Vee

Was Peace the only Black writer left on staff period or the only BDW? I thought they had several still. I do agree they need to add more and it would surprise me if PM didn't given his record. Just pull a Grey's and have Finn leave a note for Liz saying he and Hayden are giving it another shot far, far away with that demon spawn. But I feel like perhaps even more than ME at this point you'd have to pry Violet away from Uncle Frank with the jaws of life. He is incredibly fond of precocious children who eat their scenes (say what you will about the Aldersons at OLTL, they didn't do that as kids). Poor Patrick Gibbons (little Sam on OLTL/Wyatt on GH) isn't even an actor anymore nor can he act, and he keeps coming back bc Frank can't let go of him or the old show. Let that teenager go play hockey! The only actual actor between the two left onscreen! Jake is a good boy who has no time for Stone Old and is only 40% brainwashed by the Cassadines as a sleeper assassin since toddlerhood.

Khary Payton, totally wasted on GH as a spoiler for Scrubs before making it big on The Walking Dead, is voicing and physically performing as the 1940s Black Panther in Marvel's upcoming video game.

Now that I'm caught up I'll just reiterate that the focus on character is also refreshingly strong along with the dialogue. They're playing uncommon family beats with parents, children, relations and friends, setting up the next generation like we've all talked about lately - but even stuff like Cody and Olivia (or Cody and the frickin' horse!) or the Deception shenanigans sings to me lately. Drew and Nina's chemistry is substantial and their barbs are fun and not just psycho, when I usually have zero use for either character; the BLQ/Chase and Willow/Michael material feels increasingly more adult when I usually found them snoozeworthy. The Lucy/Sasha stuff on Friday was shockingly mature. Tracy and BLQ's bond is great, Maxie feels alive for the first time in years. Stuff just works. I look forward to the show and I don't tune 75% of it out. It helps tremendously that PM has evidently got the pull to let scenes breathe and run longer again. Many segments are not just the typical Valentini 50-90 seconds, character-based conversations are actually had, monologues are given. Like Trina's very good stuff about grief yesterday both with Stella and the excellent extended segment at Spencer's grave. Folks who keep claiming TA is 'green' compared to Sydney Mikayla who I don't think did anything with a fraction of the depth Ali has shown still baffle me. Whatever goes down with Chavez returning or not in spring I'll be shocked if TA doesn't get big story following this because it shows significant investment in her and her skill. Joss, Frank's preferred star, has not had an extended series of solo monologue segments like this in recent memory. It's also nice to see my earlier suspicions confirmed: Wagger (who I may soon regrettably have to call Cates) is Jason's handler at the FBI, running him on a leash with Jason infiltrating the shadow outfit to get to whoever Pikeman/the big bad is (I still suspect Ava is in it up to her neck, recent simpering for Sonny aside - neither being OOC for her with bad men). There will be the predictable outrage at the scheming feds, etc etc. when this comes out but the point is he's not a black hat. If they wanted to make Jason relatively tolerable for me going forward they'd keep him on that federal leash, though I doubt that'll happen. I've said for years Scorpio and the WSB should have drafted Jason with a deal to work for them or go to Supermax for life. A role Drew could've easily and less reluctantly filled when CM first arrived.

I'm catching up but a few quick thoughts: They were so unsubtle about chemistry testing Drew and Nina last week it is wild, lol. Him helping her with her computer and her getting him coffee for his trouble when psycho eyes Drew wanted to wear her face as a mask like Leatherface two weeks ago. But I'm for the 180, because they definitely have some heat while trading more fun and less intense barbs than before even if I have no desire to see either of them continue on the show long-term. (Drew at least would need another recast and a break, even if CM has finally brought back the hot beard and looks very good.) The dialogue has already improved so much that Cam even got off a great line that almost reminded me of his early days on AMC: “It’s the Peter Principle in action! You’ve advanced to your level of incompetence.” @Khan, weigh in when you see these scenes! Sue me but the Laura/Heather unlikely bond kind of works for me given the Webber family history and their past connection that is easily reviewable on YouTube, and now that AM has calmed down some and truly engages with Genie on a real level (and they fixed her hair). Surely if they'd just given cobalt madness to Franco that would have worked out! But I'll give it a shot. It's a strange, interesting interplay and Heather becoming cousin Laura's kooky talk-to could be fascinating. I'll get to the rest shortly but for now suffice to say Willow was clearly willing to let Michael take the fall for those drugs so she could spend more time with Jason and/or Drew. I did like him talking about his prison time and the rape.

The rap storyline was the last gasp of Rauch. IIRC Gottlieb writes Rika out in early fall '91, in a nice group canvas barbecue or local festival sequence that is on YT. I like what little I've seen of the original Ben Price with Ellen Bethea's Rachel. I didn't remember him at all. I only remembered the very boring Peter Parros, who baffled me when I tuned in to ATWT a couple years later and it seemed like they had literally transplanted the exact same character across networks, another bland doctor named Ben. IIRC that was the great Susan Gibney, probably best for her Star Trek role as Dr. Leah Brahms, LeVar Burton's outer space crush. She was such a shrew on OLTL lol. She's still so talented and quite a chameleon.

I remember people praising this girl to the high heavens a year or two ago. It's a pity she's too young for say, Lulu on GH.

It's pretty wild to see the mammoth investment put into the Eckerts in '91 - sweeping (and swooning) overhead shots of their big new bakery set followed by an extended tour of their entire family house, also all-new. Monty was really banking on Tony's star power putting this all over. As I've said before, on paper I admire the ambition: If it is true that Monty hoped to emulate the UK soaps/Eastenders by introducing a working-class ethnic family en masse that's something I can get behind theoretically in the right circumstances, and I've also always wanted a modern American soap to experiment with the UK model of bringing on a whole family unit at once. (It historically never works here when rarely done, but times have changed and you might as well try it with the right characters, such as for example Liz's doctor sister Sarah and family on GH.) I also said already that I'm impressed with the scope of the S.S. Tracy event, its immediate ramifications for the larger canvas and how it introduces Mac, the Eckerts, etc. all in one fell swoop - Robert, Anna, Ruby, Bobbie, Tracy, etc. carry a lot of that stuff in the earlier eps with the disaster itself. But while JJY is immediately winning as Mac, the Eckert characters are not just compelling enough to make all this work and the post-sinking February episodes in particular have the regular GH vets seeming like guest stars in a show entirely about the Eckerts lol. It does amuse me seeing jolly Frank(?) Eckert with his loving wife and remembering Tony's later interview (one of many retcon backstory interviews he gave for Bill) declaring that Bill's father beat their mother for years. Okay? Finian O'Toole is funny but Mac is real quick to eat lunch out of an empty morgue drawer. Couldn't be me. How did this dude turn out to be part of the cartel or whatever?

Exactly. I've said it before and I'll say it again: They ran out the clock and only played them as much as they absolutely had to because the couple was not supposed to be a hit and Frank was afraid of alienating racist viewers. Hopefully PM's penchant for diversity will change some of this; his commitment to the Ashford story resolution was already clear to me.

I love RN and KZ for who they are but I can't get behind re-pairing soap supercouples like that. I do think RN is an optimum choice for Jeff though. I had Carolyn in mind as a major antagonist for her daughter/the hospital as a brilliant, scheming surgeon and I'd want someone with real menace, and at this point Colleen Zenk is not an option because she's done it too much lol. MB can do cold menace, she did on GH before but she's a little too young/the actors who could play her daughters are a bit too old. Hazen was long ago* and is again my choice for a Matthew recast on OLTL if it still existed, which it sadly does not. (* - I badly wanted OLTL to poach him in the 2000s as a kid actor when Eddie Alderson simply could not and would not act for most of the decade, until suddenly around '09 Eddie seemingly woke up one day, decided to act and quickly became the best young actor on the show.)

If Martha was a little older you could (and I would) pass her off as a recast of Liz's scheming mother Carolyn on GH, unfortunately I don't know that it's quite plausible although she has visibly aged and Becky Herbst hasn't. (Especially if you reintroduced Sarah as an older sister, then it gets tricky if you cast someone like Tognoni who is only four years younger than MB lol) Yes, Martha played Andrea Floyd for 10 mins but who cares. I try not to think about the QAnon-adjacent path her situation with her husband seems to be going down.

Social media has never been a good barometer for an election cycle. Especially on the left. Most of the party base is not truly plugged into or caring about the axes being ground by Briahna Joy Gray, Jeet Heer or other dead-enders. Even more prominent jerks like Stancil don't have any pull outside a small sliver of the Very Online element of the left. RTs are not votes. If I spent all day inside the online left bubble I could convince myself that this is the predominant voice of the party, everything is collapsing, why isn't Biden doing what these loud (and often mostly white) geniuses tell them? But when you step outside of those people (who predicted Dem doom for every cycle in the last four years) the world is a lot more both nuanced and black and white on certain areas (abortion). The reality is they are speaking to a specific echo chamber or pundits like them, that they are not the voice of the base (or a lot of the left, which is a very big and vast tent) and the rest of the base makes up its own minds. Consider though that even where he overperformed last time, it wasn't enough to win. And it's now four years later.

Y'all weren't kidding about that little Harrison. I remember him being more of a prop than anything awhile ago but he sounds like he's speaking Esperanto.

I just think it took a very long time to see a Laura who is as strong and confident as she came off in that 2008 stint again. She does pretty well these days but she really gave people the business in that short run after the rather degrading (IMO) turn of the delusional woman who was too sick to be told the truth during the pity wedding in '06. It was clear her '08 run was a reaction to that writing and likely requested by Genie (who I believe also talked about being more confident in herself, having lost a lot of weight). And yes, Laura needs to tear Scott up just once. I could not believe he kept trying to remind her of when they went to Hollywood or whatever as late as '08 or '13. They were teenagers. Move on.

He also tried to get Lulu the chair over Logan's death. Laura has been way too permissive with Scott for decades. Any time he does some insane shît she sighs and just says 'oh, Scotty.' I get that she left you for Luke but it's enough. The fact that RC re-introduced her in 2013 with a cheap stunt where she and Scott had somehow began romancing again offscreen in Paris after all the above had happened, and were engaged - and got married again for about 3 minutes, with Laura looking like she was headed for a firing squad - was so ludicrous. It was a weak, transparent attempt to try to rev up the L&L triangle again in the dumbest way possible and it makes no sense she'd ever be with him again. We didn't even really see any of their instant marriage/divorce onscreen that year either.

Remember when Pratt started at Y&R and they legit tried to make people think Blind Neil would crash the jet with his whole family onboard over Devon and Hilary's affair? Lord.

Wonderful to see Cree Summer as the new librarian.

The ever-busy Billy Magnussen (ATWT) is one of the heavies in Amazon's new Road House remake with Jake Gyllenhaal.

I will defend Lucy for anything when it comes to Sasha.

What should Lois regret? She is a successful talent agent and music producer who has done very well for herself worldwide. And a little Scott goes a long way for me these days. I love him, but the last thing I need is Kin and Alley Mills hamboning it up together.

That's more about polling that oversamples the wrong people, IMO. Or people who still answer landlines. There's a reason polling is often off. The general public does not believe the GOP is great. That's the Beltway. Bad polling promises them there is a huge new youth or Black vote for the GOP every cycle. It has yet to appear.

Oh God, I forgot about that. And brought to us by master thespian Rodney Van Johnson.

I'd notice, because I've noticed it even when D&C were there. I thought they were at times an improvement on Passanante's regime. They had some good stuff last year, especially with the vets reacting to Ryan's death. I am wondering if this is going to lead to them hooking up after all. They do have manic chemistry, and they are already playing Nina more broad and arch again (as she should be).

I think we're pretty evenly split in here, at least among those of us actually watching the show and not following along on Twitter.

IIRC somebody was asking about who was responsible for resurrecting Lesley. In a 2018 interview with Michael Maloney, Genie claims credit:

A few reflections on the remainder of the week that was (the first half of it, anyway): Say what we will for Ron Carlivati back in 2012 but he came in hot and started killing people on Day 1 and ending stories, and I was all for it at that time lol. The writing and dialogue was pure camp and nonsense at the time but it was also very satisfying to see almost instant changes. Yet a number of those changes led to stuff that was less than fantastic (the Connie saga), and more importantly and relevant at that time I think is that the show was believed to be on a clock: Most believed GH had a year or less left and I think FV/RC felt the same. The situation here is more nuanced; GH does not seem to be facing doomsday, so the show is changing slowly and carefully. And we're seeing that slowly. The biggest change for me in the first proper week is, again, a really sharpened-up series of interpersonal dialogue scenes and a continued focus on family and social connections; the stuff with Wagger and Anna was very human, not just plot-driven, as they had Wagger present himself as both vulnerable and flawed re: how he approached Danny and as they talked through the Sonny stuff re: Stone and Robin. It wasn't all plot-driven, and it gave me the first indicator that maybe they won't simply throw Wagger under the bus over whatever this setup is with Jason, because he admitted to being fallible in those scenes. Even the BLQ/Chase and Cody/Tracy stuff feels smarter to me, focusing on just the engaged couple's relationship (actually appearing at their own apartment and not infantilized within a clan on a family estate - imagine that!) and on Cody and Tracy connecting re: Dante. I appreciated that, even if little James is intolerable. Cody had the right idea in the first place: Lasso Maxie's brat and yeet him off the grounds! This leads to another issue: I think the stuff delineating and defining Jason's two sons differently is a great idea, and while the kid playing hero-worshipping Danny is very green I think he has some charisma and potential. This is not the case for Aiden or James, and while the new team's attempts to push family connectivity and these relationships are very admirable, these kids do not need to be given more dialogue lol. They're terrible. It's time to recast Aiden yet again and James, well, I don't care what happens to him because I still can't get over the fact that he exists (third child? what third child?). I don’t care what Little Mushmouth thinks of Tracy! That's her horse! Yet I suspect this is another adorable kid Uncle Frank thinks is too precious to recast, so I expect we'll see yet more of him. The material itself is not perfect - some of the dialogue with Liz and Aiden in particular is very B&B-esque and artificial as they continue to work overtime to set up various characters' new personal parameters. Elizabeth standing there monologuing about how Jake's (offscreen) feelings have changed hers for Jason to nobody in particular while we can’t get Jake onscreen that day does not work lol. Jake is going to be on quite a bit next week so that's fine, I get there are likely guarantee/availability or block taping issues in Uncle Frank's world and I am happy for the changes and differentiation in character on paper, but with some areas it's a bit forced and kludged together. In others I feel it sings. The scenes with Alexis and the latest terrifying Molly recast were smart and heartfelt, I felt. Even Valentin and Nina had some good dialogue, and people know I can't tolerate that whisper-thin simp. He nailed it when he said Sonny isn't complicated, just erratic. The Sonny/Natalia stuff, tedious, but that's how I feel about the entire Kristina/Blaze plotline so far. If you want to get Kristina a girlfriend find someone you didn't hire as a dayplayer. Another week of scenes where Willow has inappropriate chemistry with anyone but her weak tea husband! She clearly wants more of Stone Old (not a typo) Uncle Jason in her life. Also, it's time to stop letting people bring clothes from home or letting the wardrobe dept repurpose quite so much stuff. That denim/blue jean top LW wears often looks like something she brought in IRL and is not favorable, it does not suit Carly or her. Nor do I understand what kind of horrifying Amish blue dress Eva LaRue was wearing at the brewpub with Sonny. It looked like a set of repurposed window curtains and she resembled one of the stars of Women Talking. Meanwhile, BLQ's latest wardrobe gives her both the coloring and dimensions of Super Mario. Also: Frank’s Next Time previews are so random now. it's just random snippets of dialogue from almost a dozen scenes and we're getting bits like little James saying 'are you a bad boss?' Who cares! How is that second grader a teaser for the next episode? It reminds me of Peapack teasers. Those need to go. Back in the day (and not that long ago) GH previews had fewer scenes but used to hit hard. Anyway, that's enough ranting, I'll get to Thursday and Friday later. Sasha already looks like a mime, BTW. She said it onscreen constantly. She called him Daddy, at least for a time. It's not a stretch, it's what happened. They had Laura go all in on Rick very quickly in the material that's available.