Vee

Axios angsts over Trump's debate catastrophe.

Full retreat:

Plus, bringing in Jamie and Jack was just a total fail. Absolute dullsville.

More context:

So many Twitter stans squawk when Ava is written as who Ava is. A lot of them seem to just want a somewhat more hard-edged Carly Snyder. Ava being Ava is suddenly 'character assassination.' I don't know whether PM was going to write her out; there are two schools of thought and two competing BTS stories out there. I do know keeping her dark and nasty is what I prefer, and if that means Maura goes off-contract and swans in and out from time to time and does stints to keep Ava in play so be it. But many past GH or other soap villains have proven that going off-contract is not necessarily required to continue. It's a question of how you keep them protected in story via power and influence. I always reference the Alex Olanov solution from OLTL (where Alex went from a wanted psychopath drowning women at Loon Lake to a protected mob wife, a Buchanan bride and then the mayor) but dammit, it worked.

And of course they're besties again now post-Mulcahey. But whatever.

I remember Joshua Harris best from Twin Peaks, lol. He was fun.

Ric and Ava are both slime, but fun, sexy slime. That's all I need.

That was so embarrassing for everyone involved, lol. I think Ric could've been a lead at one point but it was not then. Rick Hearst can be a lead, but Ric can't. I am not suggesting he should have an A-pairing - he is a sleazeball. I'm just noting the reality of what it is.

I know Deadline is claiming "Christmas in Pine Valley” is a title, but I'm honestly not convinced this is not some classic 'reporting on the soaps' lazy Googling since there apparently is already a Great American Family movie by that name from 2022. (The nerve!)

@DRW50

Oh boy. "Special arc" screams "3 weeks shot separately on a green screen".

I don't expect a Lifetime TV movie to be all things to all people. It has maybe 90-100 minutes runtime, it won't tie up a ton of loose ends and it will be self-contained; it won't do everything I want or anyone wants. But it can be a nice return. And my preference for AMC (or any ABC soap) would be for it to return to streaming in a regular weekly or seasonal format. But it can't be denied that cable TV movies like the Lifetime franchises do well and have a considerable lifeline. And it's pretty likely most AMC stars would make themselves available for something like that. So I can't see why anyone would want to tamp down expectations for either this or The Gates. The fact is that any new soap opera programming is bound to be compared to the other vastly inferior shows on air right now, whether they are direct timeslot competitors or not. If GH, DAYS, Y&R or B&B look bad next to The Gates or a series of Lifetime movies, that is those shows' problem. Maybe they should try not being consistently bad. Which, I think we're all agreed, would thrive In this environment same as GL. It's just very sad ATWT has lost some key veterans like Kathryn Hays or Liz Hubbard in recent years. "Pine Valley" had names attached and went nowhere. Which was probably for the best, judging what we heard about its tone and focus. I think it was going to end up a tryhard hackjob. You can say a lot about Lifetime but they're not trying to compete with Riverdale.

Compared to what, another stellar year of GH?

I honestly never bought that friendship so I had no problem with Mulcahey dismantling it. But whatever, it's here. Ric and Ava would be a B or C pairing at best because that is what all pairings with Ric have been for decades. But it would beat many of her other flirtations lol.

Rick Hearst and Maura have chemistry with virtually everyone they've ever worked with, and Maura has been paired with a few real blocks of wood on this show. If they don't get Ric and Ava in the sack they're crazy. They've both fucked crazier for less. What's wild is I remember how that started. Very, very early on Rick and Tamara also had serious chemistry. I don't mind Ric being here because he is always weird as hell and fun to watch. But he is a slimeball. You just have to know who to pair him with. I am a little amazed Elizabeth is still giving him the time of day, lol.

My tortured retcon of the retcon there was always that Mitch Laurence had somehow engineered the false memory. Mitch was obsessed in his later years with identifying with Victor Lord and his empire; he took his house, his wife and was obsessed with taking everything he had. You will recall that during Malone II he even had a psychotic break where he briefly believed he was Victor and Jessica was Viki. (There were some really strange scenes at Victor's secret mansion in the woods where he forced Viki to dance with him while speaking to her as Victor, and she had to play along.) Given that obsession on his part I can see Mitch's skullduggery somehow creating the scenario where Jessica develops an alter and history of abuse, just like the Viki/Victor saga. It's ridiculous, but so was Tess and Jessica being molested. Were the show on today, I'd just handwave it away in a few lines: Jessica's DID was all just a false memory engineered by Mitch Laurence's schemes which she has undone with years of therapy, done. (But the trauma has left her still a different person.)

Very young, like pre-elementary IIRC. It's so disgusting to think about. I still don't accept that it happened.

Here's a serious question: If they had pivoted for real, and made the show about J.R. vs. Pam (as originally planned by David Jacobs going back to the miniseries) after Bobby died and leaned harder into it as opposed to whatever other mess they introduced that season, would it have made a positive change for the show or would it have simply cut the show's lifeline by a few seasons? I always figured the inertia of the popularity of Hagman, Duffy, etc. are all that kept it going in the last few years. To me, from what I've seen, Dallas never really evolved and that is what doomed it creatively. OTOH it ran the same amount of seasons as KL, so what do I know.

They interviewed a whole of 10 people. The pragmatic likelihood, from what I've heard, is that she goes up maybe 2-3 points nationally but starts opening up bigger leads in swing states. That's what the Harris campaign is looking for.