Vee

I like Andrea in these episodes, but I've only seen a little bit of Stern. It does make you wonder if they could ever rehabilitate Haiduk's character today, if only as mostly a talk-to personality for people. I also wonder if OLTL's choice to bring back Tina (a hapless teen player in the 70s and early 80s) had to do with this Y&R stint. I know they used two other Tinas in '84 to set up the Tina Lord story before getting Andrea back early in '85, but I also don't know if Andrea was super popular in her first OLTL run - you never hear much about that. I feel incredibly blessed to see this 70s stuff. An entirely different world. That Jill/beauty shop episode with the wall to wall character voiceovers is textbook classic soap. The stuff with Lester's Jack casually saying Patty is so naive and it's his main reason for marrying her, that he's going to sleep around anyway because that's who he is - you would never see a male lead talk like this on a soap today. He'd be killed in 13 weeks. Any man on soaps now who sleeps around is drugged or tricked into doing it in some way, or absolved in some weak fashion. Twice so for the women. People aren't really allowed to be conventionally human.

@DRW50 The original ODAAT cast and crew (including Mackenzie Phillips) did an online reunion: And here's the new cast and crew (with Stacey Abrams?) at the virtual Paley Fest.

If you're like me and enjoy the pain of others, absolutely do read the replies.

This archive is an absolute treasure.

Thirded, I suspected the same. Amusingly, the last remnants of the Bernie splinter left (loud on Twitter, small IRL) are blaming... Warren for today.

Feel like you're all forgetting some other shít on that score.

I liked Jade and I still am mad about that.

I know!! Of all the actors for that?! To say nothing of the story being gross and unnecessary.

She was a revelation in a recurring role on the brief OLTL 2.0 as a fast-talking TV producer in 2013. I thought she was a terrible drip before then, completely unsuited to Alison. I don't think anything on ATWT past some parts of 2004 is worth a damn. And any time I saw it in the 90s post-Marland (which is when I first took notice of most CBS soaps aside from occasional Y&R and B&B) it was afflicted with the same disease as Rauch's GL - stodgy and boring which somehow mixed with loud, flashy and tacky. I never understood why years seemed to go by in that era in which the show revolved around two identical woman with identical bad short haircuts who spent all their time together: Carly and Molly. It took me years to soften to either.

I thought killing Rose was bold because she was so fun and vibrant. It rocked the show. Did I think all of the story at the time was very good - no. Some was, some sucked. The Paul/Rose wedding stuff was a ripoff of Todd and Blair's equally dumb "hell no" wedding at OLTL with Roger Howarth, who should never have replaced Scott Holroyd. But did the bold choice outweigh the losses with her gone - I don't know.

As early as MADD? That's nuts. Wasn't that the '90s? I know Frank Valentini was livid at OLTL when Dena Higley never had a long term bible, just a pitch line or two (Jessica has DID, etc).

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

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

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.