Vee

Oh yeah. One hundred percent.

Like titan and lion said above, the hospital focus started coming back in the mid-2000s. They had one of their worst years ever in 2005 creatively and I suspect BTS (not just with the failed Carly #3 recast) and it led to a major reset. They rehired Kimberly McCullough, showcased her with a handpicked leading man for her (though I always felt that was somewhat grudging for both Guza and JFP and it came out in the writing too often) and it just happened to coincide with the rise of Grey's Anatomy. Suddenly hospitals, young doctors, etc. were hot and it became and remained a major part of the show until 2012, and Frank and Ron have brought it back more since as well. The quality of some of those stories and characters, of course, are another story.

They knew they had a star pretty quickly after hiring her right around the time Genie first returned in 2006(?). When they realized what they had she (like Scott Clifton's Dillon before her) suddenly she began getting major airtime with key stars, and they moved her towards Carly and tried to craft her into mini-Carly to give her the authority of Carly and the mob's approval with the audience, all typical Guza bullshít back then. (They also shitcanned Lindze Letherman and Georgie's story with DIllon to give her even more to do) I liked her a lot with Logan Hayes, but my understanding is his actor was difficult. I never quite bought into Dante and Lulu because I just felt Berman was pushed too hard and into a tryhard frame, but she was very strong and I knew who the character was. I can't say that about Lulu since. Tell it to Frank. He felt he hit gold with Kristen Alderson and co. at OLTL's cloying teen scene in the late 2000s and never let up on them. He also never gave up trying to re-craft a similar teen scene at GH, which is why Temp Joss (Eden McCoy) who fits the criteria of blonde, white and under 25, became a central axis despite just not being suited for it - she's not terrible, but she's not a star and she shouldn't be getting the kind of mileage she has. I think to him the scant youth demos are still where they live, breathe and survive along with the Facebook olds.

This is also deliberate. Frank is known for preferring to keep scenes to roughly 90 seconds or less because he feels certain demographics only stay with that length before flipping or exiting a stream; he is producing according to his perception of that attention span. He's been doing it since OLTL. And the rest you mention is all true, of course.

The writing team held over by Guza from the '90s saved a lot of absolutely terrible [!@#$%^&*] and seriously elevated the day to day show until they were mostly purged in 2012. Even at its worst you still had some dialogue scenes in the 2000s that could've easily gone on cable, nighttime or streaming. I never felt the over the top pushing of Julie Berman's Lulu rang true and I felt the character was forced into an outline they wanted to go with, but however she annoyed me it was still vividly detailed and not a non-entity which is what she became under FV and the recast.

Please just kill Tessa in a bus accident.

Exactly. Love or hate him or their work, the old writing team did the deep work with Dante. No character since has been fully taken to that place, though they touched on the earliest iterations of characters like Shawn, etc a bit before they were all ousted in 2012. Nina has never been fully developed as anything but a lunatic because she was only designed as a crazy showcase for Michelle Stafford. Anything Cynthia Watros brings to it is purely her own talent. It's a waste and she could lift out tomorrow, though I might try to salvage a few things for her before doing that. I do think she fills Lucy's role in the canvas and I'd have Lucy oust her. Ava is a stone cold killer. She has layers and motivations and even angst, but that is at core who she is and the pre-FV writers would've understood it. This team waffles because they love Maura and want her to still be able to play ATWT/Carly Snyder-type romance sometimes. Ava has had a long run on the show and can continue to have a longer one, but don't pretend to me that she is a heroine. Ava showed us who she was within a month or two of her arrival when she left Connie dead on the floor.

I was never a big Brenda or Sonny/Brenda fan in her heyday, but I liked her with Jax near the end of the '90s and then came to appreciate her in hindsight much later. Caroline and I have had a lot of discussions centering around the S/B pairing in latter years and their doomed marriage in the early 2010s, and how their final (very good, brutally honest) scenes in 2011 indicated why it is futile to pair Sonny with anyone else - because if the character cannot change for her, he won't for anyone. I'm assuming Khan hasn't seen them so it's time to post them again! It was the first time in years Maurice had impressed me, and the last. Also some of the last, best work of the very longtime writing team, most of which went out with Guza and JFP. And I do agree - they could bring her back tomorrow and it would still work with them, and would be necessary to evolve the character and move him into an elder statesman role (with VM taking the share of story) and transition more and more away from the mob. We've discussed that one around here before too, though. It's also why Frank doesn't bring her back; he knows she is too big for the show he chooses to make and what he chooses to focus on.

Lol. Look, assuming for a moment this hasn't been an elaborate troll along (which would take commitment rarely seen even here), it’s cool that you really don’t care what they put onscreen so long as Adam is frontburner, dude. There’s always fans who will watch anything so long as ‘their fave’ is on. That and general inertia is just about the only thing keeping Y&R alive. But if that’s your only criterion for quality (and it’s clear it is, since you don’t really know much about this show or any other soap you ask about) then please don’t get mad at other people for feeling differently from you because they remember when the show was a quality product and that makes you feel unhappy or out of place. If this place ain't for you, move on with your life.

I thought Maurice and Sarah were a supercouple, period. Granted I was a teenager at the time lol. I think they were the last GH supercouple, in that iteration, and could've run a long time. The skill of Guza and his daily team managed to make Maurice and Tamara crackle for a bit of time too, but the show was already in the process of becoming utter trash in part due not just to Pratt and Frons but Guza's own dark obsessions and ego as well, and neither Guza's writing for them nor Maurice ever recovered from Tamara having incendiary chemistry with Ted King. They had to turn Alcazar into Stevie Wonder to try to emasculate him after that. That was the end of the couple for me. But no, nothing compared to the original.

Guza and Frons were only simpatico on certain things. Frons reportedly considered Guza the only true north for GH creatively but they did not always have the same priorities or favorites at all (Alicia Leigh Willis, etc). Frons' plans for remaking the soaps in his own vision were bigger than just GH, and Guza's vision of GH was only partly aligned with Frons's. Of course they're not as popular. They might've been 20 years ago (or 22 IMO, I don't think the couple was ever quite the same minus Sarah even with Tamara), but not today. They are a comfort couple for a segment of fans at best, but you could easily break them up as has been done many times before. The thing is, GH and ABC are not interested in taking risks with their waning share of the audience. Easier to just coddle the dying viewer base they have so Frank's own preferences and performers go down easier.

Back then, under Frons, I think it was a dedicated effort to program the shows and train the audiences to buy into the rebranded shows/couples as he saw them. These days, however, I think Sonny/Carly, like most of GH, is only still in place because of institutional inertia and reluctance to take risks. They figure their audience is baked in, of advanced age and cannot be grown or revolutionized anymore than they believe the show can be; they never expected to survive this long, soaps are barely scratching by in the streaming age, so they simply cater to a shrinking audience they believe is predominantly elderly and/or conservative from sites like Facebook who they believe just want to see X/Y, and leave it at that. That plus Frank Valentini's personal obsessions with certain actors and demos. But beyond his desires I don't think anything matters at GH anymore other than not rocking the boat and keeping the lights on.

Your tacky attempts at wit are somewhat undercut by your still using a badly watermarked photoshop photo after like 10 years.

That's an intriguing idea, tell us more.

A lot of us have said it before, I think: Kristian was a natural in the madam role she played on Melrose Place around that time. Hard, brittle and dark was her gear. I saw her there first, and did not buy it as a kid when she turned up on DAYS not long after supposedly playing an earth mother and wife. I never have really bought it since. Gina/Princess Gina, etc. keeps being brought back bc it's what she's more suited for as an older woman. The problem is Hope is expected to be a straight-line heroine, and Kristian onscreen is more nuanced than that. In any event, I think the show did her dirty and no, they should never recast. It would be doomed to fail.

I did too, but I remember people despising him at the time. I didn't get it.

Thee's no way they'd be interested in hiring her, though. She's a powerful personality, has a long memory of the show in its better days and isn't interested in coasting or focusing entirely on budget or youth demos. She'd do more than keep the lights on, which IMO is all they're interested in atm. They're never going to dump Frank short of some gigantic catastrophe.

I believe Sussman said flat out when she returned a few years ago that most males they hired were incapable of standing up to or keeping up with Eileen and had been for decades. She was absolutely right. She said she aimed to change that, but I don't think Graham or whoever was the answer. I don't know what it is.

Again: Hope isn't presently needed, but recasting her is at least as doomed a concept as Kristen. At least with Missy Reeves people were over her and she was clearly over the role.

Poor Regina King. What a time.

I love HBS but there is absolutely no chance she could stand in for Kristian Alfonso. Melanie Smith and Lesli Kay would be solid choices if Kristian were, say, dead, but tbh they shouldn't recast the character at all. It is a losing game, possibly even moreso than the Kristen recast.

We all had this conversation not long ago; Y&R is creatively dead but relatively stable numbers-wise. It's no secret that it has been coasting on brand recognition and little else for years. Griffith has been burnt out since before he first came to the show but it doesn't matter because the show, parent company and network are just running out the clock and doing nothing new with it for as long as it can still turn a profit. It's a zombie soap.

It looked and sounded like everyone was trapped in a Bish Thompson's/Red Lobster seafood restaurant in Purgatory.