Vee

Yeah, Kristian will come back when/if the show ends as a gesture to Corday and her friends at the show. She doesn't need it. Freddie Smith will begin lobbying to come back/crowbarring the studio doors when he realizes he is not going to become a lifestyle brand.

Using Deidre and Drake, Lisa and the Black cast (and yes, Ben and Ciara, sigh) when they move to Peacock is no coincidence. To me it indicates someone involved is looking to the future and the modern demographics, which network daytime simply doesn't do.

As both an Exorcist and Halloween superfan, I have mixed feelings about Green applying his successful Halloween revival formula (revival, trilogy, return of major star, etc) to as prestigious a film as The Exorcist - the two franchises are apples and oranges. That being said, I never thought I'd see Ellen Burstyn return, and the last film entry in the series was dreadful. (William Peter Blatty's Exorcist III, OTOH, is excellent) So this is interesting. The two-season Fox TV show with Geena Davis, Sharon Gless (in Burstyn's role), John Cho and Ben Daniels is also underrated and pretty good.

You should relabel it because people are just going to think you screwed up the post somehow.

I can't speak to the quality, but streaming is the only future this genre has and the sooner shows modernize, the better.

Regardless of my feelings about serial killer Ben, a Peacock spinoff is very good news for the show and its potential future IMO.

No sooner said - DAYS is doing a Peacock spinoff with several key vets, a returning Lisa Rinna and the Black canvas. Not a coincidence, IMO. (Ben and Ciara are also there, but hey)

This should have a link. That's from Deadline. Otherwise I'd never have believed it. This is very good news for DAYS and the genre.

Shelly Altman can say what she likes. As a HW she was a hack.

Of course. But there's still plenty of talent to purge in front of and behind the camera. Disney has owned ABC since the mid-90s. There were issues at that time, but the dramatic decline of the show in the 21st century is not new. The show has been mostly [!@#$%^&*] with occasional bright patches for almost 21 years. It is not "Disney," it is most often the own creatives' and at times the network's choices.

Which is why they should all undergo the same mass purge of stale talent and creatives and move to streaming if soaps want to survive, which they clearly don't.

Laura Wright had a considerable fanbase from her GL days and was known and liked by audiences at ABC. Everyone knew about them courting her for Carly on GH in 2005. GH was a still reasonably ratings-successful and stable soap opera with a team the critics still hadn't turned on (unlike the fans), and Carly was a central and popular tentpole role tied to all the core characters. LW would've been stupid to go anywhere else.

Didn't CBS crack down on Sussman intending to do a story about Devon getting shot at a traffic stop on Y&R?

Roger's feelings about the role seem pretty clearly delineated in his recent podcast interview for Slate re: the rape storyline. I've always assumed he was just happy to be playing literally any other role than Todd even if it wasn't a huge challenge and he's cruising/phoning it in, and it seems I was right. I think he is still clearly sensitive and talented, I thought he did good work on OLTL and GH when he returned as Todd from 2011-2013, and if OLTL were still around I wouldn't say no to seeing Todd again someday in a limited capacity, after a long, long break and a lot of thinking. But you can never showcase a serial rapist as a regular frontburner lead (or with Victor Jr., leads) of a soap opera today. It's just done. And as for Austin, if he was playing this role in 2013 it would be one thing. Today he's on his third character. It's not cute and it's not GH.

I loved Todd in his day, but they are never going to frontburner a serial rapist on this show again in the 2020s nor should they. It's over.

Bryan Craig's social media behavior during his run on GH was extensive, not a secret and very often hilarious. If you didn't hear about it you weren't looking very hard. I don't know about how "we" feel or who "we" are but it is common public knowledge he made a complete fool of himself on the regular, and not just the time he went to Bali and began rambling about 'Muslim dog eaters' on Twitter. Kelly Thiebaud has not recovered from that debacle period either AFAIC, but I've never thought much of her or Britt. Michael Easton fans once got mad at me for not caring that they SORASed McBain's baby on OLTL in 2013. It was a baby.

Oh lord.

They're also adding Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones) to the cast, but I don't know if he's a companion. YT link: I still haven't finished the last season due to the sheer mediocrity of the Chibnall era, but I guess I should catch up.

I rewatched that whole storyline last summer. There was plenty of groundwork AFAIC in the arc itself, even if you left out the last 3-4 years (where there was also a lot of misery and pain for the Aldens and plenty of track laid). As dc mentioned a while back, Gwyneth had run Amourelle, the cosmetics division. That explained how she'd have access to and perhaps knowledge of the chemistry.

I have very vague memories of the rec.arts.tv.soaps groups on USENET in those days, but I only read, I didn't engage as a poster til the 2000s. I do remember James DePaiva (Max Holden on OLTL) taking to either USENET or AOL to trash the writing on OLTL somewhere around 1995 or 1996, or maybe a bit later. A few actors did that in that period, back before the shows could ever understand the Internet and how to find them. That is fascinating. As I said last year, a lot of the key elements of the story, like the locket and its signature clicking, bear so much resemblance to the classic tenets of the Italian murder mystery "giallo" genre, where the stories are always puzzles with strange little audiovisual talismans.

I wrote about it a lot last summer when I got to rewatch the whole story for the first time since childhood - I do not exaggerate when I say the Loving Murders was a huge part of what got me through 2020, along with Marland's ATWT, classic Y&R reruns and some other resources - but I think they seeded Gwyneth often and well, right from the very beginning. There are both little and very big clues, like Gwyneth constantly haranguing Alex and Charles to read her psych profile of the killer - part of her wants the world to know it all, to know her pain. The final scenes she has with her father are also fascinating to analyze, and very early scenes in the story with Jeremy when she talks about going on vacation with Clay and the kids. I also think the past of Loving, particularly the early 90s episodes we've been watching, inform a lot of it.

That sure looks like Trish Van Devere, who I believe was the first Meredith.

For those who may remember the Felicia Sonmez story:

Supposedly Laura also quit when she was told the Josh/Cassie pairing was coming, though I think the external factors at the show and network were the big reasons. I think she actually could've sold that story, though.

But wasn't that long before Nik returned? I saw Chavez's Spencer mention that to him the other day, but I could've sworn that when Coloma started in the role - after the lawsuit - Ava was key in trying to get Spencer and Nikolas together because she and the young Spencer had some rapport (which IMO was done to prop Ava as a sympathetic heroine, like so many things they try to do then back off of because Ava is ultimately only interesting as a villain/antihero).