Vee

My bet is it's not happening because Kelly wants to come back to a steady paycheck, and is hoping Frank will forget. Which tbqh she has a decent shot at under the current circumstances with Jason.

I am inclined to agree re: Stefan and Bobbie. Which I need to rewatch more of. I just loved them. And yes @carolineg they loved to have Maurice walk back and forth on that stretch of lawn to Rivera's house lol. As a big ad for that hotel the whole thing worked! They did also go to some tourism sites or ancient ruins or whatever with Lily and Miguel earlier during the Juan stuff, but that was all pretty tedious despite the wonderful location spots.

That was my first thought re: this theory as well. She's a non-character played by a little cipher. Who cares?

The website has amazingly been preserved, here.

I thought they seemed to be reunited or on the road to it yet again by the end of all that. But I may be wrong.

I have been very lucky to finally get to revisit the Puerto Rico saga and November sweeps '94 in full for the first time since I was a kid watching live. It is very hard to come by and is not available on YouTube. It's been said before but the PR remote and all the action really holds up - you can see why they kept it in the opening forever to the point that we were cracking jokes about it by the end. It's beautifully done. What's also remarkable is how a good portion of it is very clearly not the stuntmen. It's amazing Maurice and Vanessa didn't take more spills with how fast they were tearing through that hotel and those grounds on various levels, stairs, ramps, etc. And climbing onto the roof of various spots, then on the hotel tram and very clearly being on it while it was moving! Of course the story they have both told is that it was VM who was gung-ho while Mo was terrified on the tram. As I would be! And unsurprisingly, the key location segments were apparently directed by... Shelley Curtis.

I welcome P&G references. Even if they did already say ATWT was a soap opera in-universe, by having June be a big fan of the show and Jessica Griffin lol. You could shrug that off and bring in or mention a character anyway, no one would ever care.

They have given Nancy a lot to hang on her this past year with so little return for her, like a proper love interest. I have made a lot of sport on this forum of Alexis' various romantic humiliations but I do think it's time again, be it with a man or a woman. There have long been rumors that Nancy is loath to do stories which play up Alexis' Cassadine past these days which I'm not convinced are true, but frankly she has played far worse so I would do it, including bringing some strange Eurotrash cousins in or something. More importantly, I would say the Natasha of the late '90s or early 2000s would have taken more extreme steps against Drew when pushed to the brink like this long ago. If she and Luke in their heyday had to deal with him, they would've by now within a hair's breadth of what they did to Katherine Bell. She should be nearing that extreme, and NLG can still play it. I would be more interested in the idea of Scout having shot Drew (an unfortunate riff on Rachel having just shot E.J. on DAYS months ago, or the aborted plan for Little Al Holden to shoot Carlo Hesser at OLTL when Frank was starting out there) if Scout had literally any personality to speak of or character like some of the other kids, as opposed to being a sad cipher. I just don't care about her; like Donna, Avery, Bailey or Amelia, I regularly forget she exists when she's not onscreen. If it's anyone it should still be Willow IMO.

I think it's both lack of interest/comfort and perhaps money. They want to keep a zillion friends of Frank, longtime perennials or faves of the writers around, and they also just seem allergic to writing strong romance unless it's for one of a handful of FV hires - and even then it's pretty hard to come by now. Last time Roger Howarth got a new character they barely made an attempt to pair him with Maxie, in an awkward 'romance' that ended up barely seen onscreen but for a kiss or two. Then came the equally slow-walked thing with Ava. Kate Mansi's Kristina with Lucky never got off the launching pad, nor did the attempt to put Eva LaRue with MB. The BLQ/Dante connection is equally molasses-like despite 2026 magazine spoilers putting him solely with BLQ and Chase. I don't know why they're so gunshy about romance or sex now. Frank's shows didn't have a problem pushing it in the early-mid 2010s, or at OLTL.

I think Greg worked very hard and had real chemistry with people like Becky, Kelly Monaco and Kirsten. It was never the same and the character was profoundly different (in part because he was a more limited actor when younger) and downgraded, but he did a good job in a tough position.

There is no point in pairing Marlena with anyone again at this point, AFAIC. John Black was it.

Robin would be living for these reviews if she was lurking around here (which I am not in any way suggesting we make happen!!!). She is still very active on social media. I will never get over Kristen Alderson teaching her to play Mario Kart live on Twitch. I will be the routine defender of Laura Bonarrigo/Koffman, who I grew up with and still love. She wasn't necessarily well-served by her first year as they kept making her so histrionic and she had a number of boring stories over her decade or so on contract, but she had some good ones too and I did love her Cassie and her work day to day. Robin and Laura have told the story about adjusting to each other, where Robin told her something like she might be Laura's second Dorian but Laura was her fourth Cassie. They became quite close in the ensuing years IIRC. Robin has run through discussing all the Cassies on her Twitter; the one she wouldn't talk about was Ava Haddad lol. Michael Malone was extremely fond of literary inspiration and allusion in his OLTL work, and would regularly reference classic novels, turn of the century texts, etc. when discussing his characters and stories on OLTL, particularly in Q&As on his now-defunct website. He was roasted in the 2000s for a soap mag interview during his disastrous second tenure for saying something like the fans would be bored by various works of classical literature he name-dropped, with the implication to the reader being that he was putting himself up there with the masters like Charles Dickens. I don't think he was but it was still a dumb tack to take given that later material. Still, he cherished his inspirations and I think the show was often richer for them in the '90s.

I think it is probably somewhere in the middle. IIRC Carly's first day is one of Labine's last credited but don't quote me there. I do think the thumbnail sketch of the character came from Labine, but Mulcahey, Guza, Harris, etc. are what really fleshed her out into a person onscreen almost immediately. Same goes with Jason/Robin in a way. Labine was clearly setting them up IMO from what I've seen, but it's Guza and co. who made them take flight to become a supercouple. I think she's right though that she left them a couple very good springboards.

I think there's occasionally a few too many references per day, but I don't have a problem with them being current. Same with the sometimes-cringe contemporary dialogue. Even when BTG does too much it's way more than the other shows are doing in terms of grounding in the times.

Mac ending the opening cracked me up near the end of FOTH's run, when he was so irrelevant. You could always depend on ol' Mac at the end! But he was also a comforting presence there in his own way, and it was a keepsake of the time when, as you guys have said, he was a major male lead in the early '90s. I was glad when JFP updated it to have Luke and Laura at the end, even if everything else about the show was a mess at that time. Now I've done at least three separate posts I should've knitted together. Oh well.

The 2000s opening was clearly an attempt to get people to take the show very seriously as a primetime-adjacent, action-oriented show with all the rock music, blaring horns and strobes lol. It was tryhard and overproduced. The part that cracked me up was when they had to do quick edits during the Liason era and suddenly Becky Herbst is flying at the screen like a ghost near the beginning with the leads after spending years in the background. Or the occasional subliminal shots of Alan, Monica and Bobbie. The one that came near the end of Guza II had these weird artificial backdrops behind the actors which always made me think I was watching a Fox Kids horror-oriented show. Wyndemere behind people's profile shots looked like Big Bad Beetleborgs, and meanwhile the horn is still howling away.

AMC's was easily the best, and should never have been retired for that Guiding Light Powerpoint-esque thing they did near the end. It had real specificity to that show and was made with detail and love. OLTL's was a total afterthought, terrible, and you could tell how Frons felt about the show. I think the most it had beyond a black stage and lights was a few very vague backdrops of a college campus, the Llanview U setting he briefly tried to put over for the youth set in 2004. I would bring back FOTH today, sequence, heads and all. I don't care. That would be one of my first orders of business lol. You could use the theme unchanged tbh, the sax is back in fashion enough. Or you could re-record it. I think FOTH is timeless and apart from a few cosmetic changes to the look I wouldn't do much to it. I've always felt it was a huge mistake to go away from it, first to the dumb rock version of the theme and then to Frank's even worse series of Powerpoints than AMC's, along with whatever the hell that thing was he used to do with the opening when he first took over in 2012. This show does not need to look like Generic Brand X, and that's what the current opening is. When you watched FOTH you knew where you were, and it was home. (I'd probably even try to get Lynn to do the eyebrow again)

I am not sure if Jason and Robin was already in motion by the time Labine's work was offscreen in March or April. I wouldn't be surprised.

Unsurprising at this point that Dante is lumped together with BLQ and Chase, not Lulu.

According to Labine, it was her. From WLS: The Carly situation has always been more permeable - from what I think Patrick Mulcahey and others have said, Labine had the rough thumbnail sketch of Carly as a vengeful long-lost daughter. Everything beyond that was the Guza team. But Jason's accident was definitely Labine, as was setting Jax up initially for Lois.

I despise them from the deepest pit of my black heart. Stop trolling me and repeating all my opinions from our private rendezvouses.

There is definitely a lot more forced, self-referential camp in recent years, probably a sign of the nostalgia-choked pop culture cycle we live in now as well as to offset the often very grim stories on the show. I agree they'd bring back Roxy and Ronnie if they thought it was possible. Those two are dead dead and those scenes still stick with me. There's a lot of dead weight of course. Like others I am amazed Linda is still there. What are they doing, waiting Danny Dyer out? I'm just waiting for her dead body to drop at this point, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. They've killed loads on this show for less. I think people expect stunts from EE, especially at the holidays, and that's a fine tradition up to a point. But it becomes numbing when it transitions into rote and the results are too predictable. You have to use those moments and holidays a bit more sparingly. Like, I'm not surprised Anthony turned up dead. What does Chrissie coming back provide the characters long-term? Does she have any truly sensible beef with Zoe given what she did? Unless another kid of Den's turns up I can't see a purpose. Also, since they already let the genie out of the bottle a few years ago with the disastrous first attempt, I'll say it: They should go ahead and recast Michelle Fowler again.

He didn't. Miguel left in 1995. Jax first appeared in early '96. As for an older woman I'm pretty sure you're referring to Ruby Anderson, Luke and Bobbie's aunt and surrogate mother. The madam of a brothel who raised them after their parents died. She ran Kelly's for many years and was a regular character after first appearing in 1979. The actress, Norma Connelly, died in 1998 as did Ruby not long after. Pretty sure the woman on the beach with Sonny is Brenda.

How would you fix it? I'm not being flippant, I'm genuinely curious, but I do think EE has had major issues for years. My background with the show is similar to yours, thanks to PBS and the BBC's very free relationship at the turn of the millennium. It still does many things very well on a standalone basis but I think it got stuck in a loop of trying to top itself not long after killing Pauline in the snow. And then feeding on its nostalgia. I still see stuff I really admire every time I check in, but the nihilism or grinding depressive cycles seem to always be there.

I think if it was just about that they'd do it. It's been almost two years since Spencer, she has the same kind of contract as anyone else and tthey don't need to wait at this point. Kai is already on recurring. I think it's just the lazy, bog-standard plot they do with a lot of young people and their bio-parents too often on this show, even when (as in Trina's case, but she's not the first) they barely know one biological parent. It is crazy and shameful how much Taggert has been totally memory-holed. Marcus is someone who could lend Portia a kind ear right now - even if you had to recast if there is an issue with Real, which I hope there isn't.