Vee

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

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.

I think the media wants a horse race. But I don't think they've tried to cover for Trump much lately. He is a very entertaining rolling disaster for a lot of them. There are some that have also reported very soberly and not gossip-oriented, especially now. It depends on the situation and the journalist. Many others still just want the access and 'excitement.' I'm not going to begrudge a progressive win if it's the right kind of progressive. I'll reserve judgment on Bush.

I think the race will narrow. Severely? I doubt it. I still think we should remain vigilant though.

It was bad enough when he did. I remember that run vividly. I was extremely excited about it, and then increasingly disappointed. It was very creative and also often very bad. It resembled DOOL (which at the time was written by James Reilly). I remember @EricMontreal22 and I regularly marveling at the insane pretentious excess and fantasy episode crap over the years. But you can't say they were bored or phoning it in, that's for sure. It's surreal to go back and watch - there's ridiculous stuff they did, like the Rear Window subplot with Michael, Marcie and Dorian, or the Matrix twins at Roxy's hotel, that I can't stop recalling - and there are certain aspects of it or characters held the test of time, or lasted long. I find his apparently equally messy AW run also a fascinating morbid watch. I think Malone would've been a boon to any OLTL as a consultant, and still had a lot to offer in a controlled position but he couldn't be allowed to HW again. Two idle thoughts of the night. 1) I've thought this for a long time, but there are striking similarities between Martha Byrne and Kristen Alderson, not just physically as adolescents and young women but in background as child actors who grew up on their shows. The difference is Byrne was given some of the best writing daytime ever offered, while Alderson generally got total crap as a young adult. Watching '80s ATWT you watch Lily grow from a spoiled poor little rich girl prone to constant rages and tantrums into a woman, you can see a lot of what Starr could've been with better, more nuanced handling than the teen queen they turned her into. Yes, Marland's ATWT often treated Lily like she hung the moon, but she was still far more dimensional and nuanced than the teenaged Starr. 2) I would've loved to have seen what Pam Long could've done at OLTL without Jill Farren Phelps. I have no idea what if anything she was responsible for dreaming up alone in '98. I've always respected her GL run, and how textured and deeply personal it was to her, and have watched too little of it, only large bits and pieces over the years. I also always respected how she embraced bringing Roger and Holly back, when IIRC it was not her idea. I don't know where to start to dig in to her backlog though.

I know what I'd do if anyone ever lured her back briefly to OLTL. It just kills me no one did. (Ron's alleged idea for her in the final weeks was very stupid.)

God, it's like an episode of The Thick of It.

Does anyone remember exactly how Nicholas Walker's Max left the show in the early Malone/Gottlieb era? The last I remember seeing of him on YT was in September '91, arguing with Asa. How did that relationship resolve before they were back to feuding? Or him and Lee Ann? It seems like the Lee Ann thing was a Rauch holdover. Did Walker's Max meet Luna?

"Dominating" by pulling all TV ads? Okay, ABC. As the comments note, this is a rather poor re-frame of what have been sparsely attended small events in the attempt to give this slanted race more tension.

And that didn't work perfectly as planned, of course, because of various recasts. Lemay talks a lot about how Willis Frame got botched because of both him and Alice having to be recast, though I'm not sure that audience would ever have accepted them together. A lot of his other ambitious professional solo characters didn't last long, either. The Snyders did.