FrenchBug82

Actually, it is the host - who clearly knows nothing about soaps and is going on his uninformed assumptions about what soaps are like - who says that. She responds that it was not it. She says what she didn't like was that it was very "militant" (whatever that means) and not particularly warm and welcoming, which tells me that she objects to the factory-like nature of soaps - where everything is done at breakneck speed without allowing for creativity or experimentation Which, you know, fair enough. She also looks down on the content of the show but it is the host who really annoyed me with his ignorance and over-the-top pearl-clutching.

You know, I hear that argument because for instance my personal tolerance of the Natalie/Jessica rewrites have partly to do with my love for MA. On the other hand, the Unabortion was an atrocity not just because it was a stupid story and a nonsense rewrite of history. Erica's abortion was a mythical iconic moment that reverberated OUTSIDE the show. Undoing it was vile not just because of the retcon. It was massively rejected by the audience before we even had a sense of what the story was because this was the epitome of what had gone wrong with soaps: a ridiculous story undoing a genuinely socially significant and compelling story for a quick lazy buzz. It combined ruining the show's heritage with the worst caricature of a soap story, combining in one story the two major sins of modern soaps. I don't know there was no Roger Howarth in the world that could have sold this to the audience.

That's sort of what I don't like. It would have been easy enough for them to tell the exact same story by using the villain bits previously used for Philip and simply portray him as a mix of his mother's son and his spoiled upbringing. Using manipulative scheming means to get anything he wants because he feels entitled to have what he wants: Chloe in this case Not sure the psycho undertone was needed and could be damaging to the character long-term.

In the current iteration, obviously. I am making a broader commentary about all soaps for the past fifteen years rather than 2021 Y&R whose degradation goes beyond that narrow point, obviously.

I could write a college-essay-length post on the loss of the art of the cliffhanger (with its baby sister: the enormously spoilerish teasers) in soaps. There are structural problems that explain why daytime soaps have declined. But there are a gazillion small things that have been done that make things considerably worse. I am not mourning some staples of the genre - character with a secret starts "I need to tell you something" fakeouts, the "Character almost finds something out"... only to be interrupted in the first 30 seconds of the next episode - but we have gone so far in the other direction where nothing is left hanging anymore. Secrets are revealed *within* a show and episodes are self-contained. It is not a continuous story anymore but one-hour chapters.

I actually don't mind Ridge feeling strongly about it and being a bit of a d*** about it coz that's Ridge and I prefer organic conflict between Brooke and Ridge such as this over contrived triangles for the umpteenth time. His behavior and refusal to acknowledge Brooke's reasonable dilemna is irritating but Ridge is an irritating character. Maybe I am too charitable but I am fine with this: it is character drama that makes sense for the characters rather than lazy shock-value plot-driven stuff that Bell is generally more inclined to. The best story in the world? No. But hey I rag enough on the show when it is lazy and abrupt that I can appreciate when they try to do something character-driven-ish even if it bangs us over the head with it. My caveat is that I can feel the current B/R conflict is the cue for at least one of the stories planned for Taylor's return and while I am SO looking forward to seeing what KA does with it, I am not super happy they are very likely shaping up to go there. Again.

The Jill-Billy relationship is one of the criminally underwritten relationships on the show of the past twenty years. Even the weird things the writers once did - like writing a strong bond between her and Cane while we used to never see her with her actual kid - could have been mined for great material for years. How much of how Billy is today down to his mother's inattention? So much stuff there. Like so much of YR you can see the gold under the dirt but nothing is picking up tools to mine it.

That's what pisses me off about the religious exemption. A religious exemption is intended to protect followers of a religion against laws and mandates that go against a tenet of their religion. So this applies to, say, not paying for an abortion when your religion preaches that it is murder. Fine. HOWEVER it doesn't apply to "I'll claim that whatever I don't want to do is due to my religion". Someone can correct me if I am wrong but I am pretty sure the only major US religion for which rejection of vacccines (and traditional medicine) is an actualy tenet that is taught, preached and believed is Christian scientism. In NO other religion has there ever been a dogmatic issue with vaccines one way or another - which is why, vocal and meddling as Churches have been in our politics, it was never an issue until now. If it was a dogmatic issue, you can well imagine they'd have said something. So: no. There is no religious exemption to be had because one's rejection of the covid vaccine is not in any way, shape or form based on a religious belief or a religious teaching. Claiming "Religion!" is not a get-out-of-jail free card for any law you don't like. Some people who have decided they didn't want this vaccine for whatever reasons are after the fact trying to find rationales for their decision but that's not a religion. Unless you count the current GOP as a cult which, you know... This. So much this. Just like Trump is simply in-your-face and crude about things most Republicans have believed and done under a facade of false rationales and propriety for decades. It is not a difference of degree, it is a difference of style. And it is morally bankrupt both ways

I don't think the rumors were absurd and I believed them for a while but it sure doesn't feel like anyone involved is acting as if SB is leaving imminently. Wouldn't it be funny if they had let the rumors run rampant on the Internet to gin up suspense and interest in the climax of the Peter story? Unlikely for soaps nowadays, we are genuinely not sure Jason will "survive" (I mean, even if dead he wouldn't really be dead but you get my point) whatever final battle. So honestly from a marketing POV this is well-played by GH if that's what they are doing.

Maybe RC is reusing his greatest hits and is going to use the two Todds template to tell us the Kristen we have been seing for the past few years was not the real Kristen. Maybe SH was unknowingly to herself a fake Kristen created using Stefano/Dr Rolf brainwashing techniques that the real Kristen unleashed to do her prison time for her and mess with people who wronged her in Salem while she gallivanted in Europe.

All in all these two factors - professionalism and being well-liked on-set - explains 90% of the names in this thread. Some more interesting characters played by more difficult actors may have come and gone but if you are likeable and liked and always on-point, efforts can be made to keep you around

"Fun Fact": usually foreign versions of American TV shows keep the original character names. But in France, "Loving" (known there as "Amoureusement vôtre") is an exception. "Gwyneth" is such an unpronouncable name for French people that Gwyneth is called Janet in the French version. Loving had been off the air for a few years when I emigrated but it led me to being VERY confused for a while when I first started to discuss the show on the Internet.

As a side note, I really really really hope I one day get to hear the whole story of what happened there coz it looks like massive backstage shenanigans at the very least.

Actually, I completely agree on that latter point. But I am interested in what kind of "genuine" change you are thinking of that would be of a different nature from what was tried - production models with Peapack, differnt type of story-telling with story arcs, different platforms with PP/BS - or from what I was talking about which was content.

If we are including behind-the-scenes events in the "real world factors" that impacted storylines, I imagine the list of pairings that were broken up because of actors dating/breaking up and/or actors intensely disliking each other must be very long - and even longer if we included the feuds and hookups we in the public know nothing about.

I should start by saying that I am in the firm belief that no character is ever useless or played out. There is plenty of life to be found in any character if/when the people making the show are inspired by it and are/or when unexpected things happen like chemistry with another actor. That being said, within the narrow premise of the question of who I am *surprised* has lasted this long - in the sense that I wouldn't have predicted it when they first started. I think ATWT Henry and YR Michaels are excellent examples. Spinelli (if his regular appearances count) is another one. Days Nicole also really didn't start off feeling like she'd be a tentpole of the show twenty five years later. While I am less surprised by Days Chloe, I do agree the fact she has driven a lot more stories than Belle - even if most of it has been bad - is surprising. OLTL Marcie is another one I did not get and am still surprised she lasted this long. As a matter of fact, while I liked the Vega brothers on OLTL, I would never have pegged them at the beginning to be the only younger-generation leading men on the show that would actually last past one contract, let alone 15 years. Based on Bell's history and the generic nature - at first glance - of their characters, I also thought B&B Liam and Wyatt would cycle out after their first contract had ended. Agree. He did introduce plenty of viable new characters. Problem (by thais version of what's ailing the show) is that he didn't really drop any. Which means Y&R now has a much heavier "vet" load than other shows and a lot less flexibility because they usually didn't come and go. It has upsides - in terms of audience loyalty and familiarity - that I think helps explains why Y&R has continued to be number one but it can be creatively stifling, that is true enough.

Always thought this made him look more like Tom Jones.

That's not entirely true. The story arcs on Port Charles, GH Night Shift/Beyond Salem, Prospect Park, the Peapack experiment... There have been attempts. The former were not particularly revolutionary and the latter have been a flaming disaster but it is not entirely true that there has been zero efforts in the past twenty years to try and help the soap genre "modernize". My personal take is that the problem with all of these is that they tinker either with the actual format - which I don't think is the problem - or the production model (which could be spruced up towards a more UK soap look but I think Peapack traumatized too many execs for anybody to try something like that again) rather than the content. I think soaps should focus on becoming bolder content-wise, telling new kinds of stories, be blunter about real-life issues and stop catering the conservative instincts (not just politically, temperamentally more generally) of some of its audience. It is their fear of alienating what's left of their shrinking audience that is making them so timid and too paralyzed to attempt anything risky to *grow* it. So they stay on cruise control. Soap executives and a lot of people argue that soaps are dying because the format is not adapted to our ADD modern age and flexible lifestyles. I disagree. I think there is plenty of room for stable one-hour of entertainment every day in the same universe - no reason soaps would be thriving in other countries when the structural conditions are the same. No, the problem is that American soaps are stale content-wise and what IS true is that every network and soap executive and EP have largely almost entirely focused any rebooting attempts at the way soaps look or feel rather than what they SAY. One important factor of the success of the soaps back in the day was that they actually told bold stories that spoke to people and even pushed them a little (a well-remembered example being Erica's abortion). It might have gotten some blowback but it created a real faithful audience who cared one way or another. They have given up trying to make us care and are just trying to entertain us in a shallow way because they think modern audiences can't hold on to something long enough before being distracted by something else. That's a big mistake because the entire point of soaps is that the interest, pleasure, satisfaction or any other feeling we feel is something that is built and reverbates long-term. And when they forget that, they just end up looking like cheaper versions of all kinds of other better shows we see out there. Execs believing that soaps are dying because modern ADD viewers can't care for a story for too long and who therefore push for stories with immediate payoffs has a huge self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it. Coz if you don't write long-term story, you don't get long-term investment from viewers. Which then reinforces their assumption that the reason for the genre's decline is structural.

I may be wrong but isn't her current temporary departure the same kind of deal Geary used to have for vacation time?

I kind of hear you on the Bryan Craig stuff and I am not going to pretend she is the best thing since sliced bread but I have a soft spot for her and Britt. That being said, I think more generally I am always fascinated by the cruelty and randomness of show business where "success" can hinge on being accidentally written in scenes with another actor where people somehow pick up on an intangible unpredictable "chemistry" on one hand and on the life choices of a colleague that you don't know and maybe don't even like on the other. There is an entire thread to be started about actors*resses who got shafted because of another actor's choices and while she may still thrive in other stories in the end, it looks like Kelly T. might be one of them. Coz being paired with Jason would have guaranteed her a pretty solid spot in the cast, good actress or not.

I concur. And, to be honest, it makes sense that they would at least try to turn lemons into lemonade by making it a big shock when it happens. Because, surely, justifying Jason leaving will need to be because of something big so... Having him disappear during/after a big climax with Peter would have a bit of deja-vu to it but the timing is tight so I'd assume this ought to be where this is going. The person I do feel bad about is Kelly T. She went in a few months from having struck storyline-gold that would have secured her place on the show for a long while to being, at best, in limbo and, at worse, at risk of being stranded.

Intent does not matter as to whether something is racist or transphobic or homophobic or sexist. When they are, they are. It only matters inasmuch the people who are at the receiving end of those things can CHOOSE to take intent into consideration - or not - in whether they ultimately forgive the person committing the transgression. But nobody is OWED forgiveness and it shouldn't be the burden of underrepresented communities to constantly have to be gracious and understanding. The recent era is when they have gathered enough social and economic power and enough of a voice to stop being guilted into constantly pretending to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when the evidence is pretty clear and the offensiveness hard to bear. They would be perfectly entitled to say that intent does not matter at all and the burden is on white people, men, straight people to do better - the tools to learn are out there; it is not that hard. But someone who is pretty obviously committed to full equality, has shown time and time again efforts to treat people properly and who stumbled upon something offensive (because, yes, we all have it ingrained in us from centuries of oppression and have internalized some stuff so it can happen even to well-meaning people) might have some leeway to hope for forgiveness. Mistakes happen so people might show mercy to someone f-ing up accidentally. But that's the "victims" prerogative.

It is often said that an adversarial press is a fundamental element of a functioning society/democracy and I think the soap world shows EXACTLY how that works. When there is no news media to call you out on stuff because they are co-dependent, it actually does the people they protect no favor in the end. Some individuals might be happier in the short-term because their job seems easier without scrutiny but that allows them to paper over and ignore all kinds of issues that it would be healthier for them to address. Letting things fester and rot in the dark does not mean they stop rotting. It means you only start noticing when it smells aka when it is too late. From the toxic workplace culture to the cultural insensitivites issues to the staleness of the content presented on-screen, so many of the things that are hurting soaps should have had a chance to become an issue a lot earlier and a healthy soap press would have done it. It may have made executives sweat but it would have helped the shows in the long run. And so is the current situation that has been allowed to fester for a lot longer than it needed to to the point. Had IR been fired when it was obvious he was a liability - many uncovered controversies ago - GH would not be dealing with "Transphobic" headlines in one of the rare moments where it gets mainstream media coverage.

I side with the people who say that the people running social media accounts are PR people whose job it is to actually pay attention to these things. We are not talking about Jane Schmoe liking random Insta-posts without reading the commentary because the guy on it is hot. We are talking someone being PAID to make the show look good on social media. Absent-mindedly - in the best telling - "liking" a post like this, widely read on social media as meaning an endorsement, whatever the intent actually is - is exactly what they are NOT supposed to do.

Nor does it make her an anti-vaxxxer. So I was confused why she was looped in this convo. Slightly relieved, I gotta say. The fewer of either, the better.