Vee

My God. I may have to send that to my parents. Yes, among other things.

Does anyone know the deal with John Colicos returning as Mikkos' identical cousin(?) Petros in '85? It seems like he was only for a week or two which is bizarre.

I loved some of the actors on SuBe: Genre queen Lesley-Anne Down, Sam Behrens (who I think did okay), the amazing Dominique Jennings who has worked so little since. I never really took the show too seriously but it was a fun light watch at times during its ridiculous storylines - like the JER Scream knockoff story, was it called Terror Island? I'm a sucker for a soap that can actually execute a decent slasher storyline, and IIRC (from almost thirty years ago) they mostly did. Unlike the Salem Stalker a few years later. Sarah Buxton I enjoyed, but she was always limited. People kept insisting she move to an ABC soap and I was like 'uhhh, good luck.'

I'm not going to fault the show for showcasing Bobbie's beloved daughter and granddaughter in a memorial, especially when Eden and Laura were clearly close to Jackie. But I do think the show's choices for any memorial definitely needs to go beyond the show's already prevalent Carly/Joss focus. Tony Geary adored Jackie and put himself on the line for her at least once if not more; he should appear. Ryan Carnes should appear, Sarah Brown should appear, Tamara Braun should appear. It would be lovely if Brad Maule, Sam Behrens or other appropriate Bobbie-related characters/performers can appear. Enough of this would satisfy me.

No chance Kristina becomes a doctor, IMO.

Oh God, I'd forgotten all about that. BTW, you apparently cannot receive DMs.

I liked her as Lizzie on GL! And I thought the recast on GH wasn't a bad idea at first; I thought she turned in a good performance in the custody story vs. Maxie over Georgie II. But it became clear she had about two speeds and that was it.

I think she's very talented and I'd be open to it. Whether she has the spark for a Lulu, I agree it's hard to see.

What he was trying to do early on with Rylan's Lulu, very clearly, was redo his dreadful "Teen Jessica" storyline from OLTL. Both women were mentally and physically traumatized by a supervillain's deranged medical procedure (Jessica got ECT from Mitch Laurence, Lulu was frozen in cryogenic stasis by Stavros). Both woke with a 'clean slate' lacking a huge swath of their memory, and both rebelled against their former lives by shacking up with hunky men who were not their current popular love interests. Where Jessica became fixated on Cristian, her high school boyfriend, Lulu randomly moved in with... Magic Milo, a poor non-actor with a hard body who Ron and Frank were deeply enamored of. It was an awful storyline, but at GH fortunately viewer response nipped it in the bud and ended it pretty quickly. After that he had zero interest in Lulu whatsoever. As you said, she became a brood mare and a mom, little to nothing else, and stayed that way until Rylan exited. I think they just need to lean her in to her family's adventurous roots, lean into her ties to Crimson/Deception as well maybe and let the story and romances follow. Maybe she takes over Crimson and becomes its roving editor-star reporter a la Brenda Starr, broadening its scope (a la Teen Vogue) to big adventure-ready stories. As for romance if it's Dante, great. If not, someone else. I think DZ would be good with a variety of people but for the immediate term I would play him with BLQ and maybe a potential triangle with fellow WSB agent Annie Donely (recast, since influencer Caitlin Reilly will not be signing with this soap lol). Lulu you don't bring back until there is a firm plan, because they never really had much of one with either adult Lulu IMO. They just loved Julie Berman and let it ride by putting her with people they liked - they turned her into a LW clone because they wanted the audience to know the new SORASed Lulu had Carly's seal of approval, then they had her tried with every hot new man until Dante. Berman's personality and monologues about her broken family carried the day in between. That's not a character to me, or if it is one I just never found it very appealing. God I wish, but it's too late! I used to chafe on their calling the toddler that.

As I've said far too many times it's what needed to happen with Dante and Lucky as the new Luke and Scorpio in 2009-10, and they shít on the golden goose. It was ready made, Dominic and Jonathan were perfect. Lulu I can take or leave lol. I think the best way forward is to lean in towards that adventuring journalist thing they had set up with a very strong actress, be it Marci Miller or whoever. I don't think Julie Berman's Lulu had a persona beyond smug and damaged in various ways benefitting the plot, and I think you'd need to reinvent her from the ground up. Her relationship with her mother would also need to be profoundly different from the very dysfunctional relationship with Luke, and her bond with Tracy which while nice didn't honor Laura enough IMO. In those years they were painting Laura in absentia as the fragile princess who couldn't take life with the Spencers and was a sad afterthought for the family. Actually, the Tracy/Laura dynamic re: Lulu could be very interesting whenever she returns if they play that history.

Which would've been better for the show, minus more Jason of course. I do remember the whole thing with Jason refusing him which caught my interest at the time as a lapsed/casual viewer at best, but it is beyond me how this did not lead to open warfare. It can't be denied that, again for better or worse, Frank and Ron broke the back of the mob focus when they came in. There was (and remains) a considerable pushback in 2014-2015 and onward to doing more mob again, but nothing about any mob story since has ever been the same. They all feel like shadowboxing, unless they feature more outsize characters like Ava.

Wasn't the rumor that they were going to decapitate Abby originally, lol? Knowing Ron's other rejected soap ideas I wouldn't be shocked if he pitched that.

I also thought the conflict was interesting but it didn't last. Ironically I think Sonny and Jason broke from each other even further later IIRC, in the Zacchara years perhaps, which is when Guza seemed to sour on Sonny for a time and when the writing began to openly critique Sonny and Carly's parenting. The problem is they put the critique in the mouth of Jason a lot of the time, who was just as guilty. And I don't remember Sonny and Jason ever being in open mob conflict, though I could swear Jason at one point had control of the business over him. It sometimes makes me wonder if at one point Guza had intended for Dante to really take Sonny down/be his undoing, leaving Jason in the prime position.

I would not have bought Emily being more than 25 tops at that point, lol. Anyway, this is all academic.

They could decapitate Gabi or Rob Wilson on-camera and they'd both be back in 6-9 months.

I think Emily was supposed to be either college-aged or just out of college by the time they got together. (She was in med school around that time.) But it would never have worked period, lol. Most of their audience remembered Amber's teen Emily idolizing Jason and Sonny.

It was his wife's idea, IIRC.

This isn't funny because sooner or later this is absolutely going to happen.

Imagine: Personalities beyond "Caucasian"!

I'd forgotten all about that. It still annoys me that the various J.R. moves related to Knots (the methanol business Gary and Abby sell him on in Season 3, the publisher) never come to anything.

Also:

@Faulkner @DRW50

In fairness, Natalia's Emily was much softer on the Qs than Amber's. But I still want to see Amber play the role once more, lol.

I will again defend some of Brenda's Italian interlude bc I thought it was interesting to ease us into showing her living a very different life. Of course that didn't last long because IIRC Sonny or Jason showed up very quickly, and Sonny was running away from all the horrible shít he'd done recently and I seem to recall Brenda excusing most of it at the time and enabling him. They also knew they were on a clock with VM and that she might not re-up, which she didn't, and they wasted some time. Now, my defense aside I also haven't watched any of that material in over ten years, so... I can't fault Vanessa for intervening on some of it. I don't think anyone was really into hearing about her epic affair with Dante except for Guza, and I say that as someone who really likes Dante and thought they had chemistry. She had been promised Sonny and Brenda, the goods had been sold to their audience and she wanted it delivered. And I wasn't even a big Sonny/Brenda fan! But I think she was right to put her foot down and get that, because the subsequent wedding scenes and some of the dissolution of their actual marriage were to me some of both of the actors' best work, period, and probably the last great work that longtime writing team did. I think seeing them together as an older, supposedly more mature (lol) married couple was and is a new frontier, and forced the writers to do something different (briefly). I think she still definitely has it tbh, pretty close to the surface these days as opposed to some of the soppier past times with Nik or with Matt Cohen's idiot character. She laced into Nikolas with beauty right before he 'died' and then she pretty easily disposed of his 'body' without hesitation. It's just something the writers keep flirting with and then trying to dance around. I knew the moment they started sharing more scenes, then when she started babysitting the boys all the time that it was coming. It was the show's way to try to prove NL/Emily was ready for the big time and was now a mature female lead. People called me crazy. Folks said it again when I warned 'em after Howarth and Becky started sharing more scenes. They doubted his word! He was a nobody. They were really running on fumes with Whack-a-Mobster at that point, and they also brought in the Zaccharas around the same time who had much more going for them.

I also checked out for a while after that, or rather right after the PC Hotel fire. The shooting was so disgusting. I had been ride or die for Maurice and Sarah's Sonny and Carly and I hadn't disliked Mo and Tamara together early on, but that cured me of S&C forever. I had been merely rubbernecking at the disaster for most of '03 (which honestly felt like it lasted five years) but I was super into Carly and Lorenzo because it was clear that had gotten away from the show and out of its control in late '03/early '04, and the early build for them (mostly pre-shooting lol) was legitimately decent. But the hotel fire (and before that, the bizarre Sonny/Sam sword in the stone caper which... I don't even fully recall) was a hilarious farce. And after that it was clear the show was hitting a not even interestingly bad period, so I walked away until coming back in summer '05 to watch another trainwreck as I realized (before anyone else I knew, I might add!) that they were going for Sonny and Emily, and then the show completely imploded. They all have a lot of similar characteristics. Mob queens who don't flinch. Maura was only originally supposed to be on for a few days (something I still don't understand). She did things early on that got the other two wasted. Ava has survived due to a different regime and a popular performer, moreso the different regime because both Cynthia and Sarah were popular. Ava has 'faced' her crimes in the past with various self-pitying themed episodes I didn't really buy into, but to see an actual mirror would be more intriguing for me because I think not too far deep down Ava is still absolutely that person.