Vee

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!

I've really loved Harley Jane Kozak, both in movies and in her soap roles I've seen. I would've liked to see psychic Annabelle appear again maybe for an anniversary to give hints at future story, like the psychic did on Loving years later. Her love interest (Tony?) is intolerable though.

I would literally contribute to a paid phone hotline to have Willow killed off, like DC Comics did in the '80s to let fans decide whether Jason Todd's Robin lived or died. I could not care less about her or Michael. She needs to be dead and he needs to be gone for a long stretch. Same with Maxie. Sasha must vanish, she basically has already. Dex is hot but boring. Chase, hot but boring. There is real potential in some of the younger stars - Setton's BLQ can do much better, and IMO Josh Kelly could do better too if they leaned into the 'hunky stableboy' thing and dropped most of the rest of his terrible intro, or said he was Mac's by someone other than Dominique. Eden McCoy is tolerable in a certain role, but Joss should be downgraded; she should be support for the youth stars Spencer and Trina, and Cameron and maybe a new Emma Drake on the other side (who I would shock the audience by turning into a real closet terror even though the entire town thinks she would naturally be the golden child). Joss can be turned into a comic character, a spoiled rich girl or screwball schemer, until you find a really strong actor. The biggest issue is story. They know hot young people must be on the show, but they write most of them like they are either 15 or 40, or at times both in the same scene. They don't let them do hot young people things bc it might offend what they perceive to be the sensibilities of the core audience. Easier to talk about babies, paternity and silly subplots like scheming to 'get' a scammy manager who does bad things. And like I said a couple weeks ago, that music subplot is pretty classic cocaine '80s soap fluff! It could be fun. It's just that it executed so poorly and the characters are all written like total simps.

As fascinating as I find the Phillip saga with the Spauldings/Marlers from the Dobson years onward in the eps available online, and as entranced as I am by the ethereal Lezlie Dalton and the great Cindy Pickett, I think it had probably reached a natural endpoint for several of those characters at least by the time 1981 or so rolled around. The Spauldings first made their presence known in late '77. Lezlie Dalton had some incredible farewell scenes with the recast Jackie (who while no Pickett does excellent work with Dalton) and Phillip at Christmas in '80 where she says goodbye - and then allegedly lingers on a bit in 1981, somehow? Anyway, I don't think the show should've cut Elizabeth, Justin and Jackie entirely out of existence as they did a few years later right after GA arrived and the secret came out with the young adult Phillip. That was story malpractice for rich characters and fascinating actors. But I do think Elizabeth, Jackie and Justin probably had reached a winding-down point for the frontburner as well after such heavy, intense story.

It would not have changed much to let most if not all of those characters go recurring tbh. They'd had good long runs on contract but I think some, like Steve, should've remained visible on the canvas for Bert til the end. At least Adam and Barbara returned for visits, Sara McIntyre never got that. Millette Alexander has always been fascinating to me.

Which was a clear directive: To make it look and feel like a Frons-era ABC soap, specifically GH, to try and hook their viewers, come off 'less stuffy' and also cut costs. There is a reason breakdown writers have been largely in use since the time of the horse and buggy passed us by. It is because HWs attempting to do it all themselves in the modern age generally leads to the HW (and/or their entire personal life) collapsing under the weight of it.

Way more of the early, early years from these shows has turned up in recent years post-YouTube than I would have ever expected ten years ago - stuff we all assumed was lost, like a fair portion of '60s and '70s P&G soaps including GL and a surprising amount of pre-Buchanans '70s OLTL, the holy grail. We also know many actors or families of actors kept kinescopes, etc. from their shows or from the affiliates. I would not assume nothing else is out there to be found.

I still think the new Q sets look like the Fresh Prince house and are too suburban. But they aren't terrible.