Vee

I just can't see anyone coming off well in that setpiece, no matter which actors were in play. (Though I'll admit I can't see Beverlee McKinsey standing down there screaming up at him ineffectually.) They all howl and shriek at Roger from below a small set of stairs they could easily walk up and it turns into a complete rager. It's some of Marj's worst work but everyone acts a fool. Right down to Roger yelling about preferring 'a toothless street whore!' to Alex. It's just hysterical.

It's hilarious to me. In large part due to the blocking in which virtually everyone impotently howls up at Roger from the ground floor beneath the stairs, just heckling him. It's like an episode of Jerry Springer when the audience yells back and forth with the latest guest. And then anyone who tries to occasionally get up there gets beat, and then a baby shows up....

Annie Wersching (Amelia Joffe on GH, but best known for her roles in Timeless, 24, Star Trek: Picard and as the original VA and physical modeler of Tess in the video game version of The Last of Us, among many other roles) has died of cancer at 45. Such a talent.

Oh damn. Annie Wersching was so talented - she reinvigorated 24 in its later years opposite Kiefer Sutherland and then did a solid turn as the Borg Queen on the recent season of Picard. Way too talented, way too young.

Meanwhile: It's time for the return of this immortal sequence. @DRW50 It can't be embedded so I had to link. @Darnhas probably never seen this and must, it is hilarious and ridiculous. Marj Dusay and many others at their less than best. It is up there with the scene on DAYS where John and Brady fight the entire town while Brady is dressed as Gay Zorro. The capper is still when the maid comes in with the baby and everyone is like "no, no!" As I said when I first saw it all that was left to add was their bringing in some sort of circus animal act.

Doing a bit of a Dobsons deep dive this lazy, hazy weekend, as their incredibly intricate and labyrinthine plotting - especially on GL with the Spaulding/Marler quad and saga - and the overall haunting mood of their era and Marland's (heavily inflected by the Ritournelle/light through trees opening setting the tone IMO) has always stayed with me since the days of WOST. I see the Spauldings came on en masse in late '77 and am enjoying looking in on that. I've said this before but I always found Elizabeth Spaulding in particular to be a spooky, ethereal character they should've brought back when Phillip went dark in the 2000s (along with Cindy Pickett as Jackie, who I've always liked whenever I saw her in an old episode). What I am curious about is this: Jackie and Justin allegedly both came on in spring-summer '76. What were they doing for most of the year and a half before the Spauldings, the central axis of their future story, finally arrived?

Peggy Lipton! What the hell?

This is just a partial episode, so maybe there was more dialogue before or Holly monologued to him while he was unconscious, but another neat bit is that it seems as though the first words they say to each other after however many years are very simple: Holly: Why? Roger: Our daughter. And that's it! No long expository dialogue. Holly leaves the room. That's enough. They don't need to give the audience a speech about who they are to each other when they would already know all that about themselves and wouldn't talk that way together, the info can be filled in via other scenes or other characters.

To add on to that, in terms of reveals sometimes less can be more. I am sure they did more in dialogue and exposition to explain away who Roger and Holly are at the time to new viewers, and I think the initial reveal scene of Roger to the townsfolk at Phillip and Blake's wedding is great, but this is very artful (timestamped below): Yes, the jump cuts on the faces are slightly dated but they do it all with great music, Garrett and Zaslow's faces, and flashbacks with absolutely no dialogue over the music. It all tells the story by itself.

Thanks!

I've worked in post-production. You can absolutely plan it when cutting together a montage or sequence like that (and I'm betting they deliberately chose it to match the music - having her turn just as the slice of the screen scrolls by and 'turns' as well is too perfect) I but having that footage to work with at all was a happy accident based on something Beth Ehlers did in a scene.

I always liked Harley dancing in the opening and the crescendo at the end but I think I'm considerably more partial to the '80s GL theme (does it have a name? idk if it was Jack Urbont but it came after the disco mess) vs. Hold On To Love today. This is the one I mean (timestamped). They kept it til '90, I guess (the later one is faster and more synth, and I liked it too). I also always really liked the haunting light through the trees/Ritournelle. It was mysterious and kept the tone for me with the Dobsons/Marland's stuff. I knew AMC (still overbudget, having moved to California) was in real trouble when they dumped the masterful scrapbook opening and basically xeroxed GL's horrible PowerPoint slide, BTW:

I'll never understand why they dumped the '80s ATWT theme. I always hated the cornfield opening. The overly dramatic music did not match the stories at all.

Y&R has been toying with the 'film in public spaces in the studio and pretend it's on location' since at least JFP. A lot of drab institutional-looking stairwells, like when Phyllis took her tumble down some stairs when Stafford left the show for GH. In fairness, I'm sure soaps have always played with filming in the facilities and making it pretend to be location over the decades. But the lighting and production value in the earlier years was much more adept at disguising it vs. the ugly GL/ATWT and even recent GH and Y&R method of 'just film anywhere backstage and pretend it's a set'. You can tell the difference between some grimy back staircase on Studio X and a stairwell in Newman Enterprises or whatever.

He definitely was not on during Live Week, lol.

Yeah, the Academy trying to turn this into Watergate to cover themselves is a bit much. It's a few older actresses getting overzealous on Twitter, it's not exactly the ruthless Weinstein/Miramax campaign strategy. It's an unfortunate flap but I imagine Riseborough will be fine in the end. She has long been plugging away successfully in the arthouse scene and on prestige TV and would likely continue to do so regardless of the nom.

Let alone that Sonny and Ava are friendly too via Nina. I saw the three of them sharing chummy scenes together and thought I was in Bizarro World. Avery or no Avery, I can't see it. And I've never forgotten the scenes with Stafford's Nina tormenting Ava in labor. It looked like a very personal, physical violation. I was a bit nauseous watching it.

That show is doing well despite my never having heard of it before last week. He will not be back!

It absolutely feels like that.

Cannot believe I am going to watch this. I have been dying to see what this woman looks like for years. Damn you.

I remember that they played the full song on the show a few times, including IIRC the finale. I never got over the impassioned Michael McDonald-sounding dude on background vocals going 'ohh yeahhhh, yeahhhh!!' over the terrible lyrics. I understood the concept of it and thought it was a nice idea in theory, but as Kim Zimmer pointed out in her memoir (which I think we've both clearly read) it was just 'a bunch of hairy-ass arms reaching out to hairy-ass arms'. The other unfortunate part came when they would get some of the eight million little child actors on Wheeler's Mormon GL to read some of the narration and God bless 'em, those kids sounded like they were delivering it phonetically.

I'm not gonna link them here because I'm pretty sure they've been poached from the older source by a notorious video thief I have some other suspicions about, but there's a decent sprinkling of fascinating eps from spring-summer 1992 on YT - fairly early Gottlieb/Malone, back when they were still fully committed to Grace Phillips' Sarah Buchanan and Mia Korf's Blair. They're pretty interesting stuff, and give some of us who weren't there a better sense of the timeframe on several storylines: Sarah's pill addiction (and apparent crush on her shrink) came not long after her return from the dead and is already wrapped up by April or May, and now they've moved onto her and Bo reunited just in time for her to become the prime suspect in the Carlo Hesser murder case. The reveal about Blair and Addie is slowly parceled out, and in early May Blair tells Max everything about who she is and where she came from while Elaine Princi's excellent Dorian tells Cassie harrowing stories about her childhood. I loved Kassie DePaiva's Blair and always will, but it's still unconscionable what OLTL pulled after Mia Korf quit to go back to the stage - I can't remember the last time any soap in America had as much of a commitment to an AAPI lead before or after Blair in '92, including the Asian-American characters onscreen today. She is a central, incredibly important player in story, bouncing between Max, Asa and her vendetta against Dorian, and for my money she is great. Simmering in early eps is Lee Ann feeling trapped in the Buchanan clan, spending more and more time with Jason Webb to Viki's consternation, and the slow disintegration of Asa and Renee as he becomes more infatuated with Blair. Also present: The incredibly earnest and annoying "Maggie Vega" character, a Latino police officer they'd apparently intended to pair with Andrew (and you can tell in these episodes) until they failed to secure their planned hire (allegedly, Saundra Santiago post-Miami Vice and pre-GL) and Bob Krimmer turned out to have more chemistry with Laura Bonarrigo. Sloan Carpenter has only just arrived. And LaTanya Richardson, Mrs. Samuel L. Jackson herself, appears as the original Rodi who figures into the Hank Gannon/Sheila Price/Troy Nichols triangle. I have a lot of fondness for Terry Alexander (Troy) from his role in Day of the Dead, but he cannot compete with Hank. Hank comes on very strong and very broad in these episodes in a way that would not fly today - he is often a brash [!@#$%^&*], and they only take him down a few pegs in subsequent eps. The writing for Troy - pushing him as a stodgy, white-collar man who can't relate to Sheila or Hank's interests - feels a little too convenient and broad as well in that classic Malone way, in that I don't remember the Troy in episodes from '90?/'91 seeming too much like a stuffed shirt even if I also didn't find him too interesting. That said, Nathan Purdee does have great chemistry with Valarie Pettiford, who is the only Sheila I ever liked and I like her more the more I see her as an adult. You can see why Purdee quit Y&R for OLTL initially. I remember Gottlieb in an interview making much of their hiring Black writers for this story, for whatever that is worth. Either way, whatever peaks or valleys it has it doesn't feel like the "Black story" is an afterthought in these episodes. I still like Grace Phillips a lot as Sarah, but that may be my anti-Jensen Buchanan bias. Either way, she clashed with Gottlieb and was out not too long after all this big push. Either the BTS issues or unpopularity were strong enough that I believe she took most of the summer or fall off and then returned (with new red hair, as Phillips was obviously already looking for new work) for Thanksgiving just in time to die within one or two episodes. (Nora had already been introduced a couple months before and begun sparking with Bo) I'd love to hear more takes from those who've seen the eps and/or those who remember more.

If they'd brought her on as a fresh character (a Quartermaine cousin, anything) she could have so much more longevity and carry a lot. As it is I will never really care about Nina or her useless secret children even though I love Cynthia Watros' performances. I remember how much of an apeshit lunatic Nina came onto this show as before the recast, I remember her tormenting Ava. I don't buy most of her functional relationships. I buy Watros' performances, but that's a whole different thing. Ultimately it's a lead balloon. But will Watros get a second or third character like Howarth or Easton? Nope. (Not that any of them should, frankly.)

It shouldn't have happened with Michael either, even though he's too boring to live at this point. Or Maxie, or Lulu when it did for them ten years ago. And we've already discussed the pulse-pounding excitement of Brook Lynn, Chase, etc.'s unmarried storylines.