Vee

Josh Griffith is another burnt out writer who was good 25 years ago but has become another Passanante at this point - he gets shows made, makes the trains run on time, inserts some of his own dark [!@#$%^&*] and that's about it. Just a cog in the wheel. Neither of them should be at the show and nothing will change while they are. Hoping for that under the current management is pointless and foolish.

Passanante was repeatedly employed as a HW because she would write as directed, not because she had a talent for it. And she wrote the poorest stories possible. I'm sure she's as talented a staff/breakdown writer as many say she is, but she has never been a good HW. Ever. Her AMC was its nadir for me, next to the Rayfield/Cascio Fronsian interregnum in early 2003. @Darn reminded me of a statement somewhere once that said most HWs today keep pitching baby stories above all because the networks will almost universally approve those vs. anything else. That explains why AMC, GL, etc. turned into Mormon baby factories by the end. It's why fùcking party girl Maxie Jones on GH has two fùcking kids. It's laziness, apathy and keeping the checks coming. I thought ATWT was hollowed out and dead long before it was cancelled and Passanante is a major part of that.

I haven't watched it all in a long time, but I remember them playing all the beats with Stavros and Laura's long build to reuniting with Luke. They played it all out for what, a month, two months, nonstop. The Jesse story, which I paid close attention to, was far less granular on detail. I still don't remember what MacGuffin Gardner had on Jesse. Maybe Jesse had been investigating "Papel" or something. That doesn't explain why he stayed away or believed in Papel's reach to get to his wife and son.

@DRW50

Griffith isn't any good for the show either. But they're not making a change for no reason, so no, neither is good news. The show is bad and it's staying bad.

She's just another very generic latter-day AMC staff writer who was all about quips and pop culture references vs. any substance. CBS and Sony have been trying to turn Y&R into a mediocre-to-bad 2000s-era ABC soap for many years and have mostly succeeded at this point. The show has no identity or quality compared to the show in the classic episodes, just like what befell many ABC soaps in their later years. So it fits that they'd go out and hire more people consistent with that dead style. And I grew up with ABC soaps, I loved ABC soaps. When they were good. Which was not where Beall came up, and it's not what Y&R is emulating. They've been wanting to turn Y&R into a superficially ABC-shaped youth-demo widget for over a decade. The networks and shows are not and never were the same, and they shouldn't be.

Not to my recollection, no. I still don't remember why they faked Jesse's death either.

Oh God, the chick from 2000s AMC should not be HWing this show.

Jean is by all accounts an excellent breakdown/staff writer. As a HW she's one of the all time worst.

@Darn and I talked about this a few weeks ago, but the fùck energy with Nick and Phyllis in '05 or whenever before Cassie died was off the charts. The affair was the right thing to do, and the antagonistic energy was also crackling. Making it true love was what never worked and has never worked, and I'm not someone who particularly cares who Sharon is with. Soaps don't let people just fùck anymore because they want to fùck - there's always some bullshit rationale, or it turns into soppy Valentine's Day.

Didn't JFP just bring over a bunch of the generic 2000s-era GH people with her, including the music guy? It showed.

My understanding is Cady had wanted the character to become darker and more complex, a la Rosanna, which I agree gave her the best work of her career in her first stint at ATWT. So a major part of the more cosmopolitan, noir femme fatale Dixie I think was her. And tbh I liked a lot of the superficial aspects of it; her clothes, her hair, etc. I thought she had some chemistry with Thorsten Kaye though she was walking into a buzzsaw with the audience there, too. So some of the fault lies with Cady, perhaps. But I can't blame her for wanting to innovate the character to a point, as she did when she'd pushed for the pairing with David in the late '90s/early 2000s. And she wasn't responsible for the actual bad story - they didn't need to run her down as badly as they did, and that's because McTavish made it personal. You could've done new things with Dixie without totally botching that. The story did not make much sense, but I didn't care. I think Agnes had a light hand in it, or so I believe we were told. I think the choice of making David Rasche's villain a Gardner relative screamed her. The fact that they remembered the Remy character also impressed me. Beyond that, no, it was very silly. But compared to some of the [!@#$%^&*] since it's practically 90s level.

The onus remains on Trump. The GOP is not going to be able to spin that. And nothing he can do will be adequate to the problems. But no, this is not all a ploy by Trump.

How could it have "worked?" Aubrey sucked as a character and there was no point in making her Katrina Karr with no actors there. Just putting an Easter egg into a show means nothing if the character and story suck.

Those were the rumors/claims, and yes they were all very stupid.

I was watching a GH '95 episode with a fascinating therapy session with Bobbie and Tony Jones (spearheaded by Kevin Collins), and this led me down the rabbit hole of comparing and contrasting - I remember the therapy sessions Viki had with Susannah Hanen pretty well in '95, but most of what I recall or have reviewed of them are super dramatic, with the alters popping out and big reveals and so on. Those scenes were excellent, but I was curious about more quiet, thoughtful stuff. This led me to one of the more polarizing elements of Claire Labine's run on OLTL - Maude Hayes, the sex therapist played by the legendary Helen Gallagher. I knew these scenes existed but I don't think I've ever seen them. I'm not going to say all Labine's OLTL stories were genius because they most certainly weren't, but this stuff is fascinating. You would never see scenes like these (or the ones with the Joneses on GH) on modern daytime. And that's really what the daily medium should be for.

I saw this little segment in a video @Jonathan kindly posted in the AMC thread and was pleased. Thought I'd put it here. (The interviewee whose identity I won't spoil is wrong, obviously, about EH being the first African-American on soap operas, but I think he just misspoke re: what he meant.)

Again, you're thinking of Dan Wakefield.

You're thinking of Dan Wakefield.