Vee

Ha I just watched this episode--and spot on.

Wyatt is utterly completely unlikeable (and I usually feel sympathetic to the jerky troubled characters). Celine still in full on bitch mode (why did she get Hannah the job anyway?) And then just more of Tyler Perry's dialogue. The actual dialogue is bad enough but he doesn't seem to realize how to edit. Even the worse soap writers don't draw out everything with a question or comment.

"What do you think of me?"

"What do you mean?

"What I said--what do you think of me?"

"In what way?"

"In any way"

"Hrmmm."

"Well?"

(that's a direct quote. I mean c'mon maybe the episodes would be too short but you could cut half of that and have the exact same meaning. The poor actors must have to take sedatives on the set to maintain their pace.)

You forgot to mention that the camera cuts between close-ups with each line.

I can't decide whether it's more silent film or very early sound film.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I remember that. A sick joke.

He is a handsome man and mildly watchable, and he has a bit more gravitas now that he's older. But they appear to have dyed his temples gray and made him affect that accent.

I think the actress playing Katherine is perfectly fine.

I'm not sure she doesn't think it's real.

Everyone on the show other than Tika, John Schneider and Crystal Fox is distractingly bad.

And the long silent film pauses for the endless reaction shots don't help them either.

Oh, and poor Peter Parros, but they have him doing a Colonel Sanders accent.

Aside from everything else terrible about it, my biggest problem with the show is: Candace is actually the Erica Kane or Rachel Davis, the heart of the only good part of the story, not pure evil but something much more raw and complex, but in the world of Tyler Perry this character is ultimately nothing more than a whore who doesn't know her place with a man and with God. That's how that story for that kind of character always ends with Perry - total submission or destruction.

Wow. To paraphrase my status update, this show has the cutting, pacing, and story and character tempo of a silent film, with the camerawork of a dolphin. The PP soaps's very minor issues look incredibly slick by comparison.

Tyler Perry's work always looks, sounds and feels like it's being produced by space aliens from the planet Puritan in the Misogyny galaxy, but this is a whole new level of ineptitude.

The good news is Tika Sumpter has proven she is a star, a black Erica Kane, and the mom, while playing a stock Tyler Perry stereotype dating back to old Hollywood, is pretty solid at what the role calls for. They both are old school Nixon archetypes, people who deserve to be on any other better soap, anywhere else. It kind of makes me wish Tika would return to NuOLTL as Layla, but I know that she's destined for bigger, better things in film and TV.

The rest are mostly a mess. Poor Peter Parros, too. And I can't believe someone else actually hired Pilar Lopez-Fitzgerald.

I believe all those history, etc. videos are on the Blu-Rays (at least for Season 1). I borrowed my friend's box set and devoured all of those videos in the extras section after watching the first couple episodes - it helped tremendously. And yes, the actors do them. A lot of the V.O. on the ones I watched were Bran, Viserys, Robert, etc.

I just started watching Season 1. It's a hell of a show.

And how many times can Wyatt's parents tell him he's a useless addict?

The real question is, how many times can I tell you?

Unless it's On Demand, I've penciled it in to DVR all of 'em next week.

Now I've got to watch this [!@#$%^&*].

Close your legs, Yani Gellman.

Denied.

Larry Gilliard is fantastic. I adored him on The Wire almost as much as I did Chad Coleman.

I don't see a problem with any of that.

Yes, it is definite. Brian being run down by Talbot Huddleston and Karen launched the series expansion from 45 minutes to one hour, which was January 1978. I was watching the day it happened.

That's all I needed to hear! The old saying goes that you've forgotten more about soaps than we could ever know, except I don't think you've forgotten a thing.

The audio links are incredible. Thank you so, so, so much. I was someone who always wanted to see more of this mysterious, misty past honored - the Woleks, Carla and her family, Tony Lord. I gave up on it when the show was cancelled and left the air, but now, with it off ABC and away from the same institutions, who knows? I do hope someone like Susie Horgan comes in with a longer background in OLTL (or she comes back) to possibly help contribute to that. But I also know Racina is very old school, and a longtime fan.

I'm also shamelessly going to lift that 1968 cast photo from the WLS link. I'd love to find a way to make a new banner out of it with the old photo at the top and the PP one at the bottom.

BTW, is it definite these episodes are from January 1978? Wiki is claiming Brian died in late April, but it's often wrong.

Then again, I could be wrong about you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v34K5VUBnAE

I think we judge her now through the lens of her work since then. At the time, IMO, it was like a little girl playing dress-up as "Carly".

It was particularly resonant with the hair because she had dyed her hair to fully become Carly.

I don't adore her, but I do like TB. I still prefer Sarah Brown by a country mile, but I thought she did a very solid job, especially later on, even in wretched years like 2003 - she sold the [!@#$%^&*] they were doing with all mob all the time. Even if I hated it, and I did, I liked her as an actress.

Romantically I only really dug her with MB (very early on) and then Ted King. I thought she was also very hot with Rick Hearst early on, but they killed that with the panic room. I thought the Zander and Jax pairings didn't make sense for the Carly of that era. With Laura Wright, Carly again became something very different, just as TB's had become very different from Sarah's. I think Sarah could've sold sleeping with Zander, but not TB.

I was told she was approached. I still would've preferred Sarah. Then I heard some nonsense that they asked Tamara to come back as Kate, which would've been so [!@#$%^&*] ridiculous, but after Claudia Zacchara I rule nothing out.

Tamara's first scene on GH was barging into Sonny's place, stick-thin, with reddish hair, in a hot pink leather jacket, which was loud even by 2001 standards, just a nightmare to look at. She was a mess and totally the opposite of Sarah Brown. But she ended up making it work, through fan support, MB's support and sheer talent and gumption, and eventually all of that turned against her, except her talent. I do miss her on soaps. I thought her AMC role was a great idea, except for the fact that the endgame there was just to pair her with Thorsten Kaye.

ETA: My mistake, it was a silver leather coat. They put her in the hot pink [!@#$%^&*] a few days later; either way, both were shocking messes.

My recollection, and this is when I was a teenager, was that Sarah disagreed vehemently with the story where Carly would dime Sonny out to the FBI. She and JFP fought it out, and she walked. Jill planned to use Tamara to exit the character by death as Sonny moved on to Angel Sorel.

The S&C fanbase, which at that time included me and I think a lot of the general audience, as well as MB helped make Tamara Braun. It was a sort of grassroots revolt, unusual at that time, and I think the failure of the Angel story as well as Endgame is what broke Jill and Megan. They were done after that. They had used the same playbook they'd had at OLTL, but you couldn't pull that [!@#$%^&*] at General Hospital at that time, as the flagship. And TB really worked it and made the role work for her, as best she could. But within about two years the show was a whole different kind of disaster, the characters you once loved had become a nightmare to deal with and I don't blame her at all for wanting out with TK. Their pairing was the hottest thing on GH at that time, and so it was destroyed.

Jill did try to get Gina Tognoni to come in and do Carly at one point. But I know Jennifer Bransford was her idea. Bransford had played Georgie Phillips on OLTL. That was a mess. That poor woman. She actually did have the rough, raw sort of quality of Sarah Brown, but she was just so out of place on GH, period. I laughed when Kelly Monaco told the story last weekend on 20/20 about Bransford literally battering her with a pool cue during their epic bar brawl and her being like 'what are you doing?'

Yes, very. Or so I heard at the time. The story at the time was there was a screaming match with JFP.

TB's Carly was destined to die. I don't know if it was only three weeks though - I got the impression it would be at least a few months to play her "final" story, which I was told was to involve rape by Sorel and slow death. Sonny/Angel was the pairing of JFP/MMT's vision. Then the fans (and Benard) rebelled.

I was so glad they killed Tomas. I was way tired of them letting obvious psychos run loose.

Tamara Braun was originally a temp, but I'm sure that's been mentioned.

I also have to say, I disagree with a number of you on Andrea, etc. I had a feeling going into this that she was done. It was the poetic, tragic ending; she's finally reunited with everyone but she's dead, in the pursuit of her ideals - she got what she wanted for those people, finally, but died in the process. She martyred herself for that. I saw it coming a week or two ago. And I was fine with it. I'm not sure how much farther the TV version of Andrea could have gone; they plumbed her depths and evolution so much in the first three seasons, from rebel to nihilist to contrarian to fighter, to martyr. What would be next? Andrea is a steady rock and hangs around? They have enough of those on the show already, most of them with less airtime and dimension than Andrea got. There are other people who need the time. I think her story was told. I didn't think the Governor's was yet, actually - they'd only begun to get into his real descent. I think they made the right choice.

I did read the articles; I also think they were right to reshoot her death. The original scene just sounds sadistic and unnecessary, although she shouldn't've kept [!@#$%^&*] stopping.

I am so glad Sonequa Martin-Green is a regular. I really, really like her, almost as much as Danai. And honestly, I think Rick embracing humanity and building a community is a very hopeful ending. I didn't expect it of Kirkman; I hope he doesn't ruin it.

I didn't get any suggestion that Karen was for Rick. I am still shipping Rick/Michonne, personally.

I thought that was actually a lovely ending. It reminded me of something Carl and I occasionally have talked about - the old BBC series Survivors, from the '70s, about a man-made biological holocaust which wipes out most of the population, but focuses on the survivors trying to build a community and a new world. Of course, that's also why I liked Season 2 of TWD, so.

I thought it was lovely that they took them in, that they weren't all wiped out. I thought it was right. I hope Kirkman and co. don't undo it all out of comic book fetishism.

I loved the Governor staggering off into the tall weeds. That's all he is now.

Laurie Holden did wonderfully. But Jesus, I couldn't believe Andrea took so long with those pliers, taking fuckin' coffee breaks to chat with Milton. That was the first time, ever, in TWD history honestly, where I'd been like, "you stupid bitch."

Oh, and I was with Carl on that kid. That dude was going for it, I could see it in his eyes and his body language. I expected him to blow Carl or all of them away.