Vee

Oh God! Branco! She always was a lunatic, even if Maura was miscast.

I generally thought Stephanie Williams was boring on every show I've seen her on, but I liked her with Doug Davidson. They would've been hot.

I remember people wondering if hiring Maura was a Sony/CBS move, over MAB's head. It wouldn't surprise me given how she was treated.

I remember some of the latter interview you posted, but where is this stuff? IIRC Maura's role on GH was originally supposed to be maybe a couple weeks, tops. I don't know if Ava was just supposed to be a cameo or if she was supposed to die and usher on Kiki and Franco. I'd love to know what was originally planned, but I don't know how anyone could've thought they would bring in Maura West for just a few days, even before we saw her onscreen and it was clear she was phenomenal on GH.

Yeah, Roman would be my choice tbh, JT or not. Though Marlena is a close second. Failing them, I'd make it someone ironic like one of the young kids.

I agree, I did find it a bit arbitrary that it wasn't Marlena or John (or Roman, as the dark horse).

I thought the actual execution scenes with Stefano were pretty well done when I saw them, tbh. I always found it surprising that this twist was the point of no return for audiences and Corday for that writing team, because I thought Hope was fully justified in executing Stefano in cold blood given what he'd done to her and her family, 'heroine' or not. The cover-up aspect of the subsequent story might've been too far, but if you were going to fire Griffith and co. for anything (and they should've, definitely) it should have been for the despicable rape of Ciara by her foster brother on the Horton living room couch.

I think, as we've said in the past, that the show knows Kristian is better in a darker, harder-edged role as an adult but has no idea how to functionally do that with Hope Brady, who they've pushed to turn into a saintly earth mother over the decades and will never deviate from. The John and Hope/Gina angle allows for them to play to her actual strengths, usually in the dumbest storylines possible lol. I also think Drake and Kristian have chemistry, but they've never been able to find a way palatable to the audience to pursue it. Hasn't stopped them from going to this well again and again, and always backing off.

She was clearly a decent actor, but she laid bare just how blandly functional and vague the dialogue was. Without Leslie infusing it with shades and history, it feels like nothing because on the page it is.

That was so baffling to me. I liked the entire setup of that story and the outline, and then he was behind a table? WTF?? This is the kind of thing DAYS does all the time, like that weird-ass cabin thing, they've been doing it for so many years. They fùck up literally any idea you throw at them with the day to day execution, and that goes back to so many creative regimes before and after that one that I tend to think is institutional. Everything gets dumbed down to kids TV level.

I am a little amazed GH kept the ancient ambulance opening and '70s theme until 1993(!!). You see it play over '92 episodes and it is extremely jarring to go from contemporary music cues and aesthetics to that. It was fine for the era of its inception but I don't know how the hell that was allowed for so long. Look at Y&R, AW, ATWT, OLTL, GL, etc. and all their permutations through the '80s and early '90s and it's beyond me. Even AMC (which had a somewhat less dated opening with the book) had updated well before then.

I thought the whole fraud story with John, etc. started out well; I actually thought it was topical given recent white collar crime IRL. I loved Carrie's role (Austin's was forced because I don't believe Austin knows math, but what are you gonna do). But like most things, it was a story DAYS was not equipped to do. And yes, since it was obvious it was Stefano just like every bad guy on this show always had to be Stefano while he was alive (and occasionally after), there was an airless element to it. I do think that story, like many others, was strung out and then dropped, just as many others were simply curtailed. That definitely doesn't mean every story that creative team wrote was stifled brilliance (case in point: Ian Buchanan, Alamania, etc.). But I think we've watched DAYS do crazy eights around any kind of functional, halfway sophisticated storytelling so many times in the last 20+ years that I never trust them to execute. And whatever the writing regime, historically that problem has gone back to Corday's anxiety and his longtime coterie, as well as possibly Sony/NBC.

It's the writers who are to blame for this material. They think it's riveting because they just want to watch him monologue. Twitter does it again:

I'll never forget Stafford's Nina fisting Ava and stealing her baby!

I didn't say I still was! 😅 I thought the Ned/Alexis interplay about their families worked up to a point. After hearing it 50 times, and then watching the Qs get decimated since then and revisiting his treatment of A.J., it plays differently. It would be nice to see it examined in a script one day, considering Ned has proudly taken on the family name and role of patriarch since then. Oh, and I remember the whole thing with Alexis somehow ending up an inadvertent sexy centerfold. I loved Nancy especially back then, but come on. No. I did like the revisit of them not long ago, where I think they had a drunken ONS behind Olivia's back. Did that go very far? It should've kept going. I kept waiting for it to turn out they'd not actually fucked.

I always loved Miguel tbh. Ricky Martin was so hot, I didn't care about anything else lol. I even liked him and Lily! I was like 12. I liked Ned, because he was witty, Wally's dry delivery was priceless and I enjoyed him with Lois. (I also came in just as the period when he was apparently a true turd was ending.) But it was just embarrassing to watch them try to put Dad Jeans Ned over as a rock star in that particular period in pop music; I can't imagine anyone buying it, and it got worse when the Eddie Maine story kept going with him and Alexis later on and they started hitting a different age demographic, in the late '90s. And then the endless speeches about the evils of the Qs, A.J., etc. got old. I enjoy him much more again now. The music thing was especially glaring when you looked at OLTL regularly playing serious pop and rock/grunge music on a recurring basis, gritty stuff, and then at 3 PM we're all getting out of school and Ned is trying to pretend he is my mom's old Steve Winwood tapes. I saw that one a few weeks ago, and that's how I finally found out where the clip of them from the FOTH opening came from. (Bring back FOTH!) I didn't see that episode when it aired.

I thought they tested them at least once before that? I know the car scene was also a test.

I am rewatching a lot of '94 and I remember thinking Ned's music was extremely corny even then. Granted I was a kid, but I did not know how he was supposed to take America by storm in the age of grunge. Maybe I just haven't heard enough of it and he was hitting the Michael Bolton ballad zone, idk lol. Ned was an attractive guy and I liked him, he was witty and fun, but WK seemed old and square even then!

Sean Kanan and Vanessa had chemistry, I remember that much. I wonder what spurred that, and when they knew they were going for it with her and Sonny.

Yes, that's exactly what happened, and then Amanda went and married the sleazy guy who was the teacher on Boy Meets World out of regret, thinking she'd driven Walters (fake Christine) to suicide. Boy Meets World guy promptly began poisoning her. Then the show took a couple months off to completely reset the entire series and course correct from the disaster of the bulk of the season, lol. They came back in the summer with a handful of episodes, scrapped virtually all the ongoing plotlines, spiced things up and turned Jamie Luner's character evil, and set the table for the pretty strong (and sadly final) Season 7.

God, that's so DAYS. For years running. I just do not understand how this show functions. Every advance has another five steps back with dumb shít like this happening at random on any day of the week.

Once again Kin is styled like Buster Poindexter. God bless.

Her MP storyline was so bizarre. I think she ended up getting hit by a train. That season was the nadir of the show.

DAYS has done low-stakes weird [!@#$%^&*] like this for so many years, tbh. Everything keeps working against most attempts at mature storytelling - the production values, the silly music cues (the 'sexy redneck twang' being the worst of all), the lighting and FX choices. I saw it in the 2000s post-Reilly, I saw it in 2011-2012, and there's been a few points since. They have never recovered from JER and Langan. But even for all those aesthetic things, the weird narrative cul-de-sacs or dead ends like what you describe have been around for so many years too. Things just sort of abruptly trail off. I put that on Ken Corday or his longtime minions in the day to day grind.

Chapek is on the ropes: