Vee

I didn't know Steve and Audrey were apart for eight years. Jeez.

Can anyone more knowledgeable than me break down the whole timeline of events around '94-'95 with Cynthia Watros' initial story and Kim Zimmer's two returns? I was always under the impression that Watros was hired to be Robert Newman's love interest in earnest, with the show originally intending to fully commit to Josh and Annie. (I didn't know she debuted as early as December '94.) I think this was under JFP? Who'd already watched Josh tank with Tangie Hill/Marcy Walker. Anyway, I know they did a very bizarre comic story in which Reva's ghost turns up and antagonizes Josh and Annie and then I guess maybe gives them her blessing? And that this was allegedly intended by JFP to only be a short run, but months later Kim was asked back for real? Presumably by the new EP? I guess what I'm curious about is: How long were they actually committed to Josh and Annie, what was the timetable like or creative turnover involved and when was the decision made to bring back Reva for real and start dirtying Annie up?

One of the biggest mistakes of the late '90s and early 2000s under Rauch and others was pegging Josh as a conventional, relatively uncomplicated honky-tonk macho male lead, pining after Reva or holding her purse. They were great together when the writing and performances both clicked, but Robert Newman is capable of so much more and to this day is brimming with both cerebral intellect and heat. And yes - Josh's sexual rage over Reva was always palpable both in the classic '80s scenes and stories and in the above scene linked, which is one I've never seen and which you could not get away with airing today. It's also a bit too crass, too far and about on par with the typical histrionic, OTT tone of GL in that mid-late '90s era - but it also doesn't feel like something they wouldn't do to each other, either.

I honestly don't remember the timeframe. She played the long-lost Joanna Mills, who IIRC was the 1840 iteration of Quentin Collins' dead lover. She came back seemingly alive and well to screw with his jilted wife Samantha and then turned out to be a ghost after all (I think) and drove Samantha off Widows' Hill, which tended to be the next bus out of town for much of the cast in the later years of the show. It was a very strange storyline.

This has been a cross-network issue for many years. I remember Bob Woods at OLTL telling the oral history that near the end of its ABC run he found himself asking, 'why do we have so many scenes in the hospital lounge?' The answer was 'because [the hospital set] is up.'

I think they did truly show it more often in the Guza years, but also regularly walked it back or tried to fob it off on someone else. Ron and Frank did this too. In the later years, when he was perhaps tiring of Maurice (which we've all discussed here a lot from that period), Guza seemed to have a keener interest in showing the price of Sonny's choices: Michael is shot in the head and comatose for years, then his marriage for power to Claudia (who ordered the hit) gets Michael convicted, jailed and raped. Later, Sonny destroys Jax's life to help Carly in court then accidentally crashes his plane and nearly kills him, all of which cost him Brenda. They always had some bullshit buffer character or plot event to try to mitigate Sonny's guilt, but the point is there were far less of them in the late 2000s-early 2010s. You could not fail to acknowledge that yeah, Sonny got Michael shot, Sonny got Michael jailed and raped. Even Jason and Carly basically said it. Ron also had Sonny murder A.J. in cold blood. The difference is he had even less interest in playing the consequences and guilt than Guza's team. He seemed to simply get bored of the story. My version of a Guza twist was always to have Sonny and Ava's mob war ice each other out by having their retaliation criss-cross: Sonny would accidentally kill Kiki by bombing Ava's penthouse and Ava would accidentally get Avery killed while having her people run what she thought was Sonny's limo off the road. Kiki is dead, but you could still do that with any of their various extraneous relations or children today. Willow too! I think Sarah's Carly and Maurice were absolutely a supercouple. I think they (and Tamara's) were the last GH supercouple, with the exception of perhaps Patrick and Robin (I'm sure some people count Jason and Sam, Nikolas and Emily or Jason and Elizabeth but I fuckin' don't). And I think the writing for Sarah and Maurice by the end of Guza I/MVJ was very romanticized, but it worked for me as a teen because the show was overall more gritty and candid in those days and they didn't pretend either of them were total saints. It wasn't until Guza II with Pratt that S&C and Jason/Courtney become totally golden superheroes.

This '88 episode sounds intriguing. Is any of it strike material or am I off on the year?

Me too.

Which is why I still say that if this show ever undergoes a sea change, just do it. Get Scorpio in a room laying it all out for the other cop characters and how Sonny funnels all his worse businesses into intermediaries and then claims he's not doing them. We always knew he was doing that shít in the '90s and the turn of the century. But whatever, I'm bitter.

The sheer volume of years I have had to endure people telling me Melissa Ordway will soar with the right pairing simply by virtue of Abby's DNA astonishes me. I know people hated the Hilary/Devon/Mariah angle at the time and I know it was poorly done but I think with the right writing it could've run and run. So could Summer/Kyle/Mariah/another less boring non-Tessa woman, so could a lot of options. It was clear at the time (just as it was in McPherson and Thomas' DAYS, another very flawed rare bird I championed against the odds) that the day to day micromanagement, budget issues and oversight on the daily writing heavily mangle what they try to do with the plotting. I remember people roasting key details of the business stories they attempted with Lauren, Devon, Hilary, etc. live. And they were fair to do so. But I think it all goes back less to what's on the unedited page and more to the institutional rot, micromanagement and defeat of quality control that wasn't there 20-30 years ago.

"Sonny is the Tiger King/runs into Joe Exotic expy" is a viable plotline!

Yes. I was very impressed at the time. I'm not going to claim her return was totally a lost diamond in the rough, but there was a lot of potential and care there even with things the audience didn't care for IMO. I still remember her very candid interview at the time saying very few men could compete with Eileen Davidson onscreen without being blown away, that it was a longstanding issue going back decades and that they were working on it, and that the Ravi infatuation was intended to be a transitional thing. I was into that (as well as the Hilary/Mariah media feud, which was pretty poorly executed) but fans hated it immediately. Which is a valid POV. But in addition, I think another significant portion of the audience at that point had been trained to be more like an ABCD/shipper audience - the one CBS and Sony had actively courted for years - and were put off by more deliberate pacing and choices that had nothing to do with simply showcasing their favorite couples. See: Her attempt to move away from Billy/Phyllis which I believe Young interceded on, the handling of Cane and splitting him from Lily (in his only good story, ever), etc. And while I understand the optics issue, I think the Devon story would've been good. The fact is he was an even more anemic version of a 'power player' at that time than he is now. Making Mariah LGBT - I think it served the network's interests even if they were terrified of it, because they were not comfortable with Camryn Grimes in a young leading role and still aren't. If they can park her with a chick then she isn't in the running for hot young male leads.

I really enjoyed Priscilla Pointer as the tough Rebecca in Season 6 prepared to square off with J.R. and co. (The totally dropped romantic beat with her and Clayton Farlow is also interesting.) So of course she is killed immediately and the men continue to reign supreme. I've never been big on Morgan Brittany, not on Melrose or anywhere else, and Katherine's endless torch/obsession feels long since tired almost two seasons before she runs down Bobby. It feels like it's taken him five years to catch on to her infatuation with him as is.

This isn't another one of those episodes you guys hype up and then I watch it and they're still using that country-ass redneck music cue they've been using for 20 years, right?

Wrapping the second third/Block 2 of Season 6 now - I'll talk about it soon enough, but I think the Verna storyline lasted just long enough. The wrap-up is fine and the therapy work in subsequent episodes so far is excellent, but I cannot imagine them extending the Shula interlude even longer (which they had allegedly planned to do until viewer response) unless they intended to do something more nuanced plot-wise than 'local hick snows Val'.

His offshore casinos, etc. have been in play at least as recently as Claudia Zacchara, when she and Sonny visited them during their marriage in 2009 (and were often seen or referred to throughout the 2000s, when Sonny would take women or family there). There has not been any noted change in how his businesses have been depicted since then. That's why most of us believe nothing has changed despite how the writing elides the topic.

I've discussed this before and AFAIC he absolutely did run prostitution. I remember the Tammy stuff too. Sonny and Jason used to run protection for hookers all across the PC area in the late '90s. This was onscreen from what I recall, but the show pretended he never dealt in sex work later. The insistence that Sonny 'only imports coffee' has always been a convenient fiction. At his height he ran weapons, gambling, sex, etc until TPTB started pretending he was 'like a firefighter,' per Courtney's take in the early 2000s. He also still has many offshore or Puerto Rico-based casinos, etc. which I'm sure run a ton of vice including women and drugs. My personal take is that Sonny's organization still runs everything it always has - it's just distributed amongst his various subsidiary companies, associates, etc. so he can pretend he doesn't touch it or take money from it. Including probably some drugs. Were the show less micromanaged by the network or FV and more free to touch this topic, that's where I'd start: Scorpio breaking it down onscreen.

Julian Sands is a brilliant actor. I'm hoping for the best.

Hayden Panettiere (GL, OLTL) returns as her fan favorite character for Scream VI.

Lord.

Cassandra on AMC 2.0 had one in 2013 after having been raped by human traffickers, without paying any price. It was a very clear example of Agnes Nixon and co. sending a message, punctuated by Debbi Morgan as Angie doing direct address to the camera about 'men in power' trying to supercede a woman's right to choose (this was back during the renewed right wing push against abortion and the whole Todd Akin/'legitimate rape' flap). A number of women on soaps have had safe abortions - it's just the last 20 years or so of daytime that have avoided the topic more and more due to the regressive sociopolitical climate, and instead opted for 'of course this rape victim/lesbian/young gay man will have and raise this baby'.

This all about covers why I don't think real substantive improvement is possible for American soaps while they're still bound to network television oversight vs. streaming. Everything is about catering to the whims of the network and/or what is perceived to be a shrinking, geriatric conservative audience (babies, white people, gimmicks). And Y&R isn't even doing gimmicks anymore. It's a zombie soap designed to be background noise. Sussman's return is the last time I felt there was any creative vision for Y&R, and even then it was very messy, flawed and clearly deeply compromised (it's notable she apparently does not make mention of Mal Young, who played HW himself).

Another reason I am always hesitant to listen to these myself. If anyone feels like offering cliffnotes let us know, lol.

I guess I'll try to have a listen to this. I think her brief, truncated and very flawed return run was the closest Y&R came to rebuilding itself in recent years. That said, everything with her husband(?) is a shitshow.

I know, it's a cameo. But the reviews were half-decent so I'm curious.