Vee

I wish Dave Weigel would just end up on Substack already. Talk about a deeply confused person.

I think there will be a commission at the end of this sooner than later, one way or another.

I thought Fitzpatrick had other problems - maybe the same ones, but the actor Lemay references re: their past friendship, his place on the show, etc. was very specific and was also not named, unlike Fitzpatrick.

Didn't Lemay all but name Coster as the actor he counted as a friend who had a problem learning lines due to alcohol, and that contributed to his exit from AW? Coster tells a different story in his (excellent) WLS interview, but it's understandable that he might, nor is Lemay's word sacrosanct. I've loved Nicholas Coster in so much TV and film - he was always a credit to anything he appeared in.

I think the commission is important. But it is going to go ahead with or without them, and if they don't agree to it the Dems will just go ahead with sole subpoena power.

This is a hypothetical. It is what the GOP wants, but it's not an actual reality right now nor a guaranteed one. That is important to clarify. Obviously voting rights and protections are absolutely integral to put into place, but treating every possible failure and catastrophe as a foregone conclusion and inevitable eventuality has been proven wrong again and again in the last year. Further, the evangelical and GOP base is not enough to win national elections. 2020 proved that (and some of them stayed home). And if they do break Roe and force us to rebuild abortion rights state by side, which is a very real possibility now, electorally that has consequences which is why the GOP higher-ups have tried to exploit the idea of repealing Roe while avoiding actually having to play this outcome for years - because it will alienate a huge portion of the squishy middle American vote. Which already went Biden for a reason. Losing Roe, if it happens, will be an obscenity. But it will not be the end of abortion rights, which will have to be rebuilt, and it will lead to serious damage to the GOP electorally. Because no, the entire voting majority will not be GOP. Unless you believe nothing will be done about voting rights in the next year or two, which I don't. YMMV. Meanwhile:

Aleve kept me afloat just fine - it's been a weekend since my second dose on Friday morning and I think I'm fully recovered minus some soreness and fatigue on Saturday. I took Aleve much sooner than I did on dose 1, so that surely helped.

All that matters is what happens when they fail to find these votes. Any number of outcomes are in play. This may be theater for Manchin to then say "I tried!" and vote Dem as he usually does, but it may not be for Murkowski. It also doesn't negate the importance of S1 as well. But this public drama happening (including discussion of pre-clearance) is good news, period.

I spoke on this the last time it was threatened, but I'll discuss it again. However this goes, it is going to suck in the short term. If they have inadvertently (and fanatics aside, it is inadvertent for many of the higher GOP brass and money people, who never truly wanted Roe overthrown - they need it to always be a perpetual wedge issue for the base, like Obamacare, which still isn't dead) activated the third rail, it will fùck the party politically long-term, and cases can be fought and won locally for years to come to reinstate abortion protections should it come to that. Abortion rights will persevere down the road. But the larger immediate tragedy on a national level, should it occur, will still be obscene.

Gawker was virtually all spoiled kids who were Bernie or Bust a few years back. Pass on their return.

And ironically, they never fully pulled the trigger on Ryan and Hayley who were hot as hell IMO. I was convinced that was down to Mark Consuelos at the time, lol.

I've been saying for years they need to fire Melissa Ordway but whenever I do people act like you shot the president. Her bloodline doesn't matter if the character is a worthless failure! Abby's been on for what, over a decade and there is nothing there. She needs to be gone for years.

To this day I don't know WTF happened with Esta and Gillian in the final months of the network show. Her return, like all the others, was heavily hyped and promoted. But in the final air shows, Esta appears for maybe 90 seconds, maybe a little more, maybe a little less and has a max of maybe three to five lines. She appears considerably less than any of the other undead or ghost characters who returned that summer in 2011. It looked to me a lot like they'd cut huge swaths of any material she shot - like Josh Duhamel, where I believe Leo was supposed to actually be alive and reunite with Greenlee in the original plan which supposedly may have actually been filmed, until Prospect Park first stepped in, they thought they were going online right then and didn't want to write permanent happy endings for Greenlee or Ryan with other people to write them out bc they didn't know if Budig and Cameron would sign onto the new show. So then Leo's appearance became a dream and they cut the rest of his material. I've long wondered if that is what happened with Esta/Gillian and Ryan as well.

I remember that Ghost Gillian story. It went on for awhile and I wasn't sure where they intended to go with it at first given that she was getting a lot of airtime for a woman who had been shot in the head and was braindead. The entire storyline where Gillian is murdered by a reality TV show producer who is actually an assassin was part of a period with Passanante that was the nadir of AMC for me, apart from early 2003 where Rayfield/Cascio were doing Frons' bidding and turning the show into something completely unrecognizable. Everything about "IncredibleDreams.com", that reality show, Alex's spy underworld, etc. was so embarrassingly stupid.

Ironically, it was Kamar that either directly or indirectly came up with that explanation for the break-up. JFP had intended to have Andy killed in the line of duty, but Kamar didn't want Andy killed off.

I know she was into him, and they were promoted as a youth triangle with Jen. But I think that was just Malone being clueless. They really thought people would go along with the cousins being teased romantically, IMO - it had been done before on the show, going back to the 70s and 80s with Richard Abbott and Tina, or the Woleks. And they never dated, but she was temporarily infatuated with Reverend Joe. Once they got heat for it, they had Flash throw out the awkward line that was something like 'I thought because we were just cousins that it would be okay!' It's also not the last time soaps have tried to pair first cousins since then, IIRC.

I don't know of any legitimate stuff that would confirm Flash was intended to be Leslie Holden on OLTL. That sounds like an old fan theory. There were lots of theories at the time about many stories, but it was clear pretty quickly that she was supposed to be Sarah. I was active at the time at the Datalounge - I haven't been back there in close to a decade, but back then we had legit insiders during the Malone II run, and nothing was ever said about Leslie. I'm pretty sure she was always intended to be Sarah but they'd simply been very stupid about thinking the audience would go along with a triangle with her, Joey and Jen. Paul and C.J. were supposed to have been lovers, and that was supposed to be part of a supposed storyline using Tina. But everyone on the board knows all about that by now. It got junked by the network and next to none of it made to the screen, besides Paul and Flash/Sarah's initial fixation on finding C.J.

Or you could read the thread, and not just your own posts?

I think Stringfield's just always been very willful and keen to do her own thing. She bucked NYPD Blue in its first season despite having a initially very plum role (I began watching that recently during the pandemic - a fascinating time capsule, doing stuff stylistically they still don't necessarily do much today on network; a lot of similar shows are much more glossy) and it was the hottest show on TV. She just doesn't care. I always felt it was a mistake to abandon Boulet's relationship with Benton outright. I loved Jeanie but her stories were too often just about quiet misery. I think she even came back in the final season and we'd learned half her family was dead or struggling. Like, why?