Vee

I do think Dobbs has made a big difference, and the media has not wanted to acknowledge that or has tried to downplay it as much as possible. There are a handful of articles and some TV punditry indicating it has changed the dynamic of the midterms, but a lot of them still need to believe in a GOP wave for the sake of excitement and keeping the more outspoken libs in their place.

I had no idea Lesley was dating a random Italian dude they brought her in with in the winter and they're still together offscreen. When Nikolas started going on about "Marcello" I had no clue what he was on about and had to google. Good for ol' Lesley I guess.

I don't have a problem with Ava having killed Connie. I do have a problem with the show trying to remake her into a sappy heroine off and on over the years since. That's not who she is. She is a killer, she is not Carly Snyder.

I don't think it's really going to hurt it tbh - those films are big for Blumhouse and it did well in theaters last time for Kills. There's a mild uproar of 'oh, how can they do this to the theatres again??' but Halloween Kills did major box office. This is most likely being done simply to try to shore up Peacock, like the sudden DAYS move. Halloween sells, Peacock doesn't.

Right - I could've sworn I remembered this very pointed interview, but I wasn't 100% sure.

I know she came close to going to AMC. I had heard something about someone (I don't recall who) intervening there before she could, but I may be wrong about that. I know Marcy Walker was allegedly very concerned about it after her GL stint went south, something she supposedly blamed Jill for.

I have a feeling she either thought it was too soon after the DID saga or that she didn't want Dorian and Viki fighting over a man.

It seems that from Labine's own mouth above Erika shut down that angle.

I always loved Florencia Lozano. Tea I went back and forth from loving and hating many times over the years, because the writing was often not as honest about the character as the performer always was. By the end she and Blair were very well matched and I'd have her back any time. I blame JFP and her people for the conclusion of the Canton/Cramer storyline, but I may be wrong.

Chelsea and Chloe are not just redundant of each other, they have not a purpose on this show in maybe 10 years.

This is how virtually all 'good' adults are written on the remaining network soaps now - if they're 'good' people they can't fùck around, have affairs, or approach each other like adults. It has to be cutesy teenage shít. Or when they become rootable or get audience investment they are defanged, like GH pretending Nik and Ava did not hook up when he was running from the police for getting a woman shot in the head and she didn't leave Connie to bleed out.

Oh, Angel Square was everywhere lol. I loved those characters, but I imagine a lot of it is cringey or OTT now. I adored Antonio and Andy. Others did not, and a lot of their story is definitely silly today. We can't say the show wasn't ahead of its time in terms of Latin representation though. It was practically an entire second canvas of characters, contract and recurring, and a lot of them lasted into '97 or possibly beyond (I don't know when Javier or Linda Soto vanished).

This is what she said at We Love Soaps: There's some incredibly bold, candid and in-depth stuff in Labine's run with Viki's therapy re: her sexuality and sexual abuse where sex, orgasms, etc. are discussed in-depth, which I posted here long ago. I'm amazed they got that stuff on air let alone out of Viki's mouth; it wouldn't be done today. There was also wonderful stuff with her and Clint Ritchie, and with Dorian and Mel. (Though my understanding is they kiboshed the Viki/Clint reunion in part because Ritchie and Erika were not in a great place at the time and he may have been drinking again - I know that Malone had paired Clint with Carlotta Vega while slowly moving him back to Viki, and I think Labine may have been the one who put Carlotta with Hank Gannon; I can't remember clearly. I loved all that stuff though with Carlotta and both men.) A lot of the Labine run did not work for me but the stuff that did was great. Admittedly, they were still coasting on the glories, outsize popular characters and supercouples of the Malone/Gottlieb/Horgan/Griffith era during that year with the overall canvas, but by '98 the show was sleepy, the cast was bored and when JFP turned up their luck ran out. I remember a very enthused joint interview from HBS and RSW in the spring of '98, crowing about the Georgie Phillips story finally giving them something to do after being 'in the freezer' for a year or more, and how Jill Phelps had supercharged the show with the story of Georgie faking a sex tape with herself and Bo. (This was before Georgie's murder.) It seemed exciting, like the show had nice energy, so I came back because I too had grown bored with the show getting sleepier in '97 and a lot of characters and couples I liked leaving. But by the end of the year JFP was in full power, and HBS had gone from singing her praises to asking the head of daytime at ABC to get Nora killed off the show.

Yes, although I think the whole circus thing came in under Labine.

Irish stuff (and Irish political intrigue) was also very hot in the early-mid '90s - Irish culture and folklore, the Irish struggles, U2, Clannad, movies like Patriot Games and Blown Away (with both Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges sporting terrible accents), etc. Later the unfortunate Riverdance. A fair bit of it is embarrassing to recall now, what with the flutes and such, but it was a big thing in those years in pop culture. And Malone was very Irish himself. Yeah, the Men of 21 with Blond Bo got silly by the end, but the early stuff with Patrick and Carlo's return/Poseidon largely worked for me. I think it was Horgan who relayed the story in Llanview in the Afternoon of how someone at ABC said they'd found Thorsten Kaye while looking for someone for AMC, and told her she had 24 hours to figure out a role for him or he was going to Pine Valley. Horgan and presumably Malone came up with Patrick Thornhart, and by god it worked. I don't remember massive critiques of Luna's death at the time, I mostly remember people being heartbroken. But I was also pretty young. I even really liked the introduction of Crystal Chappell's Maggie, Andrew's sister/cousin/whatever, for Max, though looking at some of those eps now from before Malone left they really went pretty hard at those two not long after Luna was gone.

I think it was a collection of people who worked well together - I think there's little doubt they needed Griffith to help them learn to acclimate to the format and sharpen the writing early on. And some of us have said it before, but I think Horgan rarely gets enough credit for her time as EP. She was assigned to continue the Gottlieb house style and for the most part she did so very well in 1994-95 despite some bum stories or divisive couples (all of which existed in 1991-1994 as well). She was always a strong, stable pair of hands in either of her roles behind the camera at various soaps.

His plan was for Drew and Rachel opposed by a racist Becky Lee, which would not have been very good. I believe it was the Labines who were aiming for something with Drew and Nora or her perimenopausal struggles, but don't quote me. A little of Patrick and Marty went a long way at the time and they had plenty of detractors because he never stopped saying that poem (which he kept doing for two more years once Malone was gone) but they were also wildly popular, something people forget. I adored Patrick and Marty in the beginning.

I won't speak for anyone else but I think his first run was largely strong after a few fits and starts in the early months as he and Linda Gottlieb and co. found their feet. 1992 also was an experimental year but it had two rock solid stories, Megan's death and the Billy Douglas saga, which anchored everything, and a lot of popular characters and couples either emerging or already in place (and some stuff that didn't fully work, like the controversial Sarah Gordon recast and centering a murder mystery around her - Grace Phillips was great IMO but didn't get along with the EP who'd hired her, was allegedly not popular with fans, the big story didn't fully click despite being well-written day to day and eventually they shipped Phillips off for months before having her turn up at Thanksgiving to get killed off). 1993 is supposedly the banner year when the entire show began to hum, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff in 1992 and two classic storylines. Not everything he did, all the gauzy romanticism and flights of fancy, was to everyone's taste. It definitely got a little ropey towards the end in late '95/early '96 too, and there was some more bad ideas on the table that didn't fully reach fruition, but it was not a case where a HW starts out good and then becomes unwatchable. That never happened in Malone I. Even in weaker shape it was still head and shoulders above a lot of soaps at the time and AFAIK he was fired simply because Disney was stepping in on the ABC soaps more and more in this period. Which led quickly to a new headwriting team even Erika Slezak publicly moaned about, something she never did, and then to a series of revolving creative teams and disaster. Malone's second run in 2003-2004 was a very complex disaster of his own as well, but that is a whole other topic.

3/10.

I found Nelson Branco's public persona to be deeply toxic and mentally unbalanced, which ultimately seemed to destroy whatever career he had. If there was more to him than what he put out there, as there usually is with most people away from the public eye, that's not for me to discuss; I didn't know it or see it and so I can't eulogize it or a career I didn't care for. I'm sorry for the surviving people who knew and cared for him, I hope his loved ones find some comfort and I hope his passing was painless. That's all I got.

Allison Janney (ex-GL) gets her well-deserved Liam Neeson on in an upcoming thriller for Netflix with Jurnee Smollett:

She's been so ill with long COVID. I'm glad they're able to bring her back and resolve her dangling storyline which I believe largely played out over webcam in quarantine.

Thank you for this.