Broderick

I wouldn't call Julia Newman "needy". More like "sheltered". In her first stint (1980-1981), the Little Woman couldn't have a job. The Little Woman had to stay home. The Little Woman had to stand by her man. She'd married Victor when she was a teenager, and he tended to dominate her, which led to her wanting a job at Jabot and eventually sleeping with Michael Scott. She left town for a year or two. Once she returned, she was even more confident and assertive. She often rolled her eyes when Victor patronized women. She was friendly and open with Victor, but she wasn't the sheltered little sheep he wanted her to be.

You'd think any story pitch would've been preferable to the Reliquary Nonsense. I could appreciate wanting to recharacterize Brad as Jewish (since Don Diamont himself had a similar experience), but it should've been done in a more introspective way, omitting the Evil Nazi Art Thieves, the mother who vanished into thin air, Brad walking around snacking on treats during Yom Kippur, and Victoria constructing faux reliquaries with supplies from Hobby Lobby.

Oh, I agree. If Miss Alden was just DETERMINED to drench the entire cast with Victor's semen, it would've made more sense (from a dramatic standpoint) to have Ashley, as a single woman, decide on the IVF and accidentally end up with Victor's dribble, instead of choosing his purposefully, and then have Brad -- as Ashley's husband -- SUSPECT that she'd done it intentionally because of some unresolved desire to have Victor's baby. But it seemed Alden put very little thought into the storyline from the onset, and then Jack Smith came along and exacerbated something that was already terrible by dragging Olivia into the squalor.

The Brad/Ashley pairing was bungled-up in about every possible way, beginning with the Sperm Theft and ending with the Reliquary, lol. And it's a shame, because Diamont and Davidson had chemistry, both as characters who'd known each for a long time and as actors who'd worked together for many years. The writers went to great lengths to show the relationship deepening between Brad & Ashley, and then flushed it away in no time flat.

Couldn't agree more. The only (male) actors in the 1980s who could keep up with Eileen Davidson on the show were Terry Lester and Eric Braeden. Bell likely made a mistake giving Nikki a terminal illness, as that necessitated having Ashley bow-out of the triangle a bit prematurely.

Edge always looked fine to me, too. As long as they had a courtroom, a police station, a diner, and a phone booth, they could make their show work.

Yeah, by about 1975 or so, As the World Turns looked awfully retro. You'd watch a show like Y&R that seemed so "1970s smooth", with its lush background music, moody lighting, stylized Hollywood acting, Charlie's Angels clothing (that the announcer pompously advised us was provided a swank Beverly Hills boutique on Rodeo Drive), and then you'd watch World Turns -- "LIVE for the next full hour!", with someone clomping around in the Wade Bookstore set that featured about three books, or plopping a tray of gruel down on a table in a hospital cafeteria, or sitting in living room with light blue walls, one non-functioning lamp, and a picture of some orange flower on the wall, and you'd think, "Was this taped in 1961?" It was pretty old-fashioned looking. And pretty old-fashioned sounding. But it got a lot better when Douglas Marland came along.

Yeah, being a regular on a soap isn't the lucrative job it once was. A couple of years ago, people seemed horrified that the girl who played Hillary Curtis on Y&R wasn't given a raise. I figured she was really being valued if she wasn't asked to take a pay cut.

🤣

Rod Arrants, as I recall. But y'all are gonna pop-up & say it was Sean Garrison. 😄

Agreed. And they're BOTH fairly charismatic, animated performers who either don't receive very good direction, or else they just ignore it and yawn their way through their scenes. I saw them in a little interview, and they were both 10 times livelier than they are on the show.

Kim Zimmer likely took a *risk* when she opted not to renegotiate "mid-contract". P&G probably had a stipulation in her contract that she could be dropped at the end of any 13-week cycle, or at the end of a 26-week cycle, or at the end of a 52-week cycle. When she refused to renegotiate, they could've exercised their option and dropped her entirely, cutting her annual salary to $0. (She was evidently confident they wouldn't do that, due to her popularity, and took her chances on holding out to the end of her contract before renegotiating.)

Yep, she seems to have potential, but she just doesn't do much with it -- delivers all her lines exactly the same.

What strikes me about the set is how LIGHT-colored it is. The walls are monochrome, with no difference in color or texture above & below the chair rail. That got fixed soon afterward. Also, the drapes are too pale here; later they became heavy, dark red or burgundy curtains, with sheers. There aren't many sconces on the walls here, and there's not a lot of crystal shimmering yet. Not many fresh flowers in there. The floors aren't finished yet, and there's a noticeable absence of rugs. And of course the orange Cheshire cats Kay always had on the mantel are nowhere to be seen yet.

Several of these were likely "inside jokes" that Bill Bell & Kay Alden concocted. Look at all of those "East Chestnut" addresses! Miss Alden resided at 247 East Chestnut #2500 when those addresses were being utilized. (She doesn't any longer.) 7800 Melrose Avenue for Newman Towers likely reflects 7800 Beverly Blvd, the address of Television City in Hollywood. Lance Prentiss resided at 3780 Lake Shore Drive, Lake Geneva WI 53147. When Bill & Lee Bell lived in Chicago, their weekend lake house was "Casa Del Sueno" at 780 South Lake Shore Drive, Lake Geneva WI 53147. They sold it when they moved to Los Angeles. I guess all of these addresses were easy for them to remember as they were writing.

I don't think Charlie even got pummeled with clocks; they just threw a pepper shaker at him and said, "Hit the road, Chollie!" He just sorta disappeared during the Eve Howard Reign of Terror while YRfan23's Asian man was choking to death at the Royal Wedding, and Nikki shrugged her shoulders and defaulted to "I'LL GET IT, MIGUEL" whenever the doorbell rang.

This little episode probably served four distinct purposes -- (1) Eric Braeden satisfied his guaranteed number of episodes per week while Nikki was tied up with Rick Daros, (2) we learned Victor wasn't afraid of menial work, (3) it fleshed-out the Victor character a bit more for the upcoming Cora Miller storyline, and (4) Kay Alden creamed her panties whenever they called him "Vernon Nelson".

Yep, I believe we were supposed to visualize Wiley's Department Store as a low-rent alternative to Fenmore's. Lauren Fenmore acted superior to Andrea Wiley for that reason, and of course Lauren got her comeuppance when her father realized she was shoplifting her wardrobe from Fenmore's.

She doesn't seem especially reliable. lol.

Douglas Austin was a petty thief, who pretended to be a man of elegance. We first met him in about 1979 when Derek Thurston hired him to break into the Chancellor safe and steal an audio tape of Derek and Jill professing their love for one another, and replace it with a tape of Derek saying, "I'm sorry, Jill, but Kay is the only woman I'll ever really love." Kay Chancellor invited everyone in her little circle over one evening and played the tape for them, as Brock Reynolds was confident the tape would send Derek out the door. Derek was sweating bullets hoping Douglas Austin had switched the tapes in time; he had, and Derek was free to continue conning Kay Chancellor. A few months later, Derek's ex-wife, Suzanne Lynch, "kidnapped" Derek and held him for ransom. Kay's instructions were to put $50,000 in a shoebox and drop it in a garbage can in the park, where Suzanne and Derek would retrieve it. (This was how Suzanne and Derek planned to get some spending money from Kay.) Douglas Austin had dropped by Kay's house (to see Derek), and he "kindly" volunteered to drop the cash in the park for Kay. Instead, he cut-up a bunch of newspaper clippings, put them in the box, stole the $50,000, and left Derek and Suzanne with nothing. Realizing that Douglas had cheated them out of the money, Derek went home and explained that his "terrifying kidnappers" had "freed" him. That's how Douglas Austin managed to have some money of his own -- he stole it from Kay Chancellor. All the "extras" kind of disappeared in the early 2000s. Lynn Bassett-Hound announced that she had to take care of a "sick aunt" or something, and disappeared forever in one day. Miguel had a similar "family emergency". Nikki snatched up an old clock off the mantle, threw it at him and said, "Thanks for your years of service, Miguel", and that was the end of him.

I'll defer to the Tim Sullivan experts, lol. I know that "Andrea" was Andrea Wiley. Miss Wiley was a classmate of Traci & Lauren and was the heiress of Wiley's Department Store. My understanding was always that Traci's daddy had a higher net worth than Andrea's daddy, so Tim seemed more interested in Traci than in Andrea. However, in the event Traci happened to see through him, he kept Andrea around as a back-up contingency plan. Jack Abbott figured most of this out fairly early, just as the audience was figuring it out. Ashley and John believed Traci should make her own decision about it. We had the whole pregnancy thing, and Danny married Traci, but she lost the baby. Tim hovered around in the background. I kept thinking we were rid of him, but then he'd reappear later. He showed up in 1987 and ushered Traci off to California to finish her degree, which opened the door for Brad to become involved with Lauren. Then Traci returned, with a big collegiate bow in her hair sometime in the fall of 1987, for a full-fledged triangle with Lauren and Brad. I think this story was likely re-written when Brenda Dickson left the show, as Bill Bell seemed to be toying with the idea of injecting BOTH Jill and Lauren into Brad's storyline while Beth Maitland was off the show. Didn't pan out with Jess Walton though, as she wasn't as "obvious" as Miss Dickson.

"Vernon Nelson", of course, was the real-life name of Kay Alden's husband, who recently passed away. This was VANITY, I suppose, where Kay Alden (who always seemed to have a big crush on Eric Braeden) got the "privilege" of seeing Eric Braeden being called "Vernon Nelson" by another character on the show. (Vernon R. Nelson 74, passed away unexpectedly at his residence on Wednesday, March 25, 2020. Private family visitation was held at the funeral home. Burial will follow in Kansas. Steinke-Lazarczyk Family Funeral Home and Cremation Services of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, is proudly serving the family.) There was a little period of time in the early 1980s during which Victor Newman and Douglas Austin engaged in "comical antics" that caused Julia Newman to roll her eyes and sneer at their foolishness. Seems like somewhere along in here, Douglas volunteered his services to father Julia's baby, then brought in his nephew Alan to be interviewed for the position. It was all just stupidity.

Don't forget Y&R's very first female suicide attempt -- Sally McGuire, pregnant by one man (Snapper), saved by another man (Brad Eliot), married another man (Pierre Roulland).

Back in 1987, I wasn't particularly fond of B&B either. Sometimes watched it during lunch, but it was a take-it-or-leave-it type of viewing. But I've REALLY been enjoying re-watching it "from the beginning", because these old 1987/1988 episodes seem so superior to today's soaps.

Pam receiving controlling interest over Christopher's shares of Ewing Oil under Bobby's will was probably one of the best potential storylines Dallas ever had. And they completely blew it.