Vee

Valentin consistently personifies the clinical term 'weenie.' I liked CM when he came on, but as we all have discussed that went south fast. The interminable scenes the last couple weeks with Curtis and Drew feel like that season of Dukes of Hazzard where they brought in fake shemp Duke cousins to replace the originals during a salary dispute. Here, DT and CM's stilted interplay feels like they are the poor replacements for some other far more dynamic interracial buddy cop duo that does not actually exist. Cameron is playing himself Selling It! to the camera on Access Hollywood at all times, while ex-stuntman Donnell Turner (who stopped acting on this show around 2017) is out to lunch and mentally building his vision pyramid for becoming the next Billy Blanks. It's pretty lousy that Laura got sent off to the ice floes with these three losers and not Dante and some other characters we could care about.

These are invaluable, thank you again.

I understood revamping Craig and why he was chosen to shake things up. He'd come on as a villain doing nasty things, I could buy a regression in the character and I thought using him was a smart choice. I do think, especially now rewatching the glory years from the '80s, that so much of the dimension and growth of the character under Bryce and Marland was drained in the process. Not all at once, but slowly and especially later on. By 2004 or so Craig was just a cartoon. I also never, ever got the obsession with Carly, but that may be due to my having very little time for Carly for many years. (I adore Maura on GH) I liked Hunt Block but he was a very specific type of performer. There were things he could do and things he simply couldn't or wouldn't; the mask of smarm and charm almost never slipped from the character. (Oddly enough, Block's brief run on OLTL had a similar smarmy 'villain' but one who turned out to have a heart and some pathos, right before he was brutally gunned down at the end of the last writer's strike.) Scott Bryce, by contrast, looked like a doughy suburban dad by the 2000s and seemed like he would be unthreatening, but unlike the slicker Block SB was still able to effortlessly play both a very cold villain and a complex, flawed but three-dimensional man. When he came back he hadn't missed a beat. He could give them what they wanted, the problem is the show was no longer equipped for writing Craig as anything more than a quippy cardboard villain by the time he returned, and Bryce's performance was a threat to that. I think the early Sheffer years have a fair amount to recommend story and character-wise, but I do agree several elements have dated very poorly or come off crass in that unique 2000s way. Ultimately what always fascinated me as an outsider about Sheffer's ATWT (and what was also both one of its biggest boons and flaws at times) was that so much of it was an exercise in recreating a show, recrafting and revamping a series of legacy characters with hot new actors and plugging them in anywhere. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it was just very two-dimensional or vapid. Sometimes it was both at once. I also think a lot of the dialogue work was very smart, way above the other shows I was watching. Later on it got crass. The scene people always cite with Kim and Susan feels very 90210 to me - it's not the way Kim would talk about Susan's daughters IMO, who she helped raise. But it gets eyes and it popped onscreen. That was the ethos of too much of Sheffer's reign in the end. There was always a shallow popcorn/primetime element that dragged down some of the better stuff. And I say that as someone who liked the spa storyline.

Today's soaps have a serious aversion to offering actual classic episodes, lol.

Most of the plotting on Days is "Have Mostly Naked White Guy Under 30, Will Travel" and if that's enough for a viewer, God bless.

As opposed to the time she ransomed the entire town with a bioweapon and got Tony (and Courtney, but hey) killed! I ain't forgot.

You should let this side out more often, Errol.

After quitting/being fired like 3-4 times?

He gave Will Horton easily the hottest male on male sex scene soaps have ever had, so I'm happy for him.

I remember that as well.

Seems likely given the era when Lawrence was a potential hot commodity.

K.

I still don't understand how the Scott/Karen reveal happened with him already off the show IIRC. What the point of it was. It was still such a mistake to off her, both iterations on PC worked. But the same could be said for PC offing Eve Lambert.

Bringing Marco Dane onto GH was always a crazy thing to me and part of the strange, magical ABC synergy of the golden era. I have seen very little of that material and I've always wondered whose idea it was and why, and if they made much mention of OLTL or Llanview. I also wonder if Linda Gottlieb attempted at all to get Gerald Anthony to recur at OLTL again. I had no idea Jon Russell turned up on GH. AFAIK he was gone from OLTL by then. I do know Nora on OLTL was brought on as an old friend/colleague of his.

IIRC both Cari Shayne and Sabato chose to leave.

@DRW50 @Faulkner Dropped into a BBC ident today: The audio is Donna saying in reverse, 'why did this face come back?' The digits flashing onscreen are apparently teasing a full new trailer during Eurovision.

The remastered show really is beautiful on Amazon. Yet it's hard to watch it and know Knots remains languishing in raw VHS rips for now (especially when I felt KL made much better use of its budget, production design and location shoots). I'm wrapping the seventh season, as is my custom with Dallas I skipped way ahead to watching the Jessica arc with the always delightful Alexis Smith who is completely, hilariously batshít. I will then skip even further to watch the end of season eight just in time for the dream season, where I can hopefully sync up Dallas and KL viewing in tandem to examine the Lorimar creative team swap.

I never stopped being fond of Jerry.

They care about avoiding a fine, which means they're not dumping 50 years of tapes or reels in the Hudson. I just don't think they care enough to do anything that requires any effort, vs. letting the material rot in some closet. I realize you are very invested in believing the show's archive is gone for good and take it very personally that anyone would disagree with your scoop. We established this at least a year or two ago. What you fail to understand is that just like P&G doesn't care about these soaps, few of us here care enough about you to make this some sort of personal thing. I barely have any idea who you are; I would take this position with anyone who claimed P&G had somehow taken the time and effort to nuke the entire archive. It's just not something they realistically need to do vs. shutting the stuff away and forgetting it's somewhere. That's not a reflection on you, it's just my opinion about P&G. If you don't agree, that's fine. If you could stop showing up every 6-9 months solely to rage at strangers though, that would be great.