Vee

That sounds terrible.

I still can't believe they put Jack with Sally, and I like Peter Bergman more than most of this board. But I can't believe Jack's last several love interests that weren't Diane or Phyllis.

Morrow reads young and immature despite his age so they keep playing him that way, in large part because they are afraid to move on from a lot of the vets and invest in the new generation. I'll be amazed if we ever see Fen on contract again now that he is LGBT, for example.

I am stockpiling a few eps before continuing on with my annoying posts. Once again the great Bill Duke comes through for Knots, near the end of his directorial run on the show sadly. Digging back into the archives y'all had some wild ideas for this show. Laura and Mack! I'm not sure I could've gotten into that lol. I do think the show missed a trick not using the intriguing Gary and Laura chemistry for a fling at some point, which could've really set both Greg and Abby on edge. Speaking of future Gary dramas, I know a certain pivotal character will be popping up shortly and I am intrigued to see that. This speaks to something I know some other folks have discussed, maybe here but definitely at other places - I know that at Dallas they supposedly mapped out each season well in advance at the start of the year, long before with minimal deviation, though I may be wrong. At Knots it seemed like Jacobs and co. were much more fluid about what they picked up or discarded over time, like certain actors (Teri Austin, etc.) taking off unexpectedly in small parts. How much of the long-form plotting at the start of a season they did I don't know - they clearly meticulously plotted a lot of the Wolfbridge and Val's twins/Galveston/Empire Valley umbrellas - but the various interviews made other stuff sound a lot more fluid.

GH regularly caters to their older, whiter Facebook audience who only care about stuff like Sonny and Carly forever and the nice boring couples the show puts forth, because they believe that audience represents the remaining major soap opera demographic. They've also recently discussed (in that Paley Center interview I believe, or wherever it was) seeking out a specific portion of their social media audience and discarding others. They just clearly don't care about much that does not reinforce their or Frank's priors. On occasion that fluctuates, like with the Cam scenes, but am I expecting Cam to get an A-story or be featured at the same level as Joss, or for the writing of her character to be more nuanced going forward? Nope. They tried on and off to say over the years that Lucky Skypes with the boys a lot, lol. They did that a lot in the 2010s. But yeah, at this point he has checked out on being a father for too long. I don't like it at all because he used to be a devoted father to the kids for the 2000s - all of them, Jake, Cam, Aiden - but it is what it is. Ron clearly had something in mind with this during Jonathan's brief appearance for Tony's exit, where he implied that the aftereffects of Helena's brainwashing of Lucky had left a 'darkness' in Lucky that made him want to stay away out of fear for his family (and JJ and Tony also personally rewrote their scenes about this completely so much that they stuck out from the rest of the terribly-scripted show and felt like some material out of the early 2000s; it was very good and very jarring). But this being Ron (and the fact that he got fired shortly after) he never picked up on the thread.

Please know that my knee-jerk first response to this sentence was left in drafts for a reason.

Another shining moment for her recent career. And after the insane "Madonna boot camp" and Hunger Games-esque competition for her role.

100%.

I loved Paul and Rose with Holroyd in the role. I think Roger had it with Martha too tbh despite the totally unnecessary recast, but they were so committed to turning Paul into Todd Manning and never looked back (including almost replicating his "Hell No" wedding from OLTL with Rose in place of Blair) that it wrecked everything. Holden and Lily are hot as hell in the '80s Marland episodes I've been bingeing. The overall sexual and psychological dynamics on the show were way more complex and explicit than what we get on soaps now. But by the 2000s Jon Hensley was a boring, tired suburban dad onscreen.

Well, now they're just trying to get DAYS clout lol

Michelle, Ke, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee would all be well deserved. And Riseborough is brilliant but should win for other things (like her genre work, most of which wouldn't be nominated for the same reason Mia Goth wasn't for her dual role in X/Pearl - Riseborough's performances in TV like the UK show National Treasure and Netflix's Bloodline are also incredible). Ana should've won for Blade Runner. Viola also can do better (and not in a movie with those kind of issues). Michelle will have many more chances, whatever happens; she's great. I have actually already seen most of the films this year, but I do need to see Aftersun, The Whale and Women Talking. For me, TÁR and Nope are my films of the year and Elvis is the greatest Ken Russell musical biopic he never got around to - it is both brilliant and stupid but I loved it. I like EEAAO a lot as well. I am also glad Avatar is being honored by not being part of the comics superstructure, building its own crazy world and for staying with you. It is an old style epic.

Stephanie Hsu should probably win over Jamie Lee (who was fine), but Jamie Lee is getting up there and they love to give it to older people. They'll give it to the well-deserving Yeoh and call it even, that's how the Academy thinks. Not looking fwd to Riseborough spending the next several weeks as a Twitter Hate Figure when more people should know of her work onscreen in general, but not because of this flap. I can understand people having an issue with an actor doing a grassroots campaign and coming out of nowhere; I sure haven't seen her movie lol. But the time to have an issue with that kind of strategy was at least 30 years ago when crazy Sally Kirkland did it, or any time over the last century when many actors have done the same thing. And unlike some of them Riseborough is not an outlier or unworthy. I've seen far worse noms of far worse people. It's just the game. Ana de Armas is great but did not need a nom here. She got it because of popularity and talent from other things and the mimicry angle.

She's a consistently brilliant actress, so I'm for it whatever the role. Deadwyler should probably have gotten a nom over Ana de Armas and her stan army, but I am not going to comment on Woman King lol. Paul Dano was robbed though.

I'm aware of the affair with Ben, if that's what you're referring to. I'm not expecting much from the rest of her run for the character, but I do think the Joshua villain arc itself is quite good so far (and Cathy's TV role in it is even more relevant in the age of the pop-influenced West Coast megachurches like Hillsong today, which I'll discuss soon). It's killing me that I'll almost certainly be out of the Peter Dunne, et al era not long before this show goes to HD along with Dallas on some platform as the material is so good these last few seasons, but it's wonderful to watch just the same.

Additionally, B&B is a spinoff of Y&R. They have shared characters for years. Sheila first appeared on Y&R.

It's just my interpretation of the storyline. I feel it's been carefully paced with Joshua and that the seeds have been there from the start, but others can feel differently. I still enjoy Cathy, but I miss when she was central to story, in the thick of things with Gary and Abby which feels like a lifetime ago. Lisa Hartman is capable of a lot but they've really just had her as a suffering appendage to the Joshua storyline so far this season when she could be doing a lot more. I don't think they had much of a plan for Cathy beyond S5, and I think that's been borne out in some BTS interviews (though the writers seem to not be as fond of her original storyline vs. her later one with Joshua). I don't think she needed to stay paired with Gary; it was right to turn left, surprise the audience and re-unify him and Abby in the refreshing way they have. And I didn't have a problem with Cathy getting a new love interest, but she's just been cargo for Joshua's story since then. It's too bad because she could've had a stronger run on the show overall post-Ciji.

My understanding is writers, not just HWs, still make plenty on the soaps. I can't fault folks like MVJ, Mulcahey, etc. for riding the terrible stories on B&B out til the wheels fall off. For that money and security you'd probably have to pry me out of there with the Jaws of Life.

I still think she needs to a) go as nuts as her mom and/or b) get killed off by Sonny's business. Add another of Michael's dead women to the pile and write him out for a while.

Don't touch me, you slime!

I think Robin was great on the show! I always did, but I also always was terrified of Robin's performance and thought Janet was nuts. Her work still holds up as a tour de force like when she read the town to filth. That being said, she and Kiberd 100% sold their romance and chemistry despite my misgivings. Doesn't mean I thought she should kill him off and stuff his body in the freezer! That was too far. I was glad Broderick, Agnes, etc. squared the circle a bit at the end between both versions of Janet with Collins in the final months.

It was always over the top and never made sense, and I enjoyed the show a lot in those years but even then I knew it was nonsense. They went on and on about the evils of the Quartermaines, but all I ever saw were fussy, goofy rich people arguing over pizza and stocks. You were not exactly dealing with Victor Newman in his prime at that point in that household. The only saving grace for that mess was how devoted Emily was to them early on (and later still, when she wasn't bitching about Jason and Michael) and how good Amber was.

I am very concerned about Leslie and I doubt I'm the only one. Real Andrews should be on more, but they seem committed to the most boring characters possible (Curtis). There are way too many kids on GH due to the overuse of baby stories, just like GL and AMC before it. They occasionally show Sam and Dante's teenaged kids and I often forget who they are. They're too old and as for the overall there's too many of them (not to mention the fact that Sam also has a rarely-seen daughter with Drew you didn't mention who I also forgot existed). Aiden can stay small, and the only one I have an investment in Hudson West's Jake; he is more talented than a lot of the cast so of course they don't use him and will prob recast him with a Dex clone.

I seem to recall Erica and Janet getting a lot of airtime together in the last year or two when they did that Erica double storyline or something (the double's name was Jane). I think they were in a hospital together? I may be wrong. I know that part of the aim of Agnes and Lorraine Broderick in the last few months was clearly to re-humanize Janet more. She was still very loopy but she was presented as the daffy mother trying to be there for her daughter with cancer or whatever it was Amanda had. I thought Collins was very good, though it was a world away from the Janet Robin Mattson had played. IIRC they let him go. It may partly have had to do with Eplin's well-known even then sex pest behavior. He was a great, sexy actor whose work I miss but he had a reputation which has only gotten worse since social media.

Afton deserved reparations from the state for what she put up with with Cliff.