Vee

Amazing. Every choice is bad.

Darin Brooks is not an option lol.

It was such a waste. He was dedicated to the show. He was also unhappy with the direction of his story under Guza; castigating Elizabeth, fighting drugs, the Siobhan saga, etc.

Like I said. Overplayed the hand.

New companion Varada Sethu and Gatwa filming for Series 2/15:

I will say I think a Lulu return (Berman or otherwise) is probably nigh. It's been rumored for awhile, Dante and Sam are doing absolutely nothing of note and I suspect PM will want more of Laura's kids on canvas. I wouldn't be shocked if we finally get another Lucky recast either, but I suspect they'll still hold it open for Jonathan. (Who could accept, who knows?)

No matter how he dies, no matter when he dies, it will be spun into a vast left wing conspiracy. The irony here for those of us with a sense of the past is clear.

LMAOOOO. Okay, Darin.

Oh yeah. It got personal because Sarah got vocal with the show. But I also kind of liked how that whole thing was done, because frankly it was realistic - they would bury her in the Pine Barrens. Michael was a dysfunctional product of that life who would do that to her to protect his mother, and he paid for it with a prison term and everything that happened after, all because of Sonny's unquenchable, aging will to power. The problem was Guza too often wanted to have it both ways at this point in his GH run: Push the envelope towards primetime and cable, but still always walk things back to poor put-upon, heroic Sonny and Jason (mostly Jason in that period, as he'd begun edging Sonny to a more organic role as a very flawed patriarch and had begun openly acknowledging Sonny's many mistakes as a family man).

The media is overplaying their hand on this one with the voters too early. Again.

Reskinned Greenlee had no reason to exist either. Finn and Hayden's story was boring as shît. The only person Finn's had serious chemistry with was Tracy when he first came on as a much more eccentric character. They were doing too much to differentiate him from Silas and John, but it actually worked because he spent so much time with Jane Elliot. And it would've worked had they gone there. Finn's been useless since Tracy first left, and now he's a joke.

Never heard that name before.

I've never seen the point of Sarah Brown returning to GH as anyone but Carly, and I still don't. I think she did very solid work, even if it was often very redolent of Carly. I think there are some very watchable moments in her run despite it mostly being very dark, ugly story; if you can accept that then you can enjoy some of the material. I never really cared about Claudia or what she wanted or her in any pairings; I saw her as strictly an antagonist and I thought the gothic, incestuous Zacchara family was an interesting, kooky bunch at first that ultimately got overplayed (especially Anthony). I thought she did well and didn't embarrass herself or bore me like most of the soap twins we could cite. But ultimately I didn't need Claudia, I wanted Carly.

Few, but some. Kevin on GH is the one I can think off the top of my head, which is frustrating since I was just thinking on this the other night. People could make an argument for Maggie Stone on AMC but I wouldn't necessarily agree. The character only worked when stuck to Bianca, like Frankie, and even then was a muddle. I wouldn't know enough about Francesca James' Kitty/Kelly to know if that was a success, but she was in a prominent couple with Linc.

The Salem Stalker did one thing well - it got eyeballs on the show. JER was very good at that. He wasn't very good at much else after the '90s. The deaths were often played for laughs and executed in the most cartoonish way possible, both script-wise and in embarrassing production value. You got to watch essential characters brutally slaughtered in comic ways while knowing the writer was giggling his way through it. I am a big fan of slasher movies; I think a serial killer story on a soap can be a lot of fun and good when done well and I am all for one that works right. (Some portions of the Music Box Killer story on OLTL a year later, ironically featuring Matt Ashford as the culprit, did a decent job.) But the SS as executed was just exploitative trash. This extended to the character and dialogue work, the endless dream and fantasy sequences, the 'clues' and omens that went nowhere. JER wrote for sub-literate children after he left DOOL the first time, not that the dialogue was in great shape before he left (everyone talking to themselves or monologuing about exposition non-stop). In the early 2000s a lot of young fans online gave him an immediate pass because of their memories of their childhood. But once the millennium hit it was all his Catholic guilt over sexuality and fetishes, all his psychosexual obsessions with rape, gender, misogyny, the Church, etc. all at once, all the time. It's a fascinating subject for an academic paper but as a soap it was unwatchable. Nothing JER did onscreen at PSSNS in the last years of his life could ever make it to air today, nor should it. And the Salem Stalker was a precursor to torture porn. Just nihilism, because he clearly was wrestling with some of that at the core of his nature.

She tried this again at OLTL in 1999, where she went without a HW for most of the year after Pam Long split in either late '98 or early that year (I still wonder what if anything Long wanted to do at that show - I only remember her commenting on Roger Howarth being difficult to write for in '98). ABC ultimately made her take McTavish, and they became a gruesome twosome.

Mulcahey was a key and prominent part of the writing team at GH in the late '90s often name-checked by actors and other writers and journalists (like Karen Harris, or Michele ValJean who created the Liz rape saga from her own experience, another close friend of PM's who is still at B&B), but he was never HW. Before that, his storied resume goes on and on in this thread - Santa Barbara, GL under Marland and Curlee, etc, one of their key writers too. He apparently had a tough co-HW stint at GL with others(?) in the early-mid '90s but my understanding is that by then there were many, many cooks in the kitchen and JFP micromanaged everything. @DRW50 would know more. Or @Khan perhaps.

He couldn't act on GH. He was embarrassingly bad in the role. Twinkdom or former twinkdom does not entitle you to a job. Frankly I'm still not convinced he can act. He got a lot of attention on AMC but a lot of that was just yelling to me. Well, first, Mulcahey would never have permanently killed off Lucky. He wrote a lot for the Spencers. Second, he was a staff writer at the time, not HW. And third Lucky's death was always shown to be a fakeout; Jonathan pre-taped material showing him imprisoned before he exited.

It was very well-known Jonathan Jackson was capitol-G Gone the instant his contract was up - he was thought to be a movie star (and almost was). It was all his choice, there was never any question the show would've killed to keep him if it was up to them. But they knew he wanted to spread his wings. Neither Tony nor Genie wanted Lucky recast at all and pushed against it, but eventually I think they got TG at least behind Jacob Young, a more network-ready hunky choice for a recast, who was still hot from B&B at the time. How they did so is beyond me as Jacob was in no way equipped for that part.

I'm not going to debate what Trump would do on Israel and Palestine because I do not believe he's not getting back in office.

I like America Ferrera, but it feels like a very condescending nom; like, 'oh, we'll give them something for the famous monologue'. It was a great scene and she did great. Do I think it needed a nomination, no, but that's the weird giveth and taketh mentality of the Academy.

It's pretty ridiculous that both Gerwig and Robbie got snubbed IMO (Gerwig was also snubbed for the equally excellent Little Women). And probably an angry response from the Academy's senior members. Thrilled about Anatomy of a Fall, but this is dirty pool to me and we're probably going to see another round of anonymous ballots with grumpy Academy members bitching about wokeism or something re: Barbie. Never mind that it was the biggest movie of the year, and not exactly coasting on woke capital and tear-stained online social media posts (like other movies in recent past I could name). The rumors today that Paul Thomas Anderson ghostwrote KOTFM are wild.

Oh, he was great in a lot of things. I didn't even recognize him for hours when I finally watched some of ENT - he totally disappeared into that Vulcan character. Sort of a TV version of Scott Glenn. What a talent.

This may possibly be another interesting, instructive moment in the genre to examine. I've talked about a few of them in the last decade-plus where we've gotten to see soaps either reconstruct themselves or soft reboot, either on streaming (Neighbours on Amazon, OLTL and AMC on Hulu) or in attempted onscreen revamps (Sally Sussman's troubled return to Y&R, where she opened on a classic Abbott family breakfast episode to try to cleanse the audience's palate and evoke the past). Even recently, looking at the recovered Edge of Night episode from 1975 where they jumped to ABC with a special event, much of that episode's story was devoted to recapping ongoing plot for new viewers and did it fairly seamlessly using a variety of devices (court testimony, a character telling a doctor about his patient, etc). McPherson and Thomas' infamous DOOL run also attempted a soft reboot with the Horton Square gala or whatever it was, in 2011. Will Mulcahey and co. attempt something like these gestures in his opening hours to give GH a touchstone to what it used to be back when soaps had some authenticity? I think it's entirely likely it will be much more low-key and we may not have a big fanfare at first. But who knows. Into the bathroom!

I knew when they covered the move with an endless onscreen dance marathon to save on sets the show was fûcked.