Vee

Edge of Night was famous for doing one, two, three-handers IIRC. It's a thing I feel soaps here should do more often again, but the problem is whenever they do lately it's often with the most marginal-to-poor choices possible. Jason Thompson is a fine actor, but he cannot anchor solo or near-solo episodes of Y&R, especially when he is miscast. In addition to John C. Reilly, GH has done little tributes to both Peter Hansen and Susan Brown separately (Lee and Gail Baldwin) in recent years. I didn't love the dialogue or plot choices in the latter - I'm not sure why Gail would send everyone envelopes of glitter - but the moment at the end where Kin Shriner's Scott does the long, lonely walk alone past the nurses' hub (as Genie Francis and Denise Alexander watch) to look at Gail's portrait joining Steve, Jessie, Lucille, Amy, etc.'s on the memorial wall was very good (timestamped below). Did this memorial need to coincide with an anniversary show and a budget folk-rock montage of recent couples just after this moment? No. But it was something.

I took "peppy and cheap", of course, from Soapdish, where the network honcho (Garry Marshall) makes it a guiding ethos for the show over the showrunner and stars' heads. I think it applies even more in the last decade than back then.

Yeah, we know.

It was OLTL. She wanted him as Sam Rappaport #2.

Oh God. William Hurt was one of the greats. RIP.

I'm not saying people can't have issues with Jamey Giddens but let's live in reality. He's not HWing the show and I highly doubt he would replace Ron.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having a particularly outre or camp gay villain like Leo, but when there is no shading to the character plus when he seems like an avatar for the writer's id, that's another story. When everything is spun around the axis of that character for the LGBT canvas, too, it's a problem. And the reason Chad is a part of this story is because, as I said before, Ron has a long history of using the hot str8 dudes on his soaps as objectification fodder for the audience in the ways he can get away with, almost like Golden Age Hollywood creatives skirting the Hays Production Code - ways he can't get often get away with the actual gay characters in romantic or sexual roles. He can queerbait and use the str8 leading males as eye candy for himself and for the gay and female audience alike and tease the idea that they will cross over into gay behavior at any moment - hence, Chad used as a lure for Leo. But the actual, canonically gay characters are doing what together? On GH they were C-players who just talked about watching gay-coded sitcoms, while the majority of the gay gaze was fixed on the str8 males and homoerotic content for them. And on DAYS, it's all over the map at best even though Will and Sonny are ostensibly leading characters. I have a lot of time for camp and humor, and I've defended a lot of Ron's comic interludes in the past. His treatment of the Black New Orleans-based drag act that helped shelter Marcie Walsh on OLTL in 2007 was fun and goofy but also had an emotional undercurrent due to the backstory in the scripts. Kish worked too. I don't think Leo is the second coming of the Antichrist. But using him as sort of the purging gay id of Carlivati's writing that can say all the things he wants to, do all the things he wants to and potentially molest the str8 hotties while the actual gay leads are sort of ghettoized into this mess - I just don't think it's productive, and at worst it reinforces a lot of toxic, stereotypical shít. And everyone's issues with the Craig story have already been covered.

GH is not good, but it has improved marginally in the recent years after Passanante retired(?) and I think the HWs are decent guys hamstrung in many ways. It occasionally has gripping scenes or good ideas, mostly poorly executed. DAYS often makes GH look like Shakespeare.

Great news.

That's news to me, but I'd love to hear more.

DAYS has not had 'top tier' writing in close to 30 years.

IIRC Wheeler worked her way up under Chris Goutman at ATWT, who was considered a solid success story at the time with Sheffer before that show completely fell apart. Wheeler seemed like a promising protege. I understood the choice at the time. Of course, it didn't work out.

This is the most I've ever seen of Meg minus the '70s clip that's been around awhile. Invaluable. I actually tried digging around for any discussion of Meg dating back to the terrible DV Bordisso story on Port Charles, where DV the psychic spy was revealed to be Scott's bio-dad. I hadn't watched any of that mess since it aired and it was hard to find clips being detailed about the backstory. It's very difficult to pin down any substantive remembrance of Meg from Scott in the last however many decades, and I wish we could.

And that's why she didn't take a certain job, allegedly. Good for her.

There's been a lot of chatter about VI and his family re: politics in recent years and I don't know how much is true, but he has always been a class act onscreen and magnetic to watch, even in the years when I used to be tired of the cartoonish David of the mid-2000s. He came back especially strong near the end of AMC's network run and online. It's a horrible tragedy and I wish him the best.

People love to clown on ol' Guy Wilson and pretend Chandler is cruising for a primetime Emmy any time soon, but those scenes with GW and Paul where Paul basically seduced him were practically R-rated without any clothes off. I had not seen DAYS that intensely horny since the '90s. Ron may want to do the kind of love scenes he did with the gays on OLTL, but since the blowback from that show I think he has settled himself to doing queeny camp and gags for the gays to play to the online audience which laps it up vs. anything truly intimate or serious. While it's the ostensibly str8 leading men who are regularly objectified and fetishized exclusively instead. And that's a problem. It may be what he thinks he can get away with with the remaining audience, but that does not make it right.

Lenz was not on for one day. She had a prominent role in a major story and both the magazines and fans had enough time to take notice in print back then, without much Internet. There are many other short-termers who have been given contract roles over the last 50+ years. I can go on as long as you'd like.

I think I remember being surprised by the VM cameo in 2000. I honestly don't recall. Last time I remember being totally surprised was the supposed permanent death of Taylor on B&B in the 2000s(?) and her subsequent surprise resurrection. Oh wait, no, that's not true - Ron and Frank surprised me (and I think a lot of other people) when they brought back Ian Buchanan as "Duke" (a.k.a. Faison as Duke) in 2012 on GH at the end of a week, showing him to be behind Robin's kidnapping. I don't believe there was any advance word at all.

I don't think it closes the door. No one would blink twice if Hartley or Garita returned in a permanent role. Chloe Lanier started out on this show as Young Pat Spencer, which got her Nelle not long after due to fans loving her performance. It's also a time-honored soap tradition, with one of the most prominent examples being Bethany Joy Lenz from GL - hired to play young Clone Reva, and was so good they made her Michelle Bauer, who became part of a major couple.

It's what I always assumed too.