Vee

This is incredible and should be on the show.

They should let Karla and Sean do this Andre/Dani duet she put on IG on the show. Unbelievable.

Whereas I always assumed it was Frons (and thought I'd heard such at the time, but who knows.) To me there is no way the ABC of the 2000s would've let Vanessa Marcil walk if he didn't sign off on it. He was that heavily involved at that time especially. With that kind of caliber of decision IMO JFP is just the hatchet man.

Maybe. I'm not convinced much of that wasn't Frons, unless someone explicitly said it was Jill. In fact I thought Vanessa explicitly said Brian Frons and ABC wouldn't cover her.

Yeah, I checked out almost immediately when she took over for the same reason lol. AMC and some of ATWT were enough for me. I would look in for very brief periods in those years and I think that subplot came about in the first year or two. 2016-17? It was played for laughs but IIRC JP or Altman was super proud of pushing this social issue. Alexis and the ladies are liberating the stuffy court by ripping open their blouses to prove a point for women's rights! Okay.

It really is not. The eye mite arc is up there with Jean Passanante's(?) pet subplot where someone (Olivia, IIRC) had to go to court over public breastfeeding, leading to I think Alexis and the other women going titties-out in court. Riveting stuff. I think there are other ways you can affect a change; namely, Drew seeing Willow with clear eyes and vice versa and their relationship becoming something different and more mutually villainous. And you can add a bit more dimension and pathos to his new persona per Jake and others, as we've said in the past. But I don't think he needs to do a 180.

I believe so, yes. Cyrus brought it up a few years ago. I think the only reason JFP survived the catastrophe of her solo tenure in 2001-2 was her skill as a line producer to execute Guza's vision. They could've found others. Guza had power over her creatively, having learned from the Riche wars. It was the best comeuppance Jill could ever have for what she'd done to GH, OLTL, etc. IMO.

And I'm sorry you feel that way, because I wasn't actually referring to you. I have no problem with you at all. But realistically, how exactly can I be 'gatekeeper of these threads'? Look at the Top Posters in the right hand corner at the top of the page. You won't see my name there for these last two months. And tbqh most of what I have to talk about regularly gets picked over by others while I am dealing with pressing life stuff before I can watch, so I contribute much, much less here than I do the GH thread. I'm not censoring anyone's speech, setting the topic or acting like I run this shít. If I did the fanfic guy would've been banned before the show even aired for calling MVJ an anti-Black bootlicker, lol. I am not a consistent enough poster in these threads daily or weekly to control the flow of anything, nor does that interest me. What I have been consistent in posting about, all year long, is saying that these constant rotating meta-discussions about how no one can supposedly criticize the show are silly. Yeah, I think some folks overreacted to criticism of the show from the jump. But BTG has been getting ragged on daily like any other soap we watch from the first week! You'll see it in here all week and you'll see it here next week too, and straight through into 2026. Do I agree with every critique, definitely no. Do I agree with a lot of 'em, yep. There's stuff on the show I find earnest, new and potentially brilliant, and a lot of stuff on this show I find cringe or just amateur night. I get that kind of heat in my phone texts from a close friend every day! And hotter stuff is said on here or Twitter seven days a week. So nobody is being silenced as far as I can see. What is different about BTG and these discussion threads is this: SON is, for once, not generally unified in its thinking about the state of a soap opera. A lot of the forum thinking about GH, or B&B or DAYS or Y&R follows along the same lines around here - we may differ on specific characters, couples, stories or plot points, but the majority of posters have generally the same feelings about the overall state of their longtime shows. BTG is new. People aren't set in their ways. The show is a cooking pot that hasn't settled into anything. And a lot of people feel a lot of different ways. That is why I think these recurring discussions of how BTG can and can't be talked about keep coming up. Not because anyone is being silenced, but because a lot of folks (positive or negative) just aren't used to not being generally on the same page around here. It freaks folks out. And again, for me, it's not that serious. Feel how you want! Talk about it everyday! I support it! I'm still repping for some of the Marlene McPherson/Darrell Thomas era of DAYS. 95% of posters here hated that! Again: Happy holidays, y'all.

I barely remember Nigel - the stuff I am most familiar with was both before and after his tenure - but I will try to have a look at this one. Always lovely to see Pat.

We have discussed this before but I don't think we have any new answers lol. I remember the Bobbie rumor but I just don't know more than that. I do think Pratt had tried to put over a ripoff of his own Melrose Place story (which I clocked the instant it began appearing onscreen) and I am glad Genie allegedly vetoed that. I think elements of the story were worthwhile - a suburban mystery digging back into the town and Laura's pre-LNL past - but it was a ropey sell in hindsight given how much she had already very visibly been through with David Hamilton onscreen in those golden years. There wasn't very much real estate to work with for a retcon (but still more than the terrible ones this team has tried to put over with Cody and Sasha in the last couple years). I do wonder what the whole Rick/medical consortium subplot, with him repping for a group trying to take over GH, might have led to in the original iteration. What was really insane was 3-5 years later, they casually had Alan and Monica reveal in some C-plot scenes that Monica and Rick had actually briefly picked up their affair again in the summer of '02 entirely offscreen. I choose to ignore that ever happened.

Basically. I have no problem with harsh critique of this show, since I have some of my own lol. And get some in my texts everyday from a certain friend! But it's axe-grinding for other reasons (or that one fanfic guy) I don't have much patience for. Take one example: When Soapsuds doesn't like a show for whatever reason, and decides other people are putting on pretentious airs for watching something he doesn't like, he spends his time plastering the threads with comments replying to virtually every post or thread about it that seem bent on shaming people for even watching or finding merit in it. This is not the first show where he's done this, it's been an issue on the forum long before BTG existed. Yet he's there everyday for some of the worst subhuman slop DAYS and B&B have historically had to offer so long as enough twinks are onscreen. And hey, that's his business; I don't go in those threads demanding he stop watching. But he makes a different choice. Then there's the occasional handful of posters who will semi-regularly make these grand pronouncements in these threads about how BTG threads can't handle legitimate criticism, while the show gets regular heat daily in here. Like, c'mon. This is not that serious. If you have valid complaints I am here for it. But if you're here because of the above, or because you want to free the one white guy on the show you've been publicly obsessing over for years from Martin, I am going to side-eye. I just don't have time for that in the mid-2020s. We got enough to deal with. Happy holidays, y'all.

That is how it should be at this point. I also never wanted the shooting to change Drew. He's too good a villain as he is and Mulcahey's more nuanced version of the character is long gone anyway. But you can add some more layers and dimension vs. what they're currently doing, and see what happens in future.

I'll probably always mourn what I think he was doing with Drew and Nina as a real, viable couple further down the road, despite their previously being two characters I couldn't care less for. His Drew (which the current one was birthed from) was a more nuanced, still increasingly gray character who could launch schemes and be a cad, but there was still rooting value for the two of them there. Now, as you say, Nina is a total afterthought. But PM clearly relished writing for Watros (I can't recall if he ever had before).

I just find her to have all the screen presence of a dish towel. But who knows?

Like I said, close but no! I think I made it a month-plus tops, after the first 3-4 weeks it kind of blends together into a mobius loop of horror. I know I got past Sheridan's near-death visitation by the ghost of Princess Diana.

Like any soap I am lapsed with, I'll watch in spurts of daily viewing depending on how the quality flows. I can watch everyday for weeks or months at a time and have this year, but I also have no problem dropping a few days or weeks (or months) if it goes south, which GH has regularly done in 2025 lol. There's peaks and valleys with any show. With GH I am a couple days behind but is there anything deeply demanding my attention now given the Obrecht/Faison influx? Nope! Ergo, skip to the stand. The only one I'm 100% daily with atm is BTG, and that's something I give any show I'm committed to in its first year unless it turns out to be Passions where I didn't last 3 months.

Gurl that is not worth it to me. There is nothing pressing on this show currently worth wading through a major backlog of episodes for. Just skip to the stand! It's what I'm doing from the couple days I'm behind.

I think he came by it with age. I just found him loud and obnoxious on GL. As an older man (no longer a target for horny viewers stalking his family's Facebook pages) he grew into his talent and stature for me and had a lot more authority. He's at least 10-15 years too old to play Tomas and be paired with Kat or Eva at their current status - they'd need a little more mileague and come-up for that to look right - but I'll be glad to have him.

Susan Haskell and Marty become pretty much the central heroine of the show later in '93, and stayed that way for a long while. I know different people felt all sorts of ways about that (and they didn't find a viable romantic partner to match her for another 2 years), but she was popular, it worked for me and she always kept that visceral fire and grit. As a kid she was my favorite character on the show, period. (Nora was a close second)

Jordi can be Tomas' brother or something and Tomas can die in a horrific Zamboni accident. I don't care. Anything.

I don't really have a problem with Ava keeping those popular friend relationships as I think the contrast with saintly Trina is especially interesting, and reminds me of how transgressive Robin's relationships with Sonny and Jason still were in the '90s. (And I wouldn't keep Nina around for much longer anyway, though I love Watros and think she's worked very hard.) But I also didn't have a problem with her losing them, especially breaking with Nina because of their insane history. I do agree Ava needs to be off the leash, and I think Van Etten at least actively avoids that and softens her (as Passanante and Altman often did) because he's scared of losing the character. Whereas I don't think Korte or FV care where she slot in. I think if it was up to Korte Ava would be dogmeat.

Him with Jen Jacob is the last thing I want tbh, but I like Jordi and I'm just happy to have a hot, talented Latino dude coming onboard. Alegria is dreadful.

Nice to have it confirmed. Jordi is an actor who I found intolerable when he was the hot young thing on GL but who I grew to really respect in what was largely a thankless role on AMC, where he had developed real gravitas and was intensely earnest and engaging in addition to sexy. I don't think he's ever gotten enough strong material. BTG has its growing pains but one thing I don't think they'll do is take him for granted.

Because someone clearly does not want her to be. As soon as PM was dumped the Svengali story with Sonny ended and Ava's relationships with Nina and Trina were instantly repaired. I think there are two cross-purposes involved in this stuff. While popular with fans I also think Ava's friendships are favorites of the prior team (CVE/O'Connor), who historically seemed to prefer keeping Ava in a softer and lighter antiheroine role, weeping over Nikolas and fretting with Austin, friendlier with Sonny, etc. which also enabled them to keep her around. I think that is unnecessary to keep Ava and is a major tonal mistake. OTOH I suspect Korte can take or leave Ava at best, hence her overall secondary status again today. The instant PM was gone she began being dragged and embarrassed all over town for a month or two and any semblance of a cozy relationship with Sonny was shattered. So I suspect you've got one writer who doesn't care about Ava and another who just wants to see Maura be fierce and keep her around as long as possible, and both these opposing drives enable the worst or least use of the character today.

I like Jordi! I'm for it, but not with fúckin' Ashley.