FrenchBug82

To me it takes more than a biographical pitch to feel a character is inspired by another one. Sure, you can isolate some elements that are the same but that's quite a way away from saying this character is an attempt to reproduce another character. So Dina started off Alexis-ish although was softened later on, I feel, but the "absentee mother" plot point certainly feels directly lifted and the way she was initially written certainly was Alexis-like so I will give you that one. Definitely agree there was inspiration there at the outset. But Jill really had nothing to do with Abby. "Social climber" certainly is not an original story that would need to originate in Abby and their personalities and the way they went about their climb were completely different. I don't find them alike at all, let alone assume one came from the other. As for Stephanie, again, the "tough matriarch" is an archetype as old as literature, movies and TV. There was no need to look at Angela - who was not even that similar to Stephanie in her motives and personality - for inspiration in that way. I don't buy that at all. I think Dina is the most convincing of all the examples given in this thread. Victor too to an extent. The rest feels like a reach to me.

Having been rewatching the early episodes, I can confirm it is true. But even then j swift's point stands, I think. Joe and Kelly weren't as creepy since he was not the janitor but Peter being her teacher in HS certainly is even creepier as he had direct authority over her! So I still take "Plot points that really didn't age well" by $1000, Alex.

It could very well be that the Dallas popularity inspired Bell some but I have to really be skeptical of the specific character parallels here. JR as a ruthless businessman certainly works with Victor but that was hardly specific to JR. It had been done plenty. And even if we grant that comparison, which is plausible enough, one of JR's very few human traits was his obvious longing for his father's pride which, as you correctly point out, was more one of the thoroughlines of Jack's character. Victor's toughness was not driven at the outset that I remember by a sense of family - on the contrary, his identity as a self-made man is what made him feel tough and ruthless. Otoh I don't really see anything of Gary in Jack. At all. As for Bobby maybe the pre-Pamela playboy aspect (which was never shown on Dallas but was a big part of Jack) but Bobby was a good guy - to the point of milquetoast - which Jack emphatically was not. He was a carefree hedonist more than ruthless, true, but he had none of the moral principles that were driving Bobby. So I think we are doing a disfavor to Bell by trying to shoehorn the comparison. Jack in particular was a complex character who didn't resemble anything else that was done on Dallas or anywhere else in my humble opinion. And the archetypes of John, the business patriarch, and Victor, the ruthless businessman, represented were hardly original to Dallas or to Y&R. Were there any other maybe better examples of Bell and/or Y&R being directly inspired by primetime for characters they ever introduced? I know other soaps tried the Alexis-style "b*tch" in the late 80s but I don't recall Y&R really going that route - I don't think Jill's upmarketisation fits the bill. What else?

Hum... Seems strange that Marc would have issues with Brooklyn being on film at RHOA but OK with her being on the cover of a magazine. And she is literally the cover, more than even Kenya. But that's a cool picture.

She DOES look a lot like her!

I didn't yell at anybody so I dunno what you are saying here but I do resent any of them that I know for a fact are. I however give Dodd and Ramona credit for *saying* it actually unlike those who hide it but I still have contempt for them and they lose rooting value accordingly. I don't know about "fans". I know about me and I am very coherent with myself on that particular point. The things they say and believe are gross and offensive. In any case I simply pointed out that Ramona's problem wasn't *just* foot-in-mouth syndrom and that there are a couple extra facts about her that makes things she did say and do feel like things she really meant rather than "clumsiness" like we are supposed to accept. This is one of them. She isn't vocally political like Dodd is but her pandemic behavior speaks volume.

This is kind of lost on me as I didn't find TL attractive. But I think it rejoins what I was mentioning under the broad umbrella of "charm". That, I do see. PB is a good actor but he is very bloodless. He can sell Jack as being in love but I can never see the part where Jack *seduced* whoever. TL's Jack was never really in love but I could totally see him seducing and charming his conquests.

Yes. And as I mentioned in the past I suspect one reason he detested the LuAnn story so much is that not just that it was a bad retcon, but it was the key moment where Bell just turned Jack into something else - almost sappy - and for Bergman, that might have felt like a vote of no-confidence that Bell felt he wasn't pulling off the Lester-style Jack. It is not that mellowing Jack with age was an absurd move in a vacuum but to PB it probably read as Cliff-izing the character, which he might have been bummed about. And it also turned Jack as a perpetual loser - thereby propping Victor up - rather than the rascal he had been. All of this is at Bell's feet, whatever his reasons. So I don't necessarily blame PB per se. He doesn't do badly when he has to be a bit meaner, although he doesn't do the oily charm thing as well as TL did but that could have been easily fixed by adapting the dialogue. Instead they adapted the character entirely.

At some stage I was willing to buy that but voting for Trump and her pandemic behavior tells me the rot goes beyond this and there is a level of deluded selfish entitlement that goes beyond being simply "foot-in-the-mouth". She means a lot more of the awful things she says than what she - and we - pretend. Also, that reunion where she was refusing to discuss her separation from Mario, even refusing to acknowledge it - to the point of being aggressive - was TV gold but it was also profoundly disturbing behavior and, frankly, I would have canned her. But as I said, she totally belongs on the show and is an intricate part of why it is fun-messy and they made the right call to keep her around. But I am pretty sure having to deal with her in real-life would make me very angry very fast.

Well I'd reword that and say that version of Jack Abbott was best - which is not only down to TL who was obviously great but also to the writing. Jack *was written* differently back then too and that's important to note when we look back at it with nostalgia.

As I said, I don't question the fact she belongs on the show and brings great, if infuriating entertainment. Even when I am really mad at her, I 100% think she belongs. And you deliver a really strong, if possibly too generous, defense of her I have to say swayed me a bit back from my irritation. But, if she wasn't on TV, there would be no question she is a pretty awful person, at least in the way she behaves and treats others.

Thinking about it I suspect this also might have to do with the Kelly Ripa "reboot" and who signed on to that project. Just a hunch.

Yeah that's definitely what it is but it is going to lack the emotional resonance of the other reunions where it is people who are not just there to talk about a show but have actually worked closely, loved, bonded with each other for many years. Not criticizing the fact it exists; I'll eat up any soap content. But it feels like a mish-mash random list rather than one that makes sense if you watched the show.

Also, there is no other show where the drop in quality once a headwriter first is not head writer anymore (1998) and then once he passed and wasn't around as a consultant (2005) has been so spectacular and obvious. The change was obvious and immediate in both cases and Lord knows Y&R since 2005 has been... well often not even good period, let alone in comparison. So yeah his talent mattered.

I am more... nonplussed by the people they are "reuniting". I mean JR on one hand, Maria on the other and Greenlee/Ryan on the third never had much to do with each other on the show. How much of a "reunion" is it if it is people who rarely had airtime together? If you want to use Greenlee/Ryan bring me Alicia Minshew for instance. Heck, bring at least Melissa Claire Egan to be the two-degree of separation between Greenlee/Ryan and JR.

That's actually a brilliant right-on-the-money comparison. Both for the dynamic of the recast with the fans vs the original and what they brought to their roles and what the roles were. This is why I love these forums. Even though it is thirty years old stuff, brilliant commenters still manage to make myself think of things in a different light.

You have no idea how much Ramona repeatedly saying in interviews how much better the show is without Dorinda irks me. What an ungracious woman she is. I am not questioning her place on the franchise but the fact she never pays any price for her detestable (and never contrite) behavior is really off-putting. I would like Dorinda back because I like Dorinda but I especially would like it now just to piss Ramona off. Don't dance on someone's grave if they are not dead because you are setting yourself up for trouble.

Bell had flaws like any writer or any person, really. Saying he was overall a great does not mean overlooking the things he didn't do that well. And, dare I say, the things we mention here, while problematic from the point of view of purists and perfectionnists, are hardly cardinal sins. Writing a show for two decades and a half (with others beforehand) five days a week every week of the year while making the entire machin run - with business and budget concerns, human resource drama, scheduling issues, etc - is a huge endeavor and it is inevitable that it is going to require some shortcuts and inconsistencies in the final product. And they don't even have to be the writer's fault. There is SO much we don't know about what goes on behind-the-scenes. We always assume characters get written out purely because the writer decided so or because the actor decided to leave. But like any business, there are a gazillion reasons people can be let go and that it would be uncouth to discuss publicly. I have no knowledge of why, say, Carl suddenly disappeared but it could very well have been that the performer had some trouble with human resources for this or that reason and couldn't be kept around as an employee and that recasting would have drawn attention to a delicate situation, hence the abrupt disappearance. Who knows? Identifying what Bell did wrong doesn't take away what he did right, of which there is plenty, OR that it may not always have been entirely of his only doing.

It is absolutely true and the next question for me is why and is it a coincidence that the mid-90s were such a rough period creatively for so many soaps at the same time? The fact other shows - Days in particular - were doing spectacularly well around the same time (Days crashed and burned not long after however) means there are no easy answers. But is it a coincidence? Is it because there were changes in the suits departments/network that led to consequences on the lower creative level? That would possibly explain why it happened in parallel on almost all the ABC shows and the PG shows but shows that were controlled separately like the Bell shows were doing fine. Is it because the immediate reaction to the OJ trial ratings decline led EPs to make bad short-term choices that ended up snowballing? What's the theory for why it happened almost at the same time?

That 92-93 time period is a more common date for "When did GL start to decline" than 1983 indeed. I choose Summer of 1992 because, as discussed a few weeks ago, I think Maureen's death has taken a mythical place as the death knell when it would have been survivable had there not been all the other blows while I don't think the reverse would have been true. But either way it is a date that I feel more comfortable with.

Sure but it seems so short-sighted. How did NOONE imagine that one day there might be a way...? I guess hindsight is twenty twenty but I would have tried donating them to the Smithsonian and getting a tax break or something lol

It is funny because I was watching old Sally vs Stephanie scenes just last night and I was remarking how much better dressed "fashion-industry-failure" Sally was, over-the-top fashion as it was, than Grand Dame Stephanie who, even in the heyday of the show, was always dressed so frumpy and in unflattering shapes. The show has rarely had great fashion if you ask me which is, of course, ironic.

Wasn't there an issue of having to convert them to a new format or something - a time-consuming expansive process - or something? I seem to vaguely remember something like this. Still hard to believe they thought it made more business sense for that content to be lost forever.

Exactly right. For me too the late 80s/early 90s, broadly tracking with SS's tenure although not necessarily just for that reason, was a good time period. I am a big fan of Bev McKinlee and the show had lots going for it overall. Maybe it wasn't quite up to the level of the Golden Age, which I haven't seen, but it was good soap so it'd be wrong to dismiss it. But by the time the second third of the 90s rolled around there was an evident and sharp decline in the quality of the show that it never recovered. It of course still had moments and pockets of goodness - the entire Annie vs Reva saga will stay as a highlight of the history of the show IMO - but it was way too uneven and flawed to be called good.

I don't doubt that Bravo leaned on it but because I am less conspirational (maybe naively) than ya'll I think Leah's "popularity" was also a function of the comparison of how poorly received most newbies were on the other shows at the same time and the fact most of the audience's "anger" was directed at Dorinda that season. So in comparison Leah ended up coming off alright. If it was *just* Bravo they would be selling the hell out of Housewives that are immediately disliked by the audience. If it doesn't work for, say, Drew, it wouldn't have worked with Leah if that was *just* what was going on. She had good timing and admittedly navigated the inner dynamic of the group smartly enough: outspoken but without picking unnecessary fights that would have alienated her from the audience right off the bat. Personally I didn't dislike Leah so much as was suspicious of how hard she was trying to create a certain image for herself. As someone who does wish female sexuality was talked about more positively on TV, I feel comfortable saying her whole "Look how sex-positive I am" shtick ended up pushing way into saying crass things to shock people and thinking *that* is sex-positive. Kandy is a much better example of someone who is comfortable with her sexuality but does not feel the need to make it a thing. Because when you are actually sex-positive, you don't need to advertise it. So immediately I smelled someone trying to control her image and that made me wonder what else there is.