Vee

Tom could easily be the elder hunky doctor these days. That's a role they intended for Scott Reeves as Steve/Stephen Lars, but that didn't go very far because he was a C-player in Guza's world. You could also very easily bring on Tommy/Tom III, his son with Simone. (I personally would make Gina Tognoni play the dreaded Dr. Sarah Webber, but that's me.)

Vivica Fox (Generations, Y&R) nods to her soap history in this Independence Day oral history:

Didn't Gail only come on just before Marland and Monty? One thing I do feel upon looking at a lot of the late 70s and early 80s is that they kept weaving Steve, Audrey and the Hardys into story, even if it was only community crisis stuff like the later big disaster storylines. They were a comforting constant presence, even without story; maybe that did change later. Steve and Audrey were very rarely around when I started watching. But I don't know how much more heavy story you could've pushed for them or for Lee in the 80s and 90s.

I've never been able to get over seeing Brooke Bundy as the bitchy starlet mom of Patricia Arquette's character from Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and 4 (in one of them she is a decapitated head, still yapping away at her daughter). That's all I see when I see her on GH, I can't get past it lol. The story with Heather and the Taylors seems great in '78/'79, but I am amazed at how mercenary Monty was in wiping them out. Still, it worked. I do wonder how it'd have gone if Starrett had stayed. I do like what I've seen of her.

WTF?!

It's never going to happen.

The writing on this show has largely sucked for years despite any one person on staff's best efforts. The entire setup of the show is rigged for at best mediocrity and that comes from Frank and the network. So no, while Joss does definitely need to be recast I do not think it would matter that much.

Joss is white, blonde and allows Frank to squint and pretend she's Starr Manning. That's all he cares about. Eden McCoy was a mediocre temp who lucked into a full time gig. He believes his old OLTL formula is demo gold. Cam and Trina are where it's at IMO, but Joss will remain central. Spencer and Trina will be merely the ethnic sidekicks just like Nik and Gia in the 2000s (who had considerably more story and attention), even though Spencer should be at least bi. (Which, as Carl already pointed out, won't happen)

For the GH and Twin Peaks fans - Glass Candy is a subsidiary group of Johnny Jewel/Chromatics. @DRW50

Anybody else do a spit-take at this [!@#$%^&*]?! 2007: Dillon is investigating the murder of Rick Webber, probably on some Lulu mess. Alan rather comically assumes Monica killed him, but Monica and Alan casually start discussing how Monica had resumed her affair with Rick in the summer of '02. Say what?! I've never seen this before but I was watching in '02 and I am 99.9% certain this resumed affair never actually happened.

Amazing stuff from Clint Ritchie when he finally gets into it with Viki about Sloan and the dissolution of their marriage, from the Labine era.

There are a couple funky flashback bits in the '78 episodes, but of course that wasn't them. I don't know what they did on The Doctors but I wonder if it was similar to Dark Shadows.

Depending on who you ask Jackie was there in '77, so I don't know what to think. I have no problem believing Marland created her, but it's all very foggy these days.

There's a lot of stories about her leave.

They should've sent the message to Kelly last summer with Lindsay and replaced her then.

They clearly planned to go there with Nik and Ava when Tyler was still around. His issues led to his exit.

IMO most of Becky Herbst's fanbase is into anyone who keeps her on 3 days a week. Girl's almost been fired what, twice? They don't want to go back to the 2000s, so they'll ride for anyone who is FV's favorite. And I think Frank knows that, which is why he parked/parks Howarth and Easton with her - then he can tell the network 'they have a fanbase.' It's a symbiotic relationship at this point.

And this is from a 2013 interview, but again it's apocryphal. I had thought it was the Elmans or Donovan the EP or the Hollands or someone who did the hurricane in fall '77 but I am inclined to believe Kin Shriner, though it could easily be faulty memory. This is what I mean by fog of war. That one has a few whoppers, despite being a great text. For example, both Tonja Walker and Thom Christopher seem convinced Paul Rauch is a genius for putting them together onscreen on OLTL. Rauch was fired and long gone by the time Gottlieb, Malone and Griffith paired them up.

Good lord!

There is a lot of crazy fog of war stuff about 1977-1978 and the creative turnover - sources contradict each other as do actors, all of whom have foggy memories and Wikipedia isn't reliable either. None of this stuff is wholly certain. I still don't know who created Bobbie, for example. I am pretty sure Jackie and co. have always cited Marland, but I believe Bobbie (and Alan, the first Quartermaine) came on in '77. I had heard Marland was there before Monty, if not in official capacity then in deed in 1977, so that would likely be the answer there. But you then hear that oh, the Elmans(?) tried to revamp the show in the fall of '77 with the hurricane that killed Diana and Peter Taylor's daughter and Lisa/Lana the mental patient falling in love with Jeff Webber, or was that the Hollands, etc etc. And then you get to questions like who made Laura and Scotty a major couple, something Genie has always cited as being Gloria Monty's idea (starting in '78) and that she could scarcely get airtime beforehand. Yet we know Kin was hired the summer before, and Scotty and Laura may have begun to be paired then. I had always wondered where the whole Webber brothers/Monica/Lesley drama first came from, but now it seems it must have been the Pollocks or the Hollands or something? I'm a bit surprised that stuff didn't goose the show more than it did at the time initially, and that it was so close to cancellation. (Especially if Alan was already there in '77 and in the mix)

I've been rewatching some GH from 77-80 in these lazy summer months with my world still half-shut down by the pandemic (the Marland/Monty and later PFS, etc stuff really, really holds up). Jackie was there back with the old, old guard, before a lot of other people. I know her facial work frankly leaves her and her performance all over the place from month to month but they could do more with her. I just don't care about Frank's desperate attempts to clone Starr Manning with the mediocre Eden McCoy.

I'd heard about these scenes but never seen them, though I was watching afterschool in the '90s. Audrey tells Liz about her rape. Probably Rachel Ames' last great showcase as an actor on the show - she's so good.

2006-2007, IIRC.

They tested Ingo and Tamara a little in the horrid JFP/McTavish era of 2001, when those two were throwing stuff at the wall and trying to pair Sonny with Angel. They went into business together with the shortlived Club 101, and had a flirtatious energy. I didn't think Jax and Carly worked at all back then, I thought it was painful and did Tamara no favors in her still-early attempts to make the role hers (which didn't fully click until Guza returned with the Carly fake death arc in '02, IMO), and I thought it was anathema to the two characters and their history as individuals, so imagine my surprise several years later when Laura Wright took over and suddenly, in a few weeks' time after Courtney's death, LW and IR clicked completely. I think a big part of it was not just Laura but the fact that Carly had distanced herself so much from Sonny and her past life by the end of Tamara's run. Jax and that world became a new island for Carly and her boys for a long time, and I thought he was good to her in those years and she made a big mistake losing him the way she did by involving herself in Sonny and Brenda's marriage. Of course, it didn't last - now she's surgically attached to Sonny again. She never left the orbit completely, but in the Jax years Carly was about more than that and had evolved a bit.

Both GH and Y&R have been like this for years now. They're just marking time. There's no life to it.