Vee

Rauch brought in Lee Ann. Not Jason. Mark Brettschneider was a Gottlieb hire.

Yeah, it's no Days.

Most of us wanted it once upon a time but Steve is never going to agree to it and the network/show is never going to force it, so it's a moot point.

Yes. They were longtime mob rivals. I can't remember what Cyrus had done most recently but there's a slew of past crimes.

This Jason's son nonsense people online come up with is as fake as "street kid Dev is Brenda's son". I suspect he may well be out soon, and he should be. He's a wuss but he was right to drop a dime on Sonny.

It's thrilling to know Anna says 'I see Sonny Corinthos clearly now,' but showing up at Wagger's could potentially leave her the fool depending on how he is actually involved here. Though again, I don't think a black ops kill squad would meet at FBI HQ in Quantico which is explicitly where Wagger met Jason in the flashback.

Sickles needs to go AFAIC. They should purge as many of the FV/RC-era OLTL lifers as possible. Gold doesn't count, as he dates back to the golden '90s with that show and of course many others. What's curious to me is PM/EK's names switching first place day by day so far. Seems like they're trading off daily?

It's too soon to hope for it, but I would be pleased if classic P&G characters (from ATWT) began crossing over to the show in guest spots a la how that show let people pop up from other CBS soaps or vice versa. That would be a security blanket for a longtime CBS audience.

I'll say what I said when we first learned Y&R had dispensed with all breakdown writers so Josh could do it himself: It's a recipe for a psychological meltdown. I'll never forget Harding Lemay casually mentioning in his book how he fired most/all of the staff or breakdown writers at AW after finding their work inferior and began simply writing the whole (90 minute!!) show essentially himself 5 days a week, 365 days a year. That is psychotic. As this continued on he began casually littering the pages with more and more oblique mentions of his wife and children's mental breakdowns, addictions, institutionalizations, etc. as he and his family began falling apart. Whether he fully understood the link between these things was never quite clear to me. There have been murky stories about Griffith having personal issues BTS that I don't know too much about. What I do know is this kind of pressure is a recipe for anyone to lose it. As I told Darn the other day, so much of Y&R feels like it is plotted just to get Josh through the next week or two so he can stop writing for a few hours. Plots fast-forward (like Zenk's character debuting and almost immediately being exposed, and now doing all these disguises) or simply don't happen onscreen at all. Every week is either about standing in place or hitting a new wall story-wise. It's not sustainable for any writer IMO, and Griffith used to be truly talented long ago at OLTL.

I think there's some worthwhile talks on this show (like that beautiful, sad final interview with Tyler Christopher) but I also frankly think it sometimes becomes a forum to sate Maurice's ego. He's taken potshots at various unnamed actors while inviting so many on to praise his genius.

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.