn't. The little we know about the original story's ending, from what I recall, is that yes, they were all going to be dead, and that it would wrap in some sort of trial of the century story for Marlena. I have no idea how they were going to get her out of it which they clearly would have. Regardless, Melaswen and resurrecting them was never the original plan. The backlash cowed the always nervous and prone to 180s Corday, along with Sony/NBC. The show was terrible period by then, but I wasn't complaining about getting those actors back. Most of them were dispatched so shabbily, by a writer who had clearly grown to hate or resent either many of them or DAYS itself.

Nakadai was incredible.

If they actually ever go through with yet another Drew brain/personality transplant storyline I'm tuning out again lol.

That's not going to happen. Any more than it already has.

What a hilarious choice. Jesus, did they play the entire track? You'd think these two were Luke and Laura and I'm pretty sure they broke up and/or were both gone fast.

We're not going to have a socialist state. That's not realistic and most of the public don't want it. They do like some of those shared values, and most of all they just want a better class of fighting Democrats. If we can avoid running dirtbags, anarchists, closet Nazis, general idiots or any favorites of the Intercept while doing so that would be ideal.

I think the tide has turned in some ways. The problem is dragging a lot of the party machinery along with it when a lot of them simply want to sit back, cruise to next November and do as little as possible and expect reward for being the minority party. (A common feature in the Senate across party lines for decades, I will grant you.) I credit the base and an assortment of good candidates with last Tuesday. The enthusiasm and dedication are there among the Democratic base and rank and file, despite every end of the far political spectrum and the media shítting on 'the libs' and 'wine moms' for a decade. Between Tuesday and No Kings protests, you had many of those shítheels acknowledging the supposed 'cringelibs' were getting it done. I credit a lot of the ossified elements of the party leadership and the Senate with Sunday, which turned around and shít on that energy and dedication. They then still expect all us to once again 'move forward,' turn the page and still be good little voters who will give more money and time to these groups who spam our inboxes and not complain about bigger matters or demand better action. I have held my nose and gone along with that thinking for over 25 years, and I'm done. And there's a lot of normie Dems who feel that way, who voted last Tuesday, who are out on those streets, who donate and organize. Two different elements of the party, and one has to change or go.

A vast majority were blaming Republicans for the shutdown. The polling and public opinion bore that out. Avoiding immediate harm to the public, and prioritizing that relief, is all well and good in a normal political environment. We are not in that environment anymore, and many are too slow to learn and accept that lesson. Most Democrats came to Washington to govern and legislate responsibly. Again, wonderful in a normal political environment. But we are not in that anymore. You cannot hope to merely responsibly legislate and govern your way out of a fascist state with a corrupt SCOTUS and White House calling the plays. That is a losing game. You have to change how you operate. The Republicans chose this after we elected a Black man and it was effective for them and their bigotry. If the public does not feel the consequences of electing Republicans they don't learn, and will forget. They learn by seeing it and feeling it at home. Not by Democrats dependably bailing out Republicans from the consequences of their actions. If a bully knows he can roll you and you'll grudgingly bend to his demands for the sake of the greater good, he'll do it every time. I've accepted that Democratic trade-off many times before, for as long as I've been voting. I'm not doing it anymore because we're not in that world now. And for what it's worth, the people who will pay first include myself at present, given my current health circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of millions of others. The party does need to change. It has needed it for a long time, starting with investing in real new media platforms as opposed to going hat in hand to the networks and assuming mainstream network outlets will treat Democrats fairly. They despise us. They have destroyed Joe Biden's legacy for a generation, a man who gave his life and family to service. The right has wired media for their own ends for at least 30 years. Hoping for fair treatment, hoping 'the right people will get it if we just govern' doesn't work. That's not all the party needs to change. There's a lot more. That doesn't mean leaving the future to the red/brown, alt right-adjacent dirtbag left. But it does mean changing what got us to Sunday. Even old hands like my mother, who spent her life serving this country on Capitol Hill, in the building these terrorists raided and got away with it because we turned the page too quickly, are disgusted. That's all I have to say about that in here for now and I'm not returning to it.