Vee

I think it's a good role on the canvas for her and potentially workable. I just don't think anyone has bothered challenging her with real material in over ten years. If she falters fine but I might try it.

Chavez has come a long way in a short time. He was electric with Genie, and as others have noted it is wonderful to see her connecting with performers who give her their all just as she always does. (Tyler and Tony Geary had their ups and downs, though I do think Tony always brought it with her despite his other behavior; so did JJ, even when the material got very ugly.) I am all for Molly growing up and becoming an ADA but like others I go back and forth on taking her seriously. I do think Hailey Pullos is capable of more and I don't dislike the role for her, but the show has such a superficial investment in Molly as is.

It's 2023! Learn to timestamp! In all seriousness though I have no fùcking idea where this is supposed to be. I have a very very vague recollection of it. I don't think it was seen again after the Guza regime ended. I don't think it ever really supplanted Kelly's. It reminds me a loooottt of the dual coffee shop set used on both AMC and OLTL 2.0 lol (which was a lot bigger). I'll have to rewatch them again.

Violet is just intolerable. Laura is the most proactive mayor in history lol

I'm not sure I remember that one? I do know Julian's embarrassing pub they tried to give him when they pretended he was going straight as a good man. That is still around and I think Phyllis, Sonny and Nina's buddy from Nixon Falls owns it now.

Esme's adorable baby is the size of a Buick.

I love Michelle Hurd's work on the show - I've always been a big fan of hers going back to SVU or earlier and am so glad she's found a space to showcase her talent years later, and has seemed to be embraced by the Trek fandom. I think many of the stories for the new characters from S1-2 on Picard (much like DSC) are a bit tryhard and overwrought but Hurd plays it to the hilt with so much feeling and heart. I'd love to see what she could do on a more stable show a la SNW, which ideally a Titan show would be. I've just accepted that a lot of DSC is cringe at this point and embraced the silliness as a feature and enjoyed what I can of it. I'm far more invested in SNW and LD. Speaking of the non-Discovery/DSC shows: I think it makes sense that the recent generation of Starfleet officers (Shaw, Raffi, Seven, etc.) are much more damaged and cynical people - they are coming off stuff like the Borg, the Dominion War, the synth ban, etc. You see echoes of this even with the animated characters like Mariner on LD who we know served in the War. I think it's refreshing to see that no, they're not all alright after the fairly sanitized episodic utopia of some of the '90s years where so much was swept under the rug. And ideally you then present characters like Picard, etc. as being able to help them rise to the occasion despite their issues. But I do think some of the dialogue needs a touch-up and someone needs to put Shaw (a drinker and clearly a traumatized dude) in his place a bit more. The way he treated Picard and Riker when they came onboard his ship would not have flown at all in the TNG/DS9/VOY era. Even Janeway didn't treat visitors like that out in the Delta Quadrant, and those people weren't even Starfleet who outranked her like Picard and Riker. The constant therapy-speak and emotional orgies of Discovery OTOH, I'll pass. (Of course, TNG had plenty of therapy-speak for its time...)

I definitely would've liked to see her clash with Susan Pratt's prickly Claire, or get to know Maureen a bit. There was a great scene with the two of them fighting over Maureen's qualifications in a recent summer '84 ep I watched. Sort of an opposite situation, which I'm sure you already know about: Milli was the first Jim Craig on OLTL and played the interracial love triangle with Ellen Holly, only to be recast for whatever reason with the much older-skewing Nat Polen as a more conventional patriarch (to Holly's chagrin) which contributed to ending that story.

I've always been fascinated by Millette Alexander's storied soap past, especially on EON. I think Sara is a strong foundational character who I enjoy watching. Do I think she needed to still be a contract regular deep into the '80s? No. But I would've liked to see her recur longer. Did they indicate she and Adam were still together when he returned later?

I thought I recognized the music in some of these late '80s eps and I was right - GL was using music cues from Tangerine Dream's famous score for Risky Business. It fits very well.

I'd be all for it. Speleers is very handsome still (years after the dreadful Eragon) but looks a little old for the timeline on Jack, yes. Still, after so many years of over-aged youth on Trek he's not too bad. I never fully appreciated Worf until DS9, where I think his arc and stories with Gowron, Dax, Martok, etc. really gave him his due. Michael Dorn has not lost a thing after spending decades wanting to play the role again. I think the insistence either by Paramount, the creatives or all of the above to make stodgy old Trek seem as hip and current as possible is a recurring issue with the dialogue and behavior at times. It's not nearly as bad here as it's been on DSC which, while I still enjoy it as a silly romp and love Sonequa and a lot of the cast, is just unending nonstop 2010s-onward-esque therapy sessions and monologues to me, ll handholding and the power of friendship. It's mawkish and a bit embarrassing. And when you try to make older actors, or some of the new actors who are supposed to be professionals sound like they're on Grey's or Chicago Fire or 911 or whatever it grates. I'm all for loosening up the style and tone of the extremely antiseptic Rick Berman years, but there is a happy medium to be found between two extremes. And there was a lot of great character work in those shows without having to make sure the audience for younger shows can relate to these 60-80s year olds.

I was very happy with Worf's reintroduction, clipped by someone here: I had expected it was him as Raffi's handler, but it was a great moment and a great remixing of Jerry Goldsmith's classic Klingon theme. The show is up and down for me tonally but I am really enjoying it much more than the first season. I am glad the new season is being well-received and that so far the crazy hardcore who reject almost any Trek after Nemesis are not baying for its blood (yet). My relatively minor issues stem from the fact that a number of scenes - Shaw with his people on Titan, Vadic's banter, some of the exposition and discussion with Raffi and the now-deceased Ferengi crimeboss (beautiful updating of the Ferengi makeup BTW) - seem to have tried a bit too hard to modernize the way people talk on Star Trek. It's just a little too quippy and a little 2020s for me in places. That's fine for the Abrams Trek stuff which is a specifically different universe, and fine for Lower Decks. Strange New Worlds is also a distinctly lighter show than some of the others but still maintains a baseline for deeper discussion that comes from the older shows. Discovery, well, is Discovery. And I don't expect or want people to talk like they did in syndication 25-30 years. But I do think there's sometimes a forced quality to the banter element in the dialogue to make sure it doesn't sound 'too' old-fashioned or 'too' tech-driven, especially when the show's stars are an 80 year old and his other senior citizen co-workers. Amanda Plummer is daffy enough onscreen without making her dialogue really flighty. And Shaw is clearly an alcoholic and damaged but every other line he has does not need to be a bitter quip to get the point across. Don't get me wrong: S3 is a major improvement so far, and a lot of it is quite good. Some scenes are also very good (like Picard's confrontation with Jack). But I would like to see some of the dialogue go up a notch in the maturity level and depth as opposed to often seeming to reflect the continuing push from Paramount to seemingly need to prove to people every week in the tonal shift that "Star Trek is just not for nerds anymore". Star Trek is very successful for them on streaming today with multiple hit shows and more in development, they don't have anything left to prove. @janea4oldThe Speleers interview and his wonderful remembrance of watching TNG as a kid is really a universal experience.

I'm happy for you. I always loved her work on the show and missed her despite the unfortunate way she left BTS, which clouded my memory of her.

Sonny and Spencer have, unfortunately, been close for a number of years. Ron Carlivati was the one who began amping up that relationship to put Nicolas Bechtel over with the audience and had Sonny suddenly touting his devotion to 'my nephew', and it's a bond they have taken pains to show ever since including with Chavez.

I had no idea they had the Lenore/Walter confrontation up. I've only read the AWHP daily synopses.

Is it me or does Nate have a single facial expression?

I stopped asking that question about 10 years ago. Ron has talent and I do believe he truly loves soaps, which is more than I can say for a lot of people left in hollowed-out positions in the last couple decades. He also has become very lazy, very driven by his ego in the work IMO and that's to say nothing of the social and sexual politics in his work getting left behind the times. He got addicted to the laurels and praise, to the attention as the 'savior' of soaps in the late 2000s-early 2010s as well as from outside outlets like The Soup (constantly writing it into GH even as they lampooned his work), and embraced the camp stereotype of soaps vs. writing and letting camp happen if it happens organically. That started at OLTL, got worse at GH until he got himself fired, and here we are.

I assume they just felt Cathy was played out. I've always been fascinated by how they retooled Cathy into a feminist writer as an adult and quickly spun her off into drama with Joe, then Tony Lord, etc. We have so little of Dorrie Kavanaugh available but we know that was the role intended for Robin (I think) so Agnes could revisit some of the Rachel Davis dynamic. I wish we could see more of all of them. And Catherine Burns is so great in Last Summer. I remember when Daniel Colson came on in the 2000s under Malone and he made a great fuss over telling his son Riley that his mother, a journalist, had named him for her mentor Joe Riley. At the time that had made me think of Cathy Craig. It was probably just a coincidence.

The fake mental hospital names on this show get dumber and dumber over the years. Ron Carlivati tried to shove "Miscavige" down our throat for a long time but clearly someone at Disney told them to stop that shít lol, and now we have the lame "Spring Ridge" and the silly-ass "D'Archam". I'm tired of hearing it. Just bring back Shadybrook or Ferncliff and shut it.

....What?

Wait. Waitwaitwait. Portia's hot dad is Ricco Ross?? Thee Ricco Ross?? Ricco Ross, badass Private Frost from fùcking Aliens?? And from the legendary/infamous (depending on who you ask, but I loved it) Doctor Who story "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy"? @DRW50knows who I mean: Well, now he has to stay.

That's what I figured. There is a beautiful series of very quiet mood moments at the end of this episode (6/14/1984) that is nothing so bombastic as what you might've expected from an '80s soap reinventing itself for high-energy pop and camp. They cut from Mike Bauer giving a toast at Alex's dinner (Don Stewart was so good at this stuff, even if I can never quite get his already-immortal appearance on the recent MST3K film "Carnival Magic" out of my mind again) 'to the future' and show Warren Andrews' incredibly crestfallen face - clearly thinking of his recently-dead wife - to a completely silent sequence of the 'young' crew (Jim, Hilary, Fletcher, Annabelle and the insufferable Tony) passing a bottle of wine around the fire at the newlyweds' new house and cuddling up together as the camera roves around them with a very tinny radio faintly playing Lionel Richie's "All Night Long". Then finally they cut to Vanessa and Reva at Cross Creek, awkwardly sitting together waiting for Billy to leave Vanessa there and go home to care for the newly-crippled Josh, again with no music. And the instant Billy leaves they lock eyes and Reva just says 'you're pregnant, aren't you?' Great stuff.

After watching a fair amount of summer '84 and seeing a ton of Beth/Lujack (and hearing many, many strange muzak version of the Footloose classic "Almost Paradise") I looked up the Locher Room interview with Vincent Irizarry and Judi Evans. Irizarry tells an anecdote about how the day he got hired on the show, he was still working at Joe Allen's restaurant and was introduced to a customer, an actress who had been on GL for years but was only recently fired and was none too happy to meet him. I wonder who it was.

I am not a hardcore fan by any stretch of the imagination. I am not watching currently. But if I had to cull the show for streaming? I would cut almost every single Newman that I can think of except for Mariah, Summer, maybe Noah or a couple of Victoria's kids recast. I would recast Victoria later. Victor and Nikki would be recurring special guests for specific arc-based stories. Same with Nick and Sharon (reunited). You would open the new phase of the show with them presented as part of the cast and visible in press (much like AMC and OLTL on Hulu did with Eden Riegel and Roger Howarth) but then they would go in and out for arcs. They would not be full-time contract cast. Billy would be gone. I would probably cut Phyllis. I would keep Jack and Diane together as scheming Abbott elders, Ashley and Traci too, I would keep Devon, Lily and Kyle. Michael and Lauren, maybe on recurring. Maybe recast Nate yet again. Bring back Victoria Rowell, bring back MM as Hilary and keep Allie. Anything else is fair game. This is what Y&R has always done: Flush the old for the new. If it wants to survive off CBS, that's how you do it. New young people, new focus, new families and some old favorites.

Quiet, you!