Vee

A focus on the doctors and the work they do in the last two days with official writing change is what I come away with most. The intelligence and care given over to the Heather situation despite her many insane crimes - and it's true, before '04 Heather (while batshit crazy) wasn't a totally irredeemable psychopath. And the fun back and forth between Laura and Robert over it in the background was neat. I assume this is being done so PM can continue to use Alley Mills probably similarly to her supporting B&B role of the slightly nuts Pam (who Mulcahey wrote for), though Heather was always a lot more nuts than Pam. I'm dubious but if they keep using Heather as a foil/talk-to for Laura I could potentially if grudgingly get behind something like that, because AM is talented and the roots are there with Laura and Heather in classic episodes, and it's nice to see that touched on. But Mills is gonna have to seriously tone down her performance. What really impressed me though were the Ashford family scenes with Kevin. That was very good stuff and clearly a labor of love for Mulcahey given his past work re: minority issues, and it felt to me like GH fulfilling its social contract with the viewers for the first time in a long time. They haven't gone near abortion or birth control or COVID in many recent years, just had people keep pumping out babies which I found shameful, but this is a good start back from that. Those scenes were long, layered, intelligent and emotional, and made me actually invest in Hat Dad's feelings for the first time. It reminded me of the show that gave Robin AIDS and educated its afterschool audience, and that made me proud. And LOL I do appreciate Diane reading Julian and Britt for filth as dead perjurers. I may have very limited tolerance for ol' Diane but those scenes with Alexis were spiky and smart as she broke down exactly how Alexis could get back into the law. As for Nina, she is clearly harkening back to apeshit classic Nina from the Stafford days - spoiled, snarky, OTT and histrionic. Which I find Watros has often played the undercurrent of to get through years of boring material, but now it's really defined. Which is fine by me, it's who the character has always been. Time to let her loose! Ava: I do think she is still deep in all this. I can also buy her becoming legit dickmatized for Sonny during the course of her scheme while also having worked him from the start. She's fallen for (somehow) worse men, or even lamer ones like Morgan and Griffin Munro. This is the woman who brought us Aunt Denise DiMuccio. She's both brilliant and down bad!

I have been dealing with IRL stuff so I'm going to try to unpack the last two eps more overnight, but I was glad to see them invoking the Heather/Laura past from their youth more and more in recent days. Heather has been mentioning it for a couple weeks now, then Laura. People forget that if you go back to those eps from the '70s/'80s their family connections intertwined a number of times because of the Webber brothers - and Heather lived with Lesley for awhile, and Laura spent time with her.

Thanks for both of these.

You would never have put GH back on the map in such a big way in the '90s without Luke and Laura. It just would not have happened. It was exquisitely written, performed and brilliantly promoted. It was everywhere that fall and it's what brought me to the show as a kid.

The dead end branch of the left has operated as if "Mr. Trump" will always win since 2016, in fairness. Who can forget their sage electoral projections proclaiming doom for Dems in every midterm and general since? They tend to wishcast revenge fantasies against the libs vs. reality. This even extends to slightly less clueless guys like the dude from Cracked writing an impassioned coping-phase-of-grief editorial in which he proudly proclaims that based on the SOTU he was wrong about Biden needing to step down from the ticket, if and only if he does what Cracked Guy says for the next couple weeks, in which case if Biden's numbers fail to rise (which they already have) the party must then definitely eject him. Laughable.

I'm not super familiar with this technique despite immersing myself in Marland ATWT over the 2020s. I'd like to know more if you have a post you can point to sometime, thanks.

I think late-stage Bill is very intriguing, as are his many metamorphoses and all the various backstories and subtext Tony has spun up in his many period interviews about him, etc. I just don't think it makes for a good long-term character to continue with indefinitely, especially at that point two years in. I watched the November sweeps eps of '92 where Bill and Holly first proudly declare in bed that they will each get tested for HIV before doing the deed (in a series of cringeworthy educational scenes) and then their big consummation scenes featuring test result presentations(!!), rooftop rendezvouses, purple florid speeches by Geary at his most camp and a long, long section of slo-mo dancing and some sort of sub-Bryan Adams song, and wow it's all howlers. You can buy two teens like Jason and Robin doing that ritual with the tests onscreen to educate kids watching, but not these grown-ass adults. Anyway, by fall '93 no, I don't think there is a way to make Bill work on contract.

Lord, I remember Daytime Confidential calling that poor girl "Tammin SurSUCKS". She and Lachlan Buchanan were both clear examples of daytime's many attempts at creating an Aussie to America soap pipeline over the last 30+ years; some (like Ingo Rademacher) are more successful than most others. Of course poor Lachlan came out almost immediately after Y&R and is now living his best life. I remember @Darn absolutely roasting the Korbel, reliquary, etc. era back in the day. I wonder how he feels with hindsight. I sometimes get the sense the show perhaps had more of a focus on cultivating a new generation then than it does now.

She can be happy without it being boring.

LOL the actors can like whatever they want, doesn't mean it's not a boring pairing and can't be undone at a moment's notice. These shows are not a democracy, as they prove time and again. Just ask Ceara Connor on AMC. As for L&L, it was Tony who vetoed reuniting them in more recent years. I doubt Genie would refuse to play it if it was put in front of her especially given her loaded comments at the time of Tony's exit (including in her farewell message to him), but unfortunately I don't think it will ever happen. So I choose to move on to something fresh, new and exciting for Laura. I love Kevin but that's not him for Laura and it never was. They were only put together because he was available on recurring and FV didn't want to hire anyone else for her. I don't! I think it's ridiculous and shameful they unceremoniously killed Luke offscreen with zero impact, and ridiculous how they mishandled L&L before Tony left largely due to his own petulance. If they'd gone there as planned I would have been all for it, and I think it's a black mark on the show they didn't. And I'd argue most of the longtime audience will always be there for Luke and Laura despite understandable misgivings. A handful of dedicated Twitter people do not reflect reality, especially on a couple like that. If you go online you'd think Dex and Joss and Sonny and Nina are insanely popular with their 50-200 retweets lol.

I can understand the impulse, but Laura deserves a new man all her own AFAIC. And I'd still reunite Robert and Anna, but everyone on Earth except me and caroline want Robert and Holly back together including the actors.

I was not a big Brenda fan in those years because she was so omnipresent, I preferred Robin and Lois (and later Carly, who I had an intense hate/fascination relationship with like most viewers lol) and was not quite as clear on Brenda's charms in those days. I did like her more mature relationship with Jax in that period, as I've talked about but it took me years to fully appreciate her classic era or her with Sonny. So I remember the big promo spread and just rolling my eyes and being like 'come on'. I do really enjoy rewatching '90s Brenda now.

That was Ric's last stint, I think. He was on the outs with Liz again and managed to trick Nina into marrying him so he could get her money, then began gaslighting her. I think she met and married him within a matter of like a couple weeks lol. Only heroic Franco could save her! (This was also the period with the live episode which led to Nina and Ric's wedding, with Nicolas Bechtel just clowning around at the end on the sets for Uncle Frank.) Allegedly, Ron's original plan was to murder Ric as part of this story. The network vetoed it after firing him and made them sub in, you guessed it, Silas Clay in Ric's place. That period in the first 8 months or so of 2015 was truly bugshit terrible, from Aunt Denise to Franco and Nina to Fluke and on and on. It's no wonder they fired RC but it was compulsively watchable because it was so bad.

They must've been planning sooner than just that, because we know Steve ultimately vetoed Carly around this time. But yes, looking at it again as an adult the material was always riding the line in the way Carly spells out right before they sleep together. I wasn't totally shocked because of the vibe, but as a kid racing home from school for GH I hadn't always seen all of the earlier scenes that I've seen since which are really explicit about it.

Same. But yes, her first year-plus was stone cold psycho buffoonery. Culminating in some (but not all) of the material that helped get Ron fired, Stafford on her hands and knees howling away searching for an invisible baby as evil Ric tricks her with a sound FX app on his phone labeled 'Waahh!'

I agree. Though I think they purely lucked into him with Sarah Brown when he came back. I wonder how long it was before Sonny and Carly went from just an experiment with two combustible actors to something they were actively moving towards. I remember it shocking fans live BITD when the magazine spoilers hit but if you look at stuff now, a lot of the psychosexual, bonding etc. material in that period hinted towards it.

I have talked about it before a bit, but I would create a suave WSB agent related to the Wards to come to town and romance Laura. Entirely possible. Anything after Stafford's first year is a bland blur.

New character, new hire.

They should've mined both the characters' dark psychological history years ago - beyond just Ryan and Laura's instant brothers. Kevin's family history is a veritable haunted house. I get that Genie is happy with him and they have some fans but it is boring. I'll never not want Kevin and Lucy reunited, and never not want a new man on par with Luke's heroic stature for Laura. And yes, Michael and Willow should be long gone.

I would argue she already does that, though - again, Mayor Laura is inserted into virtually any ongoing situation or storyline by virtue of her job which makes her central to the town. It's been like this for several years running.

No way. Laura is the center of PC and enmeshed in so many stories directly because of that role. She shows up as part of so many situations all the time specifically because she is 'Mayor Collins'. It feels totally right to me. Laura doing 'social work' offscreen was what kept her bogged down in the late '90s.

There was never a point beyond getting Michelle Stafford from CBS, letting her go nuts onscreen again, and then (at that time) RC thinking she would soar playing a wacky antiheroine/whatever opposite Roger Howarth which proved unpopular. Everything since then has been flailing, including the recast and the musical chairs with the secret kid(s). Like so many characters currently onscreen, Nina has run far, far longer than she should've on contract simply because FV either didn't want to give up a get from another network or didn't want to invest in new characters or popular returns. It was executive inertia, combined IMO with Maurice Benard taking a shine to Watros and being tired of being paired with LW/Carly. The distaste for the Sonny/Nina pairing has seeped off the screen from the writing team in an unprofessional way IMO, and Mo and Watros do have a smidge of chemistry (certainly more than him and LW) but that's never changed the fact that Nina should not be a 10-year veteran lol. Nor should most of the long-running post-2011 cast. (Ava is a whole other can of worms, but I think she can still run a bit longer.) So many of these people are not needed, especially when you know that Vanessa Marcil among others is out there.

Oh, that's sad. When I heard the details of her case I was wondering if it was something like that.

It is my fondest wish that the NYC actor/soap pipeline resumes in whatever altered way possible. It is a cultural heritage as well as an economic boon. I have bored so many young actors back East with this lol.

Nina has always been apeshit crazy, especially in the Stafford years. She has always been a privileged, unhinged socialite and Watros has never taken her too seriously onscreen IMO, just like Annie. There is always an edge of camp hysteria to the character. (Her performance as Kelly the AA member on Y&R was visceral and wrenching but more grounded IMO, so she is capable of modulating when she wants to and a character warrants it - Nina doesn't.) So yes, what needs to happen is what's needed to happen for years: Let Nina be Nina and go apeshit, stop trying to make her into a heroine or a doormat and let Watros do what she does best before exiting. It has infuriated me for several years now how little he gives to Brook Kerr, who works this show with real dedication like she's been helping to hold it up for 10-20 years as opposed to what, 3 or 4.