Vee

Again: It is idiotic that Spencer wants to adopt a baby or that he and Trina might get married over this mess, but the endless stream of instant nuclear family stories for most young adults and often even young LGBT characters (immediate pregnancy, babies and marriage - Kish, Wilson, Lucas/Brad and Mariah/Tessa all check some if not all of these boxes, as did Bianca on AMC before them) over the last decade-plus are clearly what the soaps or their networks feel comfortable greenlighting to what is perceived as a predominantly older conservative audience. Most young people on network soaps are not allowed to be young and fùck or do young people things - they must procreate, wed and settle down.

I can believe they'll kiss at February sweeps, I predicted that awhile ago. I can also believe they will then next kiss at May or November sweeps, lol. I think the show is petrified of showing them intimate out of fear of the racist portion of the audience and is trying to keep it as chaste as possible until Chavez leaves. I would love to be proven totally wrong.

He didn't, actually. It was Brown and Esensten, who used Darnell and Debbi heavily on Loving and The City (along with Agnes apparently having a hand in the return too).

The actual storyline was pretty lame, but Angie and Jesse's return itself was so good that I didn't care. Same with the Two Todds that has a handful of good scenes and some excellent performances strung along an absolutely nonsensical and hilarious story. Howarth, KDP, Florencia Lozano, Erika, etc. all sell it and make it work (while TSJ is out to lunch) and it was so satisfying after what had become of Todd since the rapemance.

All the 2000s P&G soap openings just scream "we don't give a [!@#$%^&*]" to me. It is muzak and flashing faces or scrolls. The precursor to the incredibly bad current GH PowerPoint opening, where literally any recurring player or small child shows up depending on the day, like a slot machine.

Meanwhile, Frank is wondering if they can shoot their kiss all reverse-angles.

I just hate all the fake elevator music themes GL and ATWT got in the last 10+ years. And yes, that opening was always so bad. The Peapack one was somehow worse.

It has to be either Stefano or Jack on DAYS.

I doubt it will happen anymore than several attempts to let Peter Jackson do an ep did in the late 2000s-early 2010s due to conflicts in scheduling, but Wright does have a longstanding relationship with the production and in particular Steven Moffat (who he co-wrote Tintin with). And they did finally get Neil Gaiman for several eps. I would love to see some New Adventures or classic people return again like Paul Cornell, who's been gone a long time and is mostly in comics atm. Or Ben Aaronovitch from the McCoy era, since they did manage to get Rona Munro back in Capaldi's era. The really interesting stuff in the interview for me is the spinoff talk - we know he's been talking about it a long time, how to re-franchise the show again, but it's exciting to see it made manifest. I didn't know about this article. (As it says it's not paywalled, you can click a link inside it to undo the block) It's in the news because of this. The video at the first link is good, but the other two parts of the article are linked in the tweet below (along with better quality images). And over at Big Finish: Speaking of spinoffs: Grain of salt, but rumor has it this latest Blu-Ray extra's focus and branding is not a coincidence.

@DRW50 @Faulkner

It is surreal to watch Frances Fisher on my EON binge while she's in the middle of this whole thing. I still don't think Woman King deserves a thing. And I like Gina Prince-Bythewood and of course Viola is an immense talent, but it's just a poisoned chalice of a project IMO.

How many episodes of Willow am I going to have to suffer through if I catch up on the last week? I tapped out at last Tuesday lol.

I'm gonna leave Uncle Porkchop and his unnatural burgundy hair alone. I would cast Jennifer Ashe as a spooky older lady for some story on a soap in a minute. She was so good on both ATWT and this. Lauren-Marie Taylor took years to finally begin to age at all, but she still looks lovely and is a regular on the horror convention scene thanks to Friday the 13th. A nice cast shot from Twitter I'd never seen. I'm surprised they bothered at a certain point tbqh:

Colin Egglesfield (AMC, the CW Melrose Place) has unfortunately landed himself in the latest Neil Marshall/Charlotte Kirk (if you don't know, google her) midlife crisis debacle, a crime thriller called Duchess.

Bryan Cranston really is all class.

Pretty sure the show has enough extraneous young white people doing nothing.

They'd absolutely be pairing them up if Tinker wasn't out. I wouldn't assume it won't happen in future. Somewhere along the way Ron decided that camp and bitchy characters, or irredeemable villains, are simply another way he can show his skill and force his will on the audience to make them accept the unacceptable. This started with the rapemance on OLTL and he's been doubling down with many characters since. Almost all of the 'good'-typed characters on a show (who he in the past wrote very well) are classed all as either boring or hypocrites, while Leo/Gwen/Obrecht/Ben/Victor/et al are bold truthtellers who deep down have hearts of gold and must be embraced by those to whom they've done wrong. And it's too bad, because his conception of LGBT characters IMO used to be a lot more nuanced. Today you're just waiting for the next two-dimensional stereotype which Ron then pretends is simply 'queer and proud'. I don't have a problem with loud gay characters or edgy characters; I have a problem when that's all they are, and when they do terrible things and then the show tries to meme its way through it. Case in point: Leo.

Drake is so sweet.

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.