Broderick

Right, the purpose of ret-conning him into a Ewing son was to create more dramatic conflict for him, to keep the Kanaly boy on the show. And then they didn't do it. 😅 (Although his new status, combined with his lack of interest in it, made him more of an interesting character, until that silly business with Priscilla Presley.)

I kinda LIKED that aspect of Ray's character. Although he was a Ewing, he remained the Same Ole Ray he'd always been, despite the new opportunities given to him. And he made it clear to Miss Ellie that he'd rather have HER affection than the Ewing name or a 1/4 interest in the Jock Ewing Children's Trust Fund.

Although it was never very clear to me on the show, I don't think Jonas's was very far from Genoa City. There's a scene where Jonas's girlfriend (Gloria??) brings a Genoa City Chronicle into the bar (with a headline story about Leslie's disappearance), and Jonas & Gloria wrap-up some fish in the newspaper without ever reading it.

I agree MVJ did a good job as Creator (although I believe she put too many girls and not enough boys in the Dupree family). She's evidently not a good headwriter at all. Guza was a little too "fast" for me, and this Thompson lady now is WAY too slow. If this show had a really good writer, it'd be an amazing show.

My suspicion has always been that Y&R has a budget as high as (or higher than) the other shows, but SONY and Bell Dramatic Serial Company keep an excessive amount of the budget for themselves & operate the show on a shoestring.

With Bill & Hayley, the ideal situation would've been to expose Hayley to the audience (when they did) as a grifter. But a grifter without a solid plan in place yet. We'd have all been excited -- "wonder what she's gonna do??" So first she decides to electronically zap money out of his accounts. But his accountant eventually catches on that something's wrong, and she has to drop that scheme and redeposit all the funds, as though it was a bank error. And pretend she's the person who caught the error. Then she could begin planning various "fatal accidents" for Bill, but the "accidents" backfire and fail. So then she settles on the poison. But it takes her a while to find a source for the poison and the right dosage. Once she finally gets it all worked-out, Bill decides to buy a new life insurance policy (with Hayley as the beneficiary), so she has to slack-up on the poisoning until he can pass his blood test for the insurance premium. Then she starts AGAIN. All of this could've been a slow, steady burn, building up over months & months, while she gets more & more frustrated that it's not going fast enough. To me, that's "old school" storytelling -- having her plans change (for logical, unexpected reasons) and make the villainess regroup completely and hatch a new, more effective scheme. But on BtG, the writers just threw everything out there a year ago -- the entire plan, poison & all -- and then they were forced to create random starts & stops to make it last a year, even though it wasn't LOGICAL to drag it out this long.

If it has to be this way in order to produce an episode with a $1.79 budget, at least maybe the characters will start sitting around in Society and the desolate Crimson Lights talking about something halfway interesting instead of A.I. & secret documents recently found in a shoebox.

Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be an improvement 😅

Aside from the storylines themselves working (or not working) and the actors being captivating (or not captivating), another fundamental problem with taping so far ahead is that it virtually precludes the possibility of doing ANY type of outdoor shooting, even down the street from the studio. It's impossible to make July in Atlanta resemble November in DC, so the possibility of a short remote sequence is automatically out the window. I understand wanting to be a month or two ahead, but in my opinion six months is WAY too far, for a variety of reasons.

Aside from possibly Eileen Davidson, I've never seen anyone do as much funny "stage business" as Cindy Pickett. There were some old episodes of Guiding Light on YouTube a while back, and I watched a few of them. Hard to take my eyes off Cindy Pickett. Whether she's yawning, rolling her eyes, rearranging her hair, talking with her mouth full -- she's doing something funny (and interesting) every time she's on camera. She never just came out & "said her lines" like some actors do -- she always injected a ton of personality into it.

In my opinion, they should look at the COST of all these tired-ass, overplayed "legacy" characters from a zillion years ago. The new writers and the producers should pick some random dollar amount (say, $4,000 per episode), and bump to recurring every single actor on the show who makes that much or more per episode and who has a guarantee of more than 1 episode per week. That's the only way they'll have enough money to get any younger, fresher talent on what appears to be a dying dinosaur of a show.

I really don't understand why they're squandering one of their "Core Four" characters on a half-ass relationship with some random, recurring character with no real stakes involved. I can (halfway) understand the low-stakes Ted/Shanice situation, but only because Ted ain't a Dupree daughter.

It comes across more as ADHD than as "careful plotting" when they drop something and then return to it months later. Yeah, I think Hayley was planning to do away with Bill from the moment the show was conceived, but it's been such a haphazard "poisoning" -- stopping a while, starting again, speeding it up, stopping again. It's been a Whiplash Poisoning, trying to keep up with when she's poisoning him and when she's just planning to poison him again.

There's no question that she lives in a STRANGE world that most of us can't quite understand. lol.

And in the case of Hayley, I reckon we'll all be dead of old age before she ever finishes poisoning him 😅