FrenchBug82

It is perfectly possible that Freddie is both OK broadly speaking and may have, consciously or not, pangs of jealousy. That video certainly didn't come off as him being totally at peace with it: there is nothing that says "I am not fine" like a "I am fine, I swear" video that is full of subtle jabs at the show. Let me compare it with a situation one may have experienced: you break up with someone because it is not working anymore. Does this mean that when you later see that person dating a really hot guy/girl and being very happy, you don't have some moments of jealousy even if you have no interest in dating your ex again? It is pretty human.

Yeah, that list isn't accurate. Traci vs Lauren was actually a major storyline in the 80s! They had a triangle around Danny (I think) and Lauren was bullying Traci regarding her weight. This was revisited several times later on. Pretty sure their overlap regarding Brad also meant later interactions.

I think one of the mistakes these women make is trying to look 20 again. So they pull and pull and it just looks freaky. Success stories like Donna Mills or Joan Collins is work that is more subtle. They look appropriately older but just not as old as they are. Raquel Welch (I guess Central Park West qualifies her for this thread, right? lol) also looks pretty great. On the other hand, while Victoria Principal looks good on the video shared above thanks to good lighting and makeup, her appearance on Titans was distractingly "altered" looking. I don't believe she has had nothing done. And then there is Botox that has certainly been distracting for certain actress although some of them (like Maura West) came back from it and their face settled well enough.

I understand what you are saying but I think history has proven that once soaps die, they don't come back. It is not like they will launch another better one in replacement. So I don't want to root for them to be cancelled rather than hope they get better. In any case it would all be a moot point if Y&R was doing better creatively. It is very sad it isn't.

And I would hope that more generally we would have learned not to root for the end of ANY soap. All soaps we have lost have been a tragedy, even when they were not in a good place creatively. We have four left; when things are going array, we should be rooting for them to get better and use their potential to the full, not cheer on the potential death of a genre that, I would assume since we are on this forum, we care about and love.

Bill Bell managing to stretch by I think what supposed to be something like a mere hour on-screen (before a press conference where Jill might reveal her affair with Jack unless John gives her a slice of Jabot) into an entire week of actually tense and suspenseful episodes will stay with me as a masterpiece of the genre.

If you mean her, it is "Laurie" (actress: Dawn Cody), Michael's pregnant wife

I know. I am just being cheeky at B&B's expense I didn't mind the slow pace of this particular story until now because I like a slow burn when the payoff ought to be there at the end which seemed like it... but the last few weeks have been unsatisfying and I am now pessimistic it is going to be as worth it as I had assumed, sadly.

Not really the best comparison. I mean the B&B would have wrapped this up in a week and if this was B&B Jason would have have time to marry Carly, Britt and Sam again in those nine months

That's why I brought it up. We had speculated about pregnancy but now it feels too late so ... what was the point? Notice too this is the SECOND time they write a one-night stand for Britt (Julian previously) that leads to exactly zero story consequence.

One of the many things that have gone haywire is exactly this. It is hard to know what the writers are trying to tell us. They had a great thing going with Jason/Britt and now it feels they are almost trying to sell us Jarly as viable on its own right. I suppose, if I am being generous, it is supposed to make in turn Sonny/Nina slightly more plausible if CarSon are not as much the obvious endgame (I mean, they are but in terms of how things are presented) but the loss of momentum from Britt/Jason is puzzling. In any case, I agree with you that it is very ambiguous and weird. Also as a side note, I have yet to understand what the point of that Britt/Jax interlude story-wise was.

My apologies. It was Taoboi who brought it up recently in the GH Spoilers thread, not you, as seen below. Anyhow, I agree with him that regardless of the sense of how the show is going overall, this late summer has felt like a bad inflection point. I hope it picks right back up again.

Well, obviously higher-ups meddle all the time. But there was speculation that between Peter/Cyrus return and a couple of weirdly abrupt story changes, we are currently (since August-ish) seeing a specific point at which orders came from above that changed the planned course the writers had been on. And I think it rings true because the dropoff in quality and coherence is noticeable.

As a completely unimportant side note, how many facelifts did Linda Dano get? Someone mentioned earlier that the skylight-fall was intended to "excuse" her being in bandages in 1997 but watching the late 1995 episodes that are being posted on YouTube and those massive unflattering bangs she was wearing then look like they are intended to cover something.

The dropoff in quality from three months ago is pretty striking. I really think Vee is onto something with his higher-up interference theory.

Agree. Very unimpressed with how they are handling this Jax-finds-out.

Well as I said I am wary of misremembering the gossip but basically it was pretty abrupt and arbitrary in the sense of her working for several months before someone upstairs telling her it is not working and firing her despite the fact, as Vee said, she was doing a fine job in the role Show-business is tough obviously but a lesser person might have been a little resentful and not wanting to revisit a bad memory. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/nyregion/an-actress-learns-from-a-setback.html

Unless I am misremembering, I thought it was even more gracious of Elizabeth Dennehy to do it considering how things went down.

Setting aside how offensive the comparison is, I am actually shocked at how poor VK's attempt at recreating the emotion in Julie's face is. Hard to tell if she is just modeling or almost mocking her but either way It is doubly offensive.

I think she does. It is a psychological phenomenon you can see in other narcissists - include infamously former you-know-what Cheeto Mussolini. It doesn't matter that she rationally knows she did wrong in the first place. It is SO easy for people like that to genuinely convince themselves that, no, THEY are the real victims and believe it to the utmost. It starts with "OK I messed up but..." and it ends with straight up erasing the OK part after a while. Look at her mom's rationale: they were rich so who cares. The human brain is a funny beast. It WILL find ways to justify anything rather than cope with humiliation or guilt or whatever other feelings she might go through. It is horrible of course but I bet it is sincere. She convinced herself that she is the victim.

What's that word kids use nowadays? D**kmatized? I personally don't mind Jack still deep down pining for Phyllis. It makes sense. Now, if he was a real person and a friend of mine I'd tell him to run away from this toxic person and relationship, partially because of what you said, but in the world of soaps much worse has been forgiven and forgotten. There would be no way for me to pine for someone who cheated on me with Nick twice abd slept with my brother but hey Genoa City is a weird reality. What would actually make this work for me more - both the weird flirtation with Sally and this declaration - was if they actually wrote a real deep storyline about Jack's loneliness. He is in his, hum, 60s. Forever a bachelor. His family is all over the world. Etc. It would be interesting to see a man who spent so much of his life chasing after a lot of things - pleasure in his youth, his father role model later on - reckon with the fact he hasn't really achieved much and is afraid to die on his own. You know, psychological drama with characters layers. As if they would.

Erika thinks she is the real victim. Everything stems from that.

Ohhhhh. Now we are talking about a theory that make sense. It makes it even worse that they did it but at least now I get it. Thanks for that tidbit!

Oh yeah I hated the ghost story on its own merits but on top of it it aged very poorly the minute they switched the story to "Shane". They had Ryan vouch for Bobby from the beyond except that he wasn't Bobby, he was married and he certainly wasn't the new Love of Vicky's life. I guess ghosts don't know f**ks**t either. That on the other hand amuses me a lot. Thanks for sharing that tidbit I had never heard.

Another detail that makes me so sure it wasn't the initial plan when they introduced Bobby. I really wonder...