Broderick

Definitely. I really learned to appreciate Brenda Epperson's sweet, soft-spoken soap heroine called "Ashley", but she was never the same character as that aloof, ballsy, assertive, take-charge, eye-rolling, exasperated Daddy's Beauty that Eileen had played.

I think that's the main reason it was hard to pair Eileen Davidson's Ashley with a leading man. (Fanning herself, rolling her eyes, gun-to-the-head thing). There was always SO MUCH going on with the subtext of her acting that she tended to overshadow almost everyone else in her scenes, with the notable exceptions of Terry Lester and Eric Braeden.

Terry and Eileen. They could look more affectionate (and more exasperated) with each other than any two people I've ever seen. I believe Bill Bell told about all the story he wanted to tell with Traci in her first five years on the show. He had her shed some of her "chubette" poundage, be praised and appreciated for her singing, marry her big crush (Danny) platonically, spar with a shrew (Lauren), and ultimately land a handsome husband (Brad). When he'd accomplished all those things, Bell sent her packing back to college to work on her master's degree. After that, he only seemed interested in using her sporadically or in a recurring capacity when she was needed in the storyline. And I tend to agree that she works best in that matter.

Yeah, only a few days lapsed between the introduction of Ashley and the subsequent introduction of Traci. If I remember right (and it's only been 37 years ago, lol), seems like we saw John Abbott pop into Ashley's sorority house for a visit and let her know he'd be in attendance at her college graduation that evening. A few days later, we saw John pop into the boarding school where Traci was matriculating and tell her that he'd be in attendance for Traci's high school graduation that evening. Both girls went home to Genoa City following their graduations, because their older brother Jack was about to marry Patty Williams, and they were participating in the wedding. Of course Ashley stayed in town and went to work at Jabot under the name Suzanne Ashley. All summer, we were told that Traci was only in town temporarily and would be "going away to college" in the fall. But when fall rolled around, Traci decided to enroll in GCU, because she'd made friends with Danny Romalotti, had reconnected with her old friend from boarding school Angela Laurence, and was enjoying spending time with her family rather than being constantly *away* at school.

It would be interesting to see some episode counts from 1989, to find out whether or not Terry Lester's role was really "dwindling" or whether he maybe just felt that way about it. (My feeling is that there was probably some justification to his grievances. The "real Jill" had departed in 1987, and the "real Ashley" in 1988. While the recasts for Jill and Ashley got their footing on the show, I think the Abbotts probably DID take a backseat to Cricket, Nina, Phillip, and Danny to a larger extent than previously. If I remember right, 1989 was also the year that Phillip III died, which propelled Cricket even further to the forefront.)

They could spell "Di Salvo" correctly, but Mergeron, Dina, Traci, Kay, and Jabot were just too tough for 'em!

I don't recall any shortage of Cricket scenes in the summers of 1983 and 1984. I believe that she started modeling in the summer of 1983, and Ashley and Jack would have to pop into the photography studio periodically to assure her that she was the loveliest, most beautiful and most brilliant girl on the entire planet. By the summer of 1984, Jabot had built an entire modeling campaign around Cricket (the "Jabot Junior" line), which resulted in many more ghastly montages of Cricket frolicking with a beach ball during corny photo shoots. To reward the little model for being so incredibly beautiful and brilliant, Jack introduced Cricket to Danny Romalotti, who was her favorite singer (naturally). Traci, meanwhile, had gotten knocked-up by Tim Sullivan, and had decided to stick her head in the gas stove to kill herself. Cricket came bouncing along and saved Traci's life, and also offered her some health and beauty tips. This led to a whole storyline where Lauren was SEETHING with jealousy that Danny had married the pregnant Traci. (Lauren was afraid that Danny would start singing with Traci instead of with her, since Traci was a decent singer and Lauren wasn't, lol.) Amy Lewis, Gina Roma, and little Cricket were always on-hand to push the pregnant Traci out on stage to sing with Danny, which annoyed Lauren to no end and led to lots of catty lines from Lauren such as, "I doubt the public wants to see a fat frumpy wife singing with a hot guy like Danny!"

It's hard to get an idea of what kind of "writer" Maria Arena Bell really was. According to her biography, she's a novelist. How many of her novels have you ever read? How many of her novels have you ever even seen?! lol. I'm assuming that she's actually an "unpublished novelist", which puts her in the same basket with most of us --- nowhere. I always got the impression (perhaps mistakenly) that Maria Bell is merely a Beverly Hills socialite, a girl who breezes into occasional board meetings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, provided she's not in Paris shoe-shopping. (She's also billed as a "fashion consultant".) She never struck me as someone who's organized, disciplined, grounded, devoted to sitting in front of a word processor, thinking deep thoughts, and determining the best way to execute those ideas. She lacks the "introverted awkwardness" of a really good writer, who's normally preoccupied with his/her craft. She seemed more interested in globe-trotting, granting high-handed interviews, and appearing at red carpet events in hideously trendy shoes. Obviously Mrs. Bell (or someone on her staff) had visited various message boards or had read letters to the show, and she could clearly articulate what we (the fans) disliked most about Lynn Marie Latham's reign of terror. Mrs. Bell (or someone on her staff) knew what problems needed to be reversed, although the day-to-day execution itself of the writing was often bungled terribly. After a year or so of coasting along correcting problems, suddenly Mrs. Bell and her staff found themselves in WAY over their heads. I blamed Hogan Sheffer. It appeared to me that Mrs. Bell was an absentee dictator, a "name-only" writer/executive producer who stormed into the studio when her hectic schedule of board meetings, shoe-shopping, and overseas travel allowed, and screamed at everyone about what they were doing wrong. (Sort of a sado-masochistic dominatrix who didn't really know how to edit a script or turn on a computer.) Hogan Sheffer seemed like her overweight toadie, a man who sat under flourescent lights all day, cranking out ten zillion ideas, of which ONE might be decent and the remainder might be garbage. Mrs. Bell probably stood over his desk five minutes per week, reading through an exhausting summary of his lousy storyline ideas, and then finally just circling a few at random and then sighing heavily and muttering, "Follow through with the ones I've circled. I don't have time to think about it. I'm hosting a luncheon for Queen Noor at noon, and I'll be on Rodeo Drive this afternoon shopping for a cute but professional lavender blouse to wear to my next Museum board meeting." Whatever the circumstances were, she was a TERRIBLE show-runner, and her assistants didn't seem equipped to deal with her style of leadership. In my opinion, she was even worse than Lynn Marie Latham and Chuck Pratt --- simply because she KNEW what the fans wanted, but didn't have the time or the motivation or the talent to deliver it, and she couldn't be bothered to hire people who could.

Yeah, Kay Alden and Jack Smith pretty carefully created a need for Jabot to require some extra cash and to turn towards Nikki and Brad for the funding. It was all kind of integral to the storyline. Plus it gave Nikki a good opportunity to interact with Jill, and gave them some great lines that drew on their history. Jill: You only have a position here because you BOUGHT yourself a position. Nikki: And YOU only have a position here because you SLEPT your way into it. And then all of that got thrown away later in favor of NVP, Crystal Springs, and a stupid senate race.

I don't remember Victor showing any interest in Casey. I recall that they had some scenes together, where he was telling Casey that Julia needed a female friend. But Casey quickly overstepped and encouraged Julia to get a job, which annoyed Goat Daddy.

If you watch Lisa, Craig, and Betsy's scene with the volume off, it looks as though you're fast-forwarding, because Eileen Fulton's arms and hands and eyes are all moving at such break-neck speed.

Yep, Kay Chancellor rendered Casey obsolete in Nikki's life. And while Roberta Leighton obviously had more chemistry with David Hasselhoff than Lynn Topping (the new Chris) did, Snapper and Chris were sacred to Bill Bell, and he didn't wanna break them up. Like Eileen Davidson later on, Roberta Leighton was just one of those girls who sorta overpowered most of her male co-stars, which I felt was why she didn't work with Brock Reynolds, Lucas Prentiss, and Jonas NoName. She COULD have been an interesting character because the past abuse she suffered from her father, but after the initial revelation of Nick's abuse, Bell seemed shy about digging too deeply into that. And without that being explored, what the heck could you do with her, except just have her walk through a hospital room with a stethescope around her neck announcing, "She's holding her own for the moment, but she's not out of the woods yet." lol.

To be honest, Bill Bell couldn't think of anything to do with Casey Reed even in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when she was young and cute. I always liked Roberta Leighton and thought she was an interesting and sorta unusual actress, but Bell seemed to have a really difficult time writing for her. He brought her on the show basically to be an obstacle for NewSnapper & NewChris, but then decided he couldn't have Snapper boink anyone besides Chris. So then he sorta tossed Casey to Brock (didn't work), to Lucas Prentiss (didn't work), to Jonas (didn't work), and then out the door. There was a LOT that could've been done with Casey (specifically the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father Nick and her resulting iciness towards men), but Bell was a whole lot more interested in showing us Nikki being boinked by college professors to increase her GPA and boinked by drop-outs to up her self-esteem and getting VD. He just didn't seemed invested in Casey. Then Roberta Leighton botoxed & collagened herself half to death, and that was about the end of that, lol.

Eileen Davidson's version of Ashley just had so many strange nuances, quirks, and tics to her character that it was almost impossible for Bill Bell to pair her with someone initially. Although Eileen was only 22 or 23 years old when she first came onto the show, she read as older, because of all the eye-rolling, hair-flicking, head-scratching, and impatient cutting off of other character's dialogue that characterized her portrayal. (We don't usually think of such a young ingenue as developing such a "take charge" personality in scenes, but she definitely did.) The poor little boy in the lab --- Eileen just ate him up and spat him out. Same with Eric Garrison and Marc Mergeron. Eileen just stole all the thunder from their scenes and made them look like patsies. Eric Braeden was old enough (and experienced enough) not to let Eileen steal all of their scenes together, and I think that's why their pairing initially worked. Braden and Terry Lester were about the only actors on the show who could "control" Eileen's tendency to snatch a scene completely away from her partner. (And this is why I felt Brenda Epperson bombed epically as Ashley. Epperson was a very pretty girl, and did a good job of portraying a sweet soap opera heroine, but in no shape, form or fashion did she ever embody the quirky mannerisms that we'd come to expect from the Ashley Abbott character.)

lol .... Yeah, that's little Marc Mergeron dancing with her.

Well, on the show Mary's been dead a pretty good while, and they've moved past it. Remember, when Dina stabbed Nikki and/or torched the Underground last year, Paul was running around angrily threatening to arrest her. Jack finally told him, "Look, Paul, my mother has Alzheimers. Think about how you'd feel if this had been Mary, God rest her soul." The implication was that Mary's been dead a pretty long time.

The story seemed designed from the get-go that Carl wouldn't regain his memory and return to Mary, giving it a "tragic" undertone (which I enjoyed). But as for the story itself, despite some good dialogue and some high quality acting from Doug Davidson and Carolyn Conwell, it all fell flat with me because I never thought Carl was dead in the first place. I'd been thinking for 8 years that he was "at the station" or "in the other room", lol. All of a sudden they were saying he was dead, and then Cricket was telling us, "No, he's not dead", which I didn't think he was anyhow. Bill Bell just didn't lay quite enough groundwork to make us believe he was dead, IMHO.

Of course even Mother Mary herself wasn't immune to being dumped. During the Cassandra storyline in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Carl Williams and his policewoman partner (Salena?) were contract cast members, but Mother Mary was recurring. By the late 1990s, Mary was back on contract, and of course Carl was completely missing in action until that wonderful, edge-of-your-seat Norfolk storyline.

Hey, great information! Thanks so much for providing that. We could see in 1980 that Steve was a grown-ass man with a college degree (so 25 makes sense), Paul was constantly being badgered by Mother Mary for not being in college (so 19 makes sense), and Pip was always announcing her age. Todd was more of a mystery (since he wasn't on camera), but I was pretty sure Mary made a comment one time to Steve about "your two younger brothers", so I figured Todd was intended by Bell to be one of the younger three kids.

Yes, there were four kids. Steve was the oldest; he was preppy, confident, yuppie-type character who prized his virginity and delivered heart-warming lectures to everyone about making the most of their situation. Then there was floundering teen Paul who was a drop-out and a complete disappointment to his parents. And the little girl Patty (a/k/a "Pipsqueak" or "Pip" for short) who was about 15. And then there was the unseen brother Todd who was "away studying to be a priest", which delighted Carl and most especially Mary, of course. (Several lines of dialogue in 1980 indicated that Todd was probably even younger than Patty, or at the oldest, was slightly younger than Paul but slightly older than Patty. He seemed to be away in Catholic prep school (high school) studying to be admitted to the seminary. But by the time the character was finally introduced thirty years later in the form of Corbin Bernsen, he'd morphed into the oldest brother. That didn't seem to be the Bill Bell's original intention for the character. The idea was PROBABLY that we were going to meet him as a seminarian, as "The Thorn Birds", about the tempted priest, was very popular at the time.)

Wasn't Carl Williams another Unneeded Father Figure who just vanished like Stuart Brooks and Neil Fenmore? (In about 1999, Bell & Alden went through that whole agonizing harangue of Cricket running into Carl in the Norfolk airport, and Paul and Mary revealed that they'd been "grieving" over Carl's "death" for many, many years. But I don't remember Carl Williams ever dying or any grieving. I was thinking he just vanished in a puff of smoke sometime after the Cassandra Rawlins storyline ended and wasn't mentioned again until the Norfolk storyline.)

That sounds right. I remember that Liz was still around for Kay's facelift in 1984, still around for Nikki's wedding, and yeah, right on up through the beginning of the Kay's Photography Exhibit, lol. Liz was dropped from contract status to recurring status a few months after Stuart was (I think he was bumped to recurring in 1983, and for Liz maybe it was 1984.) Stuart basically said, "To hell with y'all" (evidently) and ended his availability for taping soon after the change in his contract status. Liz, though, soldiered on for a year or so on recurring status. And then it seems like she just disappeared without a trace, and I was wondering whether she'd reconciled with Stuart, or whether she was still in the (unseen) Foster house, or where she might be. I remember when Sven popped a cap in Jill in 1986, I was curious if anyone would bother telling Liz that her daughter had been shot in the shower. All of a sudden John Abbott told Mamie or Ashley or someone, "Oh, dear, I need to call Jill's mother and let her know what happened. She's in London with Snapper and Chris, you know." And I was like, "Really? When the hell did she go there?!" lol. Next thing you knew, John Abbott was making a phone call, and there was old Liz, answering the phone in Snapper's London kitchen and gasping, "Poor Jill!"

Liz was definitely "downtrodden", but the other three women over 40 --- Kay Chancellor, Vanessa Prentiss, and Jennifer Brooks --- the main thread linking them was that Bill Bell tended to write those three as very vain, selfish, weak-willed women, who always put their own needs above everyone else. It was strange to have three self-absorbed "matriarchs" on the same half-hour show. During the Brooks/Foster purge of 1982/1983, I didn't feel too badly for most of the actors who got the boot. They were mainly bland recasts (Leslie, Chris, Greg, Lance) who hadn't been around very long, or later-developed characters (Lucas), or actors who'd already left at least once in the past (Peggy). But I really did feel badly for Stuart and Liz, who'd been there from day one and could've served as a link between the "old show" and the "new show". It was definitely a confusing period for those of us who watched daily. Granted, Bill Bell used the Chris character wisely (having her work at Jabot and "validate" the Abbotts to the audience), and he also got some benefit out of Leslie (having her be the defacto step-mother to Angela Laurence, who was always interacting with Traci Abbott, Paul and Andy). So Chris and Leslie, during their final months, helped pave the way for the younger characters that we'd get to know in the coming years. It's just a shame that Liz and Stuart couldn't have been utilized in a similar manner.

I've seen a couple of websites claim that Stuart Brooks died in 1984 (off-screen). If that happened, I sure missed that episode, because I've never heard any character on the show give an *update* on Stuart Brooks at all. I'd assume he's probably dead by now, since we haven't laid eyes on him in about 36 years, but I've sure never heard any reference to his "death" on the show itself. I was hoping maybe that would be addressed a few years ago when Liz Foster died. But Liz's death was just a plot point for the Jill/Lauren storyline and didn't really answer any of the questions I had about Liz and Stuart's marriage and separation and Stuart's state of being dead or alive. I think maybe that's just a can of worms no one on the writing staff is brave enough to open, lol.

I don't believe that's historically accurate. There certainly wasn't a "little triangle" of any sort, because Stuart Brooks was rarely seen after he was bumped from contract status to recurring, and the actor was angry enough about his demotion not to return in 1984 for Nikki and Victor's wedding. Juliana McCarthy (Liz) stayed with the show for a couple of years after being bumped to recurring --- she was still around in 1984 for Nikki's wedding to Victor, and for Kay's facelift --- and then she vanished as well. My recollection is that Bill Bell wanted to preserve the studio set which had previously served as Pierre's, the Allegro, and Jonas's, so he had the Stuart Brooks character pop up rather randomly and sell the restaurant to Gina Roma, and that was about it for Stuart. (Leslie couldn't sell the building herself, because Victoria Mallory had already been fired, lol.) To my knowledge, there never WAS any resolution to Stuart and Liz's temporary break-up. Liz moved out of the Brooks house because she thought Stuart was being too hard on her son Snapper; Chris and Snapper urged her in a couple of haphazard scenes to reconcile with Mr. Brooks, but Liz said she wasn't ready to yet. After a few weeks or months, Stuart was dropped to recurring and more or less vanished from the show, then a few months later Liz was bumped to recurring as well. I never knew whether the two characters had reconciled or not. Even Bill Bell didn't seem to know (or care). When Liz appeared in 1986 after Jill's shooting by Sven the masseur, it was retroactively revealed that Liz had moved to England to be with Snapper and Chris. We never saw her pack her bags and move there, though; she just disappeared sometime during 1984. Nevertheless, she left England, picked Little Phillip up from boarding school, and raced back to Genoa City (to introduce the Phillip III character to the audience). During her return, some days she was listed in the closing credits as "Elizabeth Foster Brooks", and other days as "Liz Foster". It seemed the production crew didn't know or understand the status of the Liz/Stuart reconciliation. This same confusion occurred in 2003 when Liz, Snapper, and Greg made a brief reappearance in Genoa City; some days Julianna McCarthy was credited as "Liz Foster Brooks", and other days just as "Liz Foster".