Vee

A bit late on this one, but I was making the rounds of new horror movies for the weekend and catching up on some older ones - while V/H/S 85 is out this weekend on Shudder, the previous film in the "V/H/S" horror anthology film series, V/H/S 99 from 2022 (also on Shudder), features two soap vets in two different segments. Kelley Missal (Danielle, OLTL) has a brief role as a doomed '90s chick rocker turned ghoul in the opening segment, but it's GH's own late great Sonya Eddy (Epiphany) who plays a vengeful mother exacting a Saw-esque scheme in a segment directed by musician Flying Lotus. Sonya was playing very much against type and does a great job. I miss her.

Can do! I'm glad you waited, it's been a busy week recovering from my COVID booster. The above SON link from '09 repeats the material from a TV Guide interview with Michael Fairman that was posted at the time and is very real. I would've passed along the archive.is link but that site is being finicky tonight. There's more out there that I believe adds even more concrete detail, but that's a good start. Here's Tamara basically dropping a dime on Pratt and the show in The Advocate: Happy to help.

It's inevitable Abby returns someday no matter who's writing. She is a core child and this is DAYS.

There's one I've never seen. Who's the blond?

Bryan Fuller is being sued for sexual harassment on his Shudder queer horror doc. I love a lot of his work but some of what's described here definitely sounds on brand for his excessively horny public persona. I wish I could say there aren't already too many LGBT people who operate like this in a professional capacity. The BTS personnel testimonials for either side of this accusation are already flying back and forth of course alleging that either party is the real problem, and some of it seems to suggest a turf war over the documentary and its content. I'd love to believe it's not true but I don't easily do that, so I'll see how it shakes out. Either way, gross.

She looks like Nomi Malone!

Poor Linda Gray looks frail in that sidelong shot of the women. But my mother is also that thin these days near that age and she's doing okay, so who knows. Oh God. The Loni/Denise Richards double act story. That was a nadir moment for the show (and actually in the back half of Season 4 IIRC, which wasn't quite the dying days but it was a rough patch and got rougher down the road).

This doesn't surprise me at all. Ormond is another up and coming female star who was the flavor of the month in the mid-'90s and then (like Gretchen Mol or Annabella Sciorra) her career vanished very, very fast. The next time I saw her again was in Inland Empire around a decade later when she began to recover a career in arthouse work.

In fairness, though: They won. Drew's career will be fine. But she made a series of stupid choices during this period, her show personnel treated people poorly on-set during the strike, and she took her lumps for it. It's not that deep. But I know we agree you can still be a Drew Barrymore fan (as I am) and acknowledge that.

Lord. You can like Drew Barrymore and admit she made a stupid choice with the multiple weepy video messages. All that did was embarrass her and cause her to keep stepping on rakes in public for several days. I like Drew. I hope her show continues. And the public loves Drew Barrymore, she will survive. But the way she mishandled this situation is a blunder largely of her and the network's own making. I understand the nuances of that situation re: her show's survival and I don't think she needed to be raked over the coals quite as much as she was, but the fact is it was overall an unforced error on her show's part. And in terms of strategy, turning the pressure up on Drew's show caused all the other talk shows on daytime to back down. That was a major factor in getting the writers to win big. It worked. Drew's career will recover. But if she wanted to keep those writers, she should've not gone back. It's that simple.

Anyone blaming the Dems is either carrying water for the Republicans and expecting them to always bail them out for their own bad behavior (which is generally an implicit attitude among the Beltway media, who prefer the pre-Trump GOP to Dems anyday) or the dead-end wing of the left who just despise Dems period.

If it's really only temporary it seems designed simply to teach Jen Lilley and others who might want to step out of line a lesson, when Lilley no longer needs the soaps. It also smacks of the same ego and contempt for the audience which has already led them to recast key roles with performers who are already onscreen playing others multiple times now, like the revolving Kristens and the Ben/Alex games. All of the above seems on brand for Alarr, and to an extent Ron who helped start this at GH. It's also obvious from Lilley's comments that they'd intended to bluff her into signing long-term when she first offered to come back to honor Aniston, and when they couldn't do it they reacted out of spite.

Non-paywall link here.

He was forced to write frontburner action story for Zach Slater and hated doing so? Cite your source.

There's no dispute that Frons loved those characters. That doesn't mean Pratt did not clearly enjoy writing for Zach. Nobody was forcing him to do that material, that's the point.

Things are going poorly for McCarthy in Congress today, but this is all I can think of (not my tweet):

I saw zero sign of Pratt being forced to use Zach. He was the typical macho character he favored among the men at GH, and he notably amped up all the crime/gunplay elements with Zach as soon as he arrived (as well as at Y&R). YMMV. Zach also romanced or bedded both Pratt's rotating new outside faves he promised would shake up the show but who tanked in story - first Tamara/Reese and then Jamie Luner as the miscast Liza. The story Pratt gave Angie and Jesse seriously damaged Jesse's character on a fundamental level, even if it gave us Shannon Kane and gave Laura Bonarrigo from OLTL some work. It could also arguably be called playing into ancient racist tropes.

Mischa Barton is officially somnambulant to watch and seems haggard. Her strange array of Swiss Miss-esque outfits aren't helping. Some elements of the hotel story and others seem vaguely all-ages teen soap, which does again remind me of some of the early Prospect Park soap subplots over here (well, not the all ages part). There's nothing wrong with that but it becomes a bit uniform and you hope for stuff with a bit more substance. I need to catch up on the last two or so eps though.

It's not a nitpick when it affected both the viewers and the actors alike. The issue is that the audience, Eden and Tamara Braun all came onboard sold a specific pitch. They came in believing Bianca and Reese's romance to be a legitimate long-term storyline, not just a device to deliver Reese and then cut her loose from Bianca to fùck all of Pratt's other preferred (mostly male) characters. Eden dipped when this turned out to be a bait and switch while Pratt blamed her in the press, and Tamara either quit or was fired very soon after because the character tanked with the audience as a result of Pratt's story choices. That is not coincidence. I don't have a problem with Reese being bisexual; I didn't even necessarily have a problem with her being into Zach, her brother-in-law, which was scandalous. (I don't even have a problem with the pitch to have Bianca sleep with Ryan as revenge, which turned most people off and probably is what sent Eden out the door.) But making her into a vixen would've been hackneyed '90s nighttime soap tripe, playing into old ciiches about queer seductresses at a time when it was the last thing the show or Bianca needed, and it was a waste of what was hailed as Bianca's frontburner new love interest played by a major daytime star. The real issue is the execution. Sure, Zach providing his sperm for Bianca and her surprise new wife is scandalous and soapy to me. The tension between him and Reese is something you could play with over time without shortchanging Bianca and the central LGBT couple. It's all very similar to Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids are All Right with Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo which was topical and controversial at the time - I'm all for a story like that. But almost as soon as Reese was introduced with Bianca, Reese and Zach became the story instead. They were making out by what, February? Reese came on at Halloween of the previous year. And by April, only a couple months after Zach and Reese started necking, Tamara was gone forever and Reese was history. Why? Because she didn't want any part of the story Pratt ended up telling, and neither did the fans. Pratt told a story at turbo speed, rushed through it to get to the beats he wanted and told a story both the fans and actors didn't like. What it cost the show was two talented actors. I don't need my queer characters to be saints - far from it, I've been advocating for LGBT vixens and villains since before Reese existed. I did need them to not bait and switch the most popular LGBT character on daytime over and over after bolstering a portion of their audience on her rape by a man and then promising they'll finally give her an top-tier love interest only to send her to the guy where if Pratt squints he kind of looks like Sonny Corinthos. I needed Bianca to not just be a delivery system for Pratt's latest sex fetish doll like Faith Rosco. And when we got the opposite, everybody involved quit. So no, I don't think it's nitpicking. YMMV.

Makes one wonder if Meg being killed off was a scab choice they had to live with, a la Jesse on AMC (I think?). But Meg had been circling the drain a long time.

I have a lot of time for some of Chuck Pratt's primetime soap work in the '90s, I watched his Spelling soaps faithfully for many years. I don't think that on paper ideas like Reese/Bianca (or Reese being tempted by men like her brother-in-law) or Taylor Thompson, the conservative Iraq war vet, are bad. But at every daytime show he's been HW on in the 21st century he's left a long trail of unhappy actors and stories of serious disrespect, and his GH and AMC stints were especially full of misogyny, bimbos and a lot of cheap shock value material. (Faith on GH was basically a macho sex maniac fantasy.) And the execution of even good ideas was terrible. He gave several magazine interviews at AMC describing all of the above, I can't really dig all of them up right now. And the actors later let loose about him. The way the Reese story was pitched vs. how it played out, IIRC, is what drove Eden Riegel to leave and stay gone til Prospect Park in 2013. For his part, Pratt basically blamed Eden for not signing a long-term contract (which I doubt she would've declined had the story not collapsed) and said he'd always intended for Bianca to merely be an intro device for Reese who would become a bisexual vixen.

Yes you do, you changed your SN months ago. But your past posts literally are still labeled "Dylan". Your account still dates back to when you first joined. I wasn't aware you were actually trying to pretend to be someone else until just now, lol.

The Reese/Bianca story was a good pitch - I liked the idea of Tamara finally playing a soft butch dyke and having a major romance for Bianca. I also didn't mind the concept of her being bi on paper, or even the supposed planned story turn that allegedly made Eden quit and stay gone for a long time (Bianca getting revenge on Reese by sleeping with Ryan!), provided the focus stayed on the two women and their tortured romance. But the fact is the audience was promised one thing for Bianca and her new love interest and given another - a story focused once again on Zach and Pratt's pet actor. Later, Pratt finally confessed in print that Bianca was just being used as a delivery system for his preferred GH star; that he wanted Reese to become a catty bisexual schemer a la something out of his Spelling primetime soaps, sleeping with both men and women. To reduce all that potential to that is a tacky idea and a cynical betrayal of the audience and the actors, especially since both Braun and Eden Riegel have indicated they felt they were sold a bill of goods by the show, promised one thing and given another just like the fans. That's on Pratt, who was wildly unpopular BTS and treated the company like shít both in private and public, like when he later bragged that Jamie Luner being miscast as Liza would come on the set and whip all these ungrateful lazy actors into shape. I'm still not convinced you actually watch GH, Dylan, but yes. Wes Ramsey has had a long career outside of GH for many years and did some good work before he began unbearably hamming it up as Peter August. Oscar could not act at all.

Only the most desperate of twink lovers. But he was the worst actor I've seen on GH - ever.

It's insane to me that anyone would ever think Frankie is a copy of Luna Moody. That character famously came into existence only when Linda Gottlieb and Michael Malone first came to daytime several years after Frankie was created. I've never heard that being 'fan lore' anywhere, ever, on any soap forum before today because the dates simply do not line up and most people know that.