Broderick

I felt like not mentioning her relationship with Brad Carlton was a pretty serious oversight (especially since they highlighted her taking control of her daddy's stores after his death).

Unless it's the always present Budget Crisis, I'm not sure why Mrs. Manning didn't pop in. Gloria was there, so instant dramatic possibilities would have ensued. Fen quietly "turned gay" off-screen, without a shred of conflict, so we'll probably never see him again.

I got the impression Lauren & Michael knew all about Fen's beau, but simply hadn't met him in person yet, just by phone. Didn't Michael say something like, "Trey! We're so happy to finally meet you in person!"

"Can you feel me tremble when we touch? Screech --- squawk!" Fen missed that one, obviously, when he was filing his glowing report about her performances.

Lauren & Mrs. Manning are both being terribly selfish and immature in their conversation. With Lauren, it's understandable, as she's just a self-absorbed 19 or 20 year-old girl. But Joanna -- Lord, she was just awful sometimes. She acts like Lauren should love her to death, even though she'd announced when she left Neil Fenmore that she wished she'd aborted Lauren.

Fen blew something (else) today -- his credibility. "I've seen videos of your concerts! Mom! You were seriously GOOD!" He must not have seen her Sergio Mendes numbers.

They probably couldn't afford Susan Seaforth-Hays for the day; they'd given too many lines to Fen's boyfriend. Killed the budget. lol.

Yes, there's a decent clip of Lauren and Joanna. It's centered around what made Lauren such a "mean girl" (abandoned by her mother, spoiled by her father).

Right I don't think anyone specifically "said" he was at the office; they just didn't mention him at all, until his "tragic death." But for those of us who occasionally wondered where he was, I believe we were to assume he was "at the office". Of course we assumed Carl Williams was "at the office" for 7 or 8 years, and lo and behold, he was presumed dead, had been adequately grieved by his loved ones, and was living in Norfolk. Probably. Bill Bell seemed to like the actor, but the Gina/Neil/Joanna storyline wasn't very riveting, and it was mainly about Lauren. Bell probably figured Neil Fenmore had outlived his usefulness and dropped him to recurring, with no offense to Jim Storm.

He got the Carl Williams treatment. Stopped appearing without an explanation. He was just "at the office".

After watching it, I thought it was a letdown. The selection of flashbacks seemed pretty obvious and didn't require much thought (although thankfully they weren't just hastily harvested off You Tube). Regarding Fen, I feel like the writers took a potentially thoughtful storyline that should be told with a young male legacy character (Noah Newman) and squandered it on a "lesser important" character who's rarely mentioned (Fen), had it occur entirely off-camera, advanced the boy right into a typical soap opera committed relationship with a random dayplayer we'll never see again, had everyone act all "woke" about it -- "so glad to finally meet you in person, Trey"; "I'd like to know all about the woman who raised the man I love", and now they can quietly ship Fen away until he's "cured". Ugh.

With Fen's little boyfriend having more than 5 lines, and possible residual payments to Doug Davidson, Grant Cramer and Kimberlin Brown for their clips, their $16.86 allotment for the month is gone. The rest of the January episodes will probably be Billy Abbott, alone, doing a podcast, in an empty restaurant.

Interesting. That having happened, I guess it's safe to say we'll never see Fen again. lol.

And I believe that little boy of Kay Alden's (John Alden) played Nicholas Newman in the early 1990s. (There was a scene about 2000 or 2001 where Paul was standing in his office with Cricket, Lynn, and Marissa, and all I could think was that Doug Davidson was the only person in the scene who'd gotten his job based on talent instead of who his family was. The others were all there strictly because they were related to a Bell or a Birn.)

THIRD nep baby -- because you also need to include that terrible girl (Marissa Arena) who played Marissa Bell-Barton on the show. First she was the personal assistant to Diane Jenkins, and the after Alex Donnelley left, she became the handmaiden of Lynn Bassett-Hound. (She was Maria Arena Bell's sister in real life.)

Makes sense --- he made it clear that his allegiance was to CBS for many years. I figured Lee Bell's talk show was likely part of the reason, and of course his own experience with Irna & ATWT was also a factor.

They were. In his "Television Archives" interview, Bill Bell said it was Screen Gems (now Sony) that courted him to create a new show in the early 1970s. The Screen Gems reps were under the impression (initially) that his new show would end-up on NBC, but Bill Bell shrugged and said, "I always knew we were going with CBS." (Had Lee Bell's talk show been on the CBS affiliate in Chicago? Bell seemed to have an allegiance to CBS that he never had to NBC, possibly because he saw the chances of success were greater at CBS, or possibly because of his involvement at CBS with Irna Phillips, or possibly because of Lee's experience there.) But he was very emphatic that he never seriously considered NBC for Y&R.

We used to laugh about this at my house -- Mister Abbott would've never married Brenda Dickson's Jill, but she was ideal to play the divorce storyline with the lurid photographs and adultery. As someone said above, Deborah Adair played the character as more "flippant, but always with an ulterior motive", while Brenda Dickson imbued all the hurt and anger that Jill had endured at the hands of Kay Chancellor. Adair's Jill could be comically callous and calculating, with a shrug of her shoulders. Like at one point, she tried to sell Liz Foster's house to drum-up some cash, and she dragged the New Greg into the middle of it. Liz Brooks made Jill apologize to Greg for wasting his time. Jill had no interest in apologizing to Greg -- because his time meant nothing to Jill, but once she found out John Abbott was in town for a conference, she called Greg and arranged to meet him for lunch to offer her apology, but really she just wanted to park her fanny prominently in a spot where John Abbott would notice her and start thinking of her again. (This is while she was engaged to Andy Richards.) With Adair's Jill, it was easy to forgive her for these types of stunts, because she always played them as though it was just a way to "get ahead", but if it didn't work, aw shucks, at least she tried. Brenda Dickson was always more "focused" and "calculating" in her conniving.

I don't recall there ever being a shortage of Danny Romalotti, from the time he first appeared in the summer of 1981 until he left to do "Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" in the 1990s. He maybe doesn't appear in many recaps, because most of his early material was strictly "C-storyline" stuff that was barely worth a mention in the big picture. If I remember right, he was initially a waiter at Jonas's, where Paul and Andy both ended up working. (In fact, the three actors -- Damian, Ford & Davidson -- all got their charcoal sketch done together for the opening credits.) There was a little "locker room set" attached to Jonas's restaurant, where Paul, Andy, and Danny could change into their designated waiter uniforms, which were white shirts, black pants, and aprons. This was a clearly a John Conboy-esque trope that allowed the three boys to stand around in their undershirts and Fruit of the Looms to discuss their love lives, in a somewhat homoerotic manner, that caused John Kelly Genovese to grouse that the show was "verging on T&A titillation." Danny was supposed to be the innocent "good boy" (presumably Catholic) who was the antitheses of Jack Abbott (the older, more worldly boy that Patty and her friend Gretchen had encountered in a country-western Urban Cowboy bar that they weren't supposed to be in). Seems to be it was a slow-moving, fairly thoughtful storyline, in which Patty was pretty torn about whether she preferred the boy who sang saccharine songs to her in a swing, or the boy who had a fancy job, a fancy car, and was sexually experienced. Danny had presented himself at work as being from a "large, happy family". Paul and Nikki decided to surprise him by doing a little biography on him for the newspaper, or for the program notes in a little concert he was doing. They went to the house where he supposedly lived, but no one there had ever heard of him. He was forced to admit that his mother was deceased, and his sister & father were in the slammer for thieving, and he'd merely told everyone at work a version at work that he WISHED was true. This got even more sympathy from Mary Williams (who hadn't yet turned into the sauerkraut and spareribs cartoon of her later years). Mary was Danny's big champion, as she didn't want Patty "living in sin" with "that Abbott boy", and she felt Danny was more in line with Patty's conservative, Catholic upbringing. This went on for about a year. In the spring of 1982, Traci Abbott arrived in town from boarding school, and she had posters of Danny all over the wall of her bedroom. It was quickly revealed (vis-à-vis her friendship with Angela Laurence) that she had a huge crush on Danny. She was stunned to find out Patty actually KNEW him. This led to a lot of stuttering, stammering, red-faced scenes in which Traci couldn't believe she was actually able to speak with her idol.) But he was CONSISTENTLY around. Michael Damian likely had a fairly flexible schedule that allowed him to record and do concerts, but I don't recall him being "missing" for a long period of time. Most of us who watched daily back then (who were teenagers) were far more interested in Danny, Patty and Jack than we were in the "A-storyline", which was Lorie Brooks and the Vanessa Prentiss trial.

I never could buy into Donna Reed as Miss Ellie. If Old Man Southworth had told Donna Reed to go round up some steers, she would've pitched a fit over the possibility of breaking a fingernail, lol. Hope Lange probably would've worked. Priscilla Pointer was pretty much wasted; they didn't try very hard to write for her while they had her.

Y'all are right ... Chris was still around when the 1897 story ended. It was later that he vamoosed. I just remembered Hoffman looking at the moon, rubbing her goozle, batting her eyes, tearing at her gloves, and barking ... "And to think ... Chris is still ... out there ... somewhere, Barnabas." It's a shame the show couldn't wrap-up in the "real" present, with the "real" Collins family that we'd met in the first episode.

A LOT of their stories got so convoluted, because there seemed to be little advance planning. That 1897 storyline, for instance, seemed to be pretty straightforward at first. The goals seemed to be explaining (1) how Chris Jennings became a werewolf and (2) why Quentin Collins was hanging around Collinwood. By the time it was over, we had Count Petofi's hand, a witch (Angelique) trying to stop a phoenix (Laura) from staking a vampire (Barnabas), and the actor who played Chris Jennings had quit the show and moved on, negating the entire purpose of the whole storyline. Not saying it was a *bad* story but it just didn't serve its purpose, and it ended up veering into a convoluted mess. Same with Joanna Mills in 1840.

She talked a great deal about utilizing today's news. She said back in the 1980s, when soaps were more "cutting edge", they weren't afraid to take a news story, incorporate it into a storyline, and examine it from all different angles, from the standpoint of how the various characters would react to the situation. She indicated CBS is afraid of that now, and they'd rather stick with the evil twins, back-from-the-dead, and doppelganger type stories. She laughed about the 1985 storyline when Tyrone Jackson wore "whiteface" as Robert Tyrone; she said, "You couldn't do a story like that on network TV anymore." She's right about that.

lol. I remember Joanna Mills, but I swear I don't think she was on the show even a month.

I tend to forget she was on the show. Didn't she last about 3 weeks?