Vee

I wouldn't be opposed to Johnny DiMera, Twunk Satan tempting the gays if there were literally any other non-broad, better-written LGBT examples on the canvas. Unfortunately, Ron's ability to write nuanced gay storytelling went out the window after OLTL, long before he had reduced the GH gays to a variety of cliches like 'watching Golden Girls on Hulu'. When you're not committed to emotional storytelling for queer characters then it just comes off lazy, shrill and yes, prurient.

Well, I think you can easily fudge the exact year. If they said 1980/1981 onscreen then they were being stupid, because yes, Scott didn't get back to town til Luke and Laura's wedding, pretty late in the year. I just assumed it was anywhere between '81 and '83.

This will be an interesting change for the show which seems to have virtually no other high-tension storylines going, and has somehow unwisely launched a Cassadine weather machine storyline at the very end of sweeps.

No? Why not? I'm not challenging it, I'm genuinely curious; I was under the impression they were schemers and fuckbuddies somewhere in that span. Heather got out in late '80, right?

I think the show really wanted to cement the ready-made Webber family in those years. I did find it odd how quickly she took to Rick being her father, but Laura was very young and had already had a very tumultuous life.

The character is a cipher and always has been. There's better Black characters to bring on.

The Cassadine retcon was meticulously designed and executed. I went back not long ago and rewatched the scenes where Laura lays out in detail for Luke how she almost told him but learned of Lesley's 'death,' where and when they were when she found out, etc. and it's clear someone had mapped the timeline out - it's brilliant.

I doubt it was the same thing. I vaguely recall a scene like that, but I think it was the shock of recognition after being gone so many years. I think the mistake (aside for, in GH's case, the secret itself) is in doing at a point when they were so frontburner. If you can fix on a point in the characters' onscreen lives where they were not, say, in frontburner A-story, then retconning new stuff into a past era is not a big deal IMO. This was not the case for the Webbers at that time. Same goes for, say, Viki and Jessica and the disgusting molestation retcon Higley wrote for Jess on OLTL - Viki, Clint and their family were frontburner almost nonstop during Jessica's childhood years in question. Even if the retcon were somehow acceptable, which it wasn't, it would not be possible.

Yeah it was, and that is bullshit. I think the Webber house was a place where they tried very hard to build a picture-perfect, happy life and largely succeeded on the balance, but still had a lot of stuff seething under the surface - not just the David Hamilton trauma which made Laura a town pariah for a time onscreen, or Rick's own past with Monica which eventually came roaring back, but also Lesley's dark past with those other men and maybe even Laura's commune days. I think there are secrets you can still retcon in there, because retconning is often the nature of soap opera for better or worse. But I think a finer balance had to be struck with a family the audience knew so well and loved dearly, with three very popular characters in their heyday. Maybe something related to the Hamilton case, or Cameron Faulkner or Gordon Grey's family, that Rick helped cover up re: Laura, who was volatile back then.

I think it's at least 50-60% they killed him off, lol. Shameful. Lord I just saw Michael. Look, Christian LeBlanc is a very attractive older man but the thick white beard just makes him look like one of the old prospectors on Old West shows in the '60s! He looks like John Huston! There's got to be a happy medium.

Confirmed: With statement from Wendy:

If that is Keemo's kid it's a step in the right direction. If it isn't it's still a good step, since I was just waxing on about how soaps have fallen down on representation since the halcyon days of poor Mia Korf! They do still need to bring an eligible male though, and Keemo himself IMO.

I think a story about some dark secret in suburbia at the Webber house was a good idea - Laura, Lesley and Rick's life together was not a bed of roses, as the plethora of '70s episodes now blessedly available to us on YT from '77 through '80-on makes abundantly clear. I also loved, loved, loved that there was still so much location history on the show in 2002 that the Jones girls were living in Laura's old house and she could still visit it and talk to them about it. That's the kind of thing soaps can do generationally that other shows just can't. I don't think that secret had to involve molestation or Laura killing Rick's mistress. Nor do I think Rick was a saint, but he wasn't jumping into bed with every woman - mostly just Monica. (There was also the beat of Monica telling Lesley she was too maternal and frumpy and/or barren to satisfy Rick, a fear Lesley held onto for a long time before Monica said it to her face in those famous scenes, so it's possible he could stray.)

I assume Genie and then maybe the network vetoed it. That's just shameful.

I know there were a lot of rumors about how the Rick return story was originally supposed to go differently in '02*, something about that consortium he was involved with buying the hospital as well, and maybe they had intended to actually do a beat with Monica and restarting their affair, who knows. But it never happened onscreen. I just found it unspeakably lazy to do that with such central characters and such an iconic past story. And they started doing that kind of offhand backstory stuff more and more in that period, and it got worse over time. (* - The attic story itself was a pretty blatant ripoff of Charles Pratt and co.'s own story on Melrose Place, where Alison rediscovers her own childhood trauma in the family home and I think the attic, where she was molested by her father. I don't know if they ever originally intended to suggest Rick had molested Laura, but it was def my fear at the time because I knew Melrose Place well and knew Pratt was from MP. I believe there was also a rumor that originally the woman in the attic in Laura's visions, Rick's mistress, was supposed to be the young Bobbie Spencer but that got vetoed and it somehow became the murdered Theresa Carter. I have no idea what's true or not, I'd love for someone to tell us someday. Any or all of that is a pretty huge reach IMO, but Rick's sexual obsession with Monica did last years so it's not like he's incapable of infidelity.)

When either of you read the complaint, then we can discuss it.

This is a bad look, kid.

Nope. I did a double-take about this in this thread or another a few months back.

I think North has spoken fairly negatively of his soap days, though I may be overstating it as I can't find too much on that now and I don't want to dig back to stuff that is over a decade old; Chris was famously underused on PC, and he did audition for the first Stephen Lars recast on GH in the mid-2000s. I think it'd be a great get for him to cameo someday as scheming Chris, but I doubt he'd do it. From an interview in the 2010s, somewhat less negatively:

That's almost what they've been doing. Shades of how Roseanne handled the Beckys in its penultimate season, which was unnecessary.

What I don't understand is why there seems to be some mystery about the Ice Princess on the show today of some sort. For years in the 90s and 2000s we were told Luke kept himself very wealthy by chipping off pieces of the thing and selling it on the black market.

I only made it about halfway through that. That was rough.

Re: Genie Francis and sometimes beyond her wheelhouse performances in other roles, discussed in the recast thread, I wanted to comment on this a bit: I'm pretty sure I've always been a party of one on liking some of Genie's wilder or more off-brand performances. I thought she should've gotten an Emmy for her performance at the end of the reviled Rick Webber attic storyline, where Laura had had a complete psychotic break and was shambling around in the attic in her old wedding dress hallucinating and out of her mind - the storyline was so dark and such a rotten end for the character, but she was mesmerizing to me. I also loved her the day she re-froze RKK's Stavros in his cryochamber in 2013 and just howled incoherently at the screen through the glass window., shaking as it cut to black, thinking he had murdered her daughter. (Another great bit was whoever in the room had her defy Luke, who did the usual paternalistic 'my daughter' thing he'd been doing with Lulu for years, and had Laura push him off and say 'our daughter!') But most people roasted that sequence at the time, or the scene shortly before it where Stavros pounded the dining table during his captive banquet for her and Luke, and Laura just started screaming in terror right then and there. A lot of people thought it was OTT but to me it was a very real approximation of how she'd react to the return of her undead rapist husband who had abused and terrorized her for several years on that island. (These are both timestamped) Anyway: I liked the idea of Genie playing a vixen or schemer like on AMC or Y&R, but I don't think anyone can say that her performance as, say, Genevieve on Y&R worked at all. I think she could do darker or more spiky stuff at times, but when I've seen her try it often doesn't turn out like the moments above that I like (and no one else does!) - she often goes to cartoon. I love her but she's not the first talent on soaps whose scope sometime exceeds their grasp.

I'll take my Genie comments to the GH past thread or whatever it is, as it's pretty OT.

Wasn't Abby supposed to 'die?' What happened to that? Completely unrelated: If DAYS won't commit to either Marci Miller or Linsey Godfrey long-term (although it seems in this case Miller won't commit), I would 100% steal both to play sisters Serena Baldwin and Christina Collins, respectively, on GH.