Vee

Bob Guza worked on a couple of classic slashers in the early '80s - both Prom Night with Jamie Lee Curtis and Curtains with Samantha Eggar, which is a favorite of mine. I know he supposedly was working on a Broadway musical following GH (with Nick Offerman!) but who knows what became of that beyond a few stagings or readings.

Axios, a.k.a. Politico with fillers, screws up letting the mask slip:

Arnold nails it once again:

The NYT has finally managed to top the Tom Cotton fiasco. A thread: The kicker is later, and 100% the truth IMO:

If Barbara Crampton turned up again I'd have to tune in. She is everywhere back in the horror genre these days and she is still incredible.

How much of a slow burn does it qualify as when the main focus and story drive seems to continue to be the white teens? Esme executes a scheme against Joss and Cam to drive plot, even though her stated objective is supposedly about Nikolas and Spencer. These two kids have been on almost a year and haven't kissed, while Cam and Joss (who do not have a serious fanbase together as far as I can tell) get a tender love scene. And I happen to think William Lipton is the best actor of the four, but go where the attention is and weave him in with Spencer and Trina, while doing something different with Joss's character as she potentially begins to morph into the rich bitch when Esme is done. Instead the focus is still on Frank's priority, IMO - Joss and her man. The Spencer/Trina stuff increasingly functions as a B-plot to me even though it's supposed to be a central story, which is exactly how Frank treated the 'ethnic' teens on OLTL: Sidekicks to the whites. Even when the story is supposed to be about them, the focus is not on them.

Yeah, I've been pretty cynical about TI West's post-House of the Devil output but it is easily his best film IMO. Brittany also does a decent cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" in it.

All the teen scenes on the ABC soaps in the last however many years have been squeaky clean and tame as hell. Starr Manning got knocked up at like 17 on OLTL but she instantly had a man, a baby, a fully furnished home and no problems whatsoever while singing her treacly songs and carrying her baby around on her hip being a perfect heroine. These GH kids, also boring as hell. You looked at Degrassi or the PP soaps and it was another story. To me it's just another indicator of the networks and the shows being too nervous to rile the ever-shrinking, conservative-skewed audience in the 21st century as the polarization has heated up nationwide. That's what governs the use of non-white characters or LGBT characters, and it's what governs the treatment of the teens and twentysomethings like they're vanilla little angels. IMO, at GH at least, it starts with Frank who carried that sensibility over from OLTL and what he considered a winning youth formula. Yeah, Nate on OLTL did porn and Cam and Joss have a sex tape, but ultimately the story is either not about them or about how someone else did it to them and is the real problem. The actual teens are mostly relatively sinless. Even the GH teens of the 2000s got dirtier, usually led by Maxie hoeing it up!

Since this has been put in this thread for awhile, I thought it should go here - some excerpts from the new Evan Ross Katz BTVS oral history floating around, particularly re: the BTS drama. It does deal with the Whedon of it all as well. Most of the actors seem to sympathize with Sarah Michelle Gellar being used as a target by Whedon and/or the higher-ups to stir up aggression. (Alyson Hannigan and David Boreanaz declined to be interviewed.) I'm not using direct quotes because these are all from press coverage. @DRW50 @Khan Emma Caulfield (Anya): Julie Benz (Darla): Amber Benson (Tara): SMG: Danny Strong (Jonathan):

Speaking of horror: Brittany Snow (Susan/Daisy, GL) stars in Ti West's new (and excellent) horror picture X, where she shows more than you'd ever expect to see of her. But she's great in it.

If what you're doing fulfills you, more power to you. But I'm sorry, writing your own show or getting a job at one of these shows vs. writing fanfic on this forum are two really different things. For myself, I work in another part of the industry where I'm happy doing what I'm doing, and I have different goals and bigger creative fish to fry than soaps. I don't have any interest in working in daytime today because of the state of the genre and that particular piece of the industry. Trying to pursue creating a daytime soap today is like trying to pursue creating your own horse and buggy company. I have no interest in Jamey Giddens' career path, but even if I did, I wouldn't be doing it by writing original prose on this forum. I hope what you do makes you happy, but it has nothing to do with me and it's not going to change my critical review of these shows.

I would happily bring Lorenzo back, at least for an arc. I never bought his death. Tomas was a dud though. I'm still annoyed about how they squandered him on OLTL, because his entire introduction mystery (long story) was part of a long game for getting back Roger Howarth. It was actually very well done as a seeded series of clues involving a mysterious painting many months in advance and paid off spectacularly when Howarth's Todd finally came face to face with his loved ones with the art in his hands - Ron can still be good when he writes for moments - but ultimately it meant Ted King's character had no actual purpose or weight to him because they did not give him much decent to work with in the interim.

I don't think Eden McCoy is terrible, but she's average at best. She did a decent job with those scenes with Benard's kid and William Lipton the other day. She is the temp that stayed because she filled Frank's shallow physical and ethnic requirements for a teen star, and she should not be leading this part of the canvas. Lipton is very good, while Sydney Mikayla and Nicholas Chavez both have their green moments but have a ton of charisma and likability. But Joss is the center because Joss is in the Starr Manning/Kristen Alderson mold. They need to de-emphasize Joss and then work on a recast for the long term, or at least start playing Joss as the selfish rich girl - I think McCoy could play some of that. And I would play an actual triangle or quad with Cam and Spencer and evil Esme for a little while, since the actual pairing of Spencer and Trina is moving at a snail's pace as is, but that's me. It all depends on how the new girl works out. Jordan #3 makes them all look like Richard Burton, though. And Willow - I don't understand.

Tomas was kind of a bust of a character. People were very excited when he was brought onto OLTL, especially me, but Ron mangled it very quickly. He clearly didn't have any interest in Ted King except as a foil for Roger Howarth and Kassie DePaiva, and invested nothing in the relationships and then wrote some stuff which made it impossible for the audience to invest in him as a serious romantic option (making him the man who had abducted Todd for the evil agency in 2003, etc - he had done a lot of awful things as a spy). He devolved into a scold for the characters people liked and had little to do by the end. I love Ted King, but if GH was going to bring anyone on, then or now, it should've just been about bringing back Lorenzo.

Zach Tinker is part of a very stacked cast in Supermassive's latest interactive horror game. I loved their work on Until Dawn, starring daytime's own Hayden Panettiere among many others (like Rami Malek). For horror fans, the game also features (among others) David Arquette, Lance Henriksen, Ted Raimi, Lin Shaye and Grace Zabriskie.

What, really? I thought they were brothers. And no, I seriously doubt it. Luis was active, high profile and in charge of his organization for years when Tomas was known to be operating in intelligence, and before that he was with the Delgado family as a young man. I think it's likely Tomas posed as Luis and/or Lorenzo as part of some sort of covert operations at one point, but I don't think there was a feasible way to claim Tomas and either one of them were actually one and the same all along.

I don't think Ron knew WTF that whole thing was about. He improvises sometimes and then figures it out later. It was just another way to keep the endless subplot/tease with Todd and Blair going. I don't think there is a feasible way to claim that Lorenzo Alcazar had been living a double life as Tomas Delgado for years, because Téa knew of her estranged brother going back to the years the Alcazars were in power in the underworld and well before. The Alcazars were too visible. I do think, as I've said in the past, that it would've turned out that the Delgados and Alcazars are related genetically, and that Tomas (who spent years as an intelligence agent) may have been doubling as one or both of the Alcazar brothers at times as part of some shady operations. Which is fine. Stop copying my paper. 😘

Seeing as Ron used to love that Talk Soup/The Soup was roasting his GH and IIRC began actively writing the show into scripts and courting its attention, that's on brand. I will never get over the Soup skit making fun of Luke's flashback episode where Tony Geary played Luke's abusive dad, with Tony Hale howling 'you're old, Luke!' and ranting about their inability to do a second take of any scene no matter what. I wish it was still available. ETA: You're welcome. 12:08 into the video. Be sure to have AdBlock.

Richard Burgi gave one of the great genre performances of all time in, of all things, Hostel II. Both hilarious and scary. He channeled white yuppie impotence and rage perfectly. Both GH and Y&R utterly wasted him because I don't think they knew how deep he can run. And poor Robert Newman clearly is only here to run out the clock.

Oh, I didn't expect Todd and Blair to be together as a package on GH. But with a supercouple where the guy had been gone like eight years in some torture chamber, only just reunited at the end of the show and it seemed like the HW was grudgingly writing it at times near the end, it was a bit of a kick in the dick. But I know how it goes when people cross over from soaps, I've seen it before. The people who get a contract are going to get new pairings, that's a fact of life. Blair was lucky not to have died in a plane crash like Vicky Hudson. The problem was that Ron wanted to have it both ways on GH; he wanted to perpetually string out the tease of Todd and Blair for the OLTL audience by constantly having her visit or be in Todd's orbit or lose his one romantic rival for her (Ted King's offscreen OLTL character, Tomas), but he didn't want to ever commit to anything long-term. He just kept playing the subplot in the background. And I just didn't think Todd and Carly offered anything different for either of them. Plus, if you stacked it against her and A.J. there's no contest. So if Todd was going to be there it should've been a cleaner break which gave the old fans some sort of payoff and closure, not the constant tease, and it wasn't that because Ron wasn't ready to let go of OLTL. And they never really have, lol! I also thought it was foul what they did to the Téa fans - killing her baby with Victor Jr. Ron and Frank had already unceremoniously 'killed off' TSJ's Victor near the end of the show, now they had their only child die. Victor II was a crazy bastard but TSJ and FL were hot as hell, and they had their fans. I don't care who it was, it was a shitty thing to do to their fans after killing the guy (who they never got around to resurrecting themselves - OLTL 2.0 had to do it). I was for the GH baby switch revisit which made sense for Todd, but they could've done it without killing Téa's son. That was insult to injury for those fans. I agree. And I think that is what FV is afraid of. IMO he likes people he can manage and keep in their place, fob them off with promises and then do what he wants. Vanessa was capable of forcing Guza's hand on the Dante storyline in 2010. FV can't control VM, and she is big enough to command her place. That was the drama with Genie, and it's the drama here. The way he runs GH, he can't have that. It's a very poor business decision IMO, but I think it's his worldview. I think if you start bringing major GH giants back with that kind of pull, the days for his favorite actors (not just the OLTLers) and his perspective on GH as a hybrid/ABC Daytime refuge soap are numbered.

I think they worked out pretty well on the show, though I didn't approve of keeping the fanbases from OLTL on an endless string - I despised McBain on OLTL and was thrilled Natalie was free of him, but I was also able to deal with him in a new context as a cop who had zero respect for Sonny and Jason. That was refreshing. And I was admittedly invested in Todd and Blair from OLTL who Ron consistently had given short shrift, yet he seemed intent on keeping the flame going with them with Kassie DePaiva coming in and out for perpetual recurring stints to tease the romance going hot and cold, which I didn't think was entirely fair to the audience; I also thought that if you were going to move him on to someone else it needed to be with someone different from Blair, as opposed to Carly who came off as a rebound version of the same woman he'd been obsessed with for years, and a rushed affair despite Howarth and Laura's chemistry. (They also had Carly side with Todd against Jason after learning he stole Jason and Sam's baby, and I'm sorry - there is no universe in which that would ever have [!@#$%^&*] happened.) Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I don't think you could ever have those characters back now, especially Todd the rapist. It's too bad, because despite some flaws the experiment worked IMO. But I didn't fault OLTL 2.0 for taking back its property, especially when GH still had Sean Kanan and many other viable new leads that worked in their place (and Kanan and LW were scorching together). But Ron and Frank couldn't handle losing their faves, and that's when things went downhill. I just think Vanessa is a big personality and a very strong presence on the show, and Frank cannot tolerate people he can't control or keep in their place because they don't need the show. IMO that's part of why Genie kept leaving. She would not return without a contract, and he kept wanting to keep her on recurring and play it cheap, and eventually he had to bend. If he can't control a veteran or can't fit them into his conception of the show and what it should focus on, if someone can destabilize that, he considers it a threat. I think Vanessa is the biggest threat possible, because she doesn't need the show and she's a bit flaky or wild and DGAF, lol. But this is at least partially conjecture, and I may be armchair psychoanalyzing a little or a lot.

On OLTL, when Ron first took over, there were a series of special episodes devoted to Asa Buchanan's death. Those episodes were largely very good (as was much of Ron's first year, IMO) but there were some weird side things. During the event, Viki and Dorian were once again locked together in a wine cellar or something and had it out for the umpteenth time. Viki brought up Victor's death. Dorian told Viki that she hadn't killed Victor after all - "I killed Victor." She offered no explanation for how this could be given Viki's re-integrated memory of doing so, and when Viki brought up Victor's unlikely return from the grave in 2003 Dorian simply said "if that was really him." It was never elaborated upon, but they did make a point of changing Victor's death date back to the '70s on the Lord mausoleum set, so they clearly meant to undo the terrible Victor resurrection plot from 2003. I am glad they undid his resurrection, but I don't believe Dorian killed Victor after all, simply because Ron never bothered to explain a thing, and because I always liked the twist that it was Viki and that Dorian had spent years bearing the public shame and hatred to protect her. But this is what Ron does sometimes with controversial past stories; he suggests there is a seed of doubt but completely fails to explain the details. Back to the topic, he did this at GH with Rick Webber during the 50th anniversary as well - Rick's ghost is called on the attic story with Laura and Theresa Carter, and Rick simply says that 'that's not what happened' or words to that effect. There's no other discussion. It's lazy. I think the show, though very flawed and volatile with some really terrible stories and much degraded daily writing, was fun and had a lot of strengths for most of 2012 through to late spring 2013. Even after the OLTLers returned there was still some good fun for awhile (though the Pickle Lila stuff on The Chew which ends in virtually the entire onscreen cast contracting violent diarrhea is possibly the worst episode of GH I have ever seen). They did save the show for a good stretch. I was so glad they brought the Nurses Ball back. I think it's important it continue. I also think it's important it not be quite so cheap and embarrassing when they do it, and it's been that way for some time, so maybe it can take a brief break lol. Lesley and Tracy still appear on a recurring basis, and Kimberly seems happy to show up whenever. I will eat my hat if Frank allows VM back on set.

[!@#$%^&*]! I knew it was at Kelly's for both her and Robin. Damn, I'm good. Anyway, yes, it touched me that he was given that seal of approval from two of the audience's most beloved characters. Didn't last, of course. The Sean stuff is a bit campy with a drawing-room mystery but it's a fun one-off and true to the spirit of the characters. Reilly's daughter (a Tiktok star, IIRC) is very good but sadly will likely not be back given her fame, so they should recast the Annie role. Sharon Wyatt's voice cameo was touching. They should've locked down Carly Schroeder as Serena when they had a chance. She kept acting long after she grew up. Now she's in the armed forces. Too late.