FrenchBug82

If I was a soap producer in charge of reviving a daytime soap, one of my first steps is to can all next-episode previews, cut day-by-day spoilers and strictly limit what is leaked as spoiler to magazines. The audience knows nothing before it happens and I make sure things happen they do not see coming (a daytime soap would have dropped a gazillion hints Kimberly was alive before the reveal, thereby spoiling the shock value) and that they want to talk about once the episode is over.

I actually think we were including Reid in our conversations about Luke because his ultimate fate was because of what we discuss which is TPTB's assumption that people were rooting for Luke-Noah instead. I will be blunt about Paul: I didn't see it but I know he was popular. However the whole dating Sonny and then Will in such proximity felt very incestuous to me. It was inevitable in a cast with few gay characters but I didn't enjoy it. But I agree: they tried. And the fact they landed back on Will/Sonny and didn't even have anything for them to do once they got back together also highlights what we are talking about. That producers' assumption about "supercoupling" gay characters limits their ability to fly their wings as full-fledged character. It is not a LGBT specific thing (see Days Hope) but the truth is when you have two, at most three openly LGBT characters on a soap, producers can't break that paradigm and are not willing to invest enough in the characters to expand their universe.

You would be surprised. Y&R was long traumatized by the vicious reaction to the Victoria/Neil pairing in the late 1990s. Kristoff St John (RIP) has talked quite a bit of the impact it had on making the show very skittish about trying anything similar (which rejoins what I was saying about producers being easily spooked by audience reaction, even when they misunderstand the reason for it). And lo and behold the trial balloon they had with Ashley/Neil in 2018, while it yielded a less intense reaction, STILL got YR a lot of hate mail. So. Yeah. Watch the news if you don't think there is still not a LOT more of that around. Enough to spook producers who don't feel like they can afford to lose any further part of their fanbase. That said, I am surprised that of all the things producers tried to revive soaps, most have tried superficial changes like changing sets or pacing of stories and not one has thought to become unabashedly "progressive" on the kind of stories they tell. I bet that would secure a really strong audience, even if it doesn't completely overlap with the current one. "Generations" was a smart idea and while it failed for various reasons, in a landscape that has fewer of those kinds of shows - and knowing how popular the Tyler Perry crappy soaps are - I think the hunger of a show with bolder tone and representation could definitely sustain at least one soap full-time.

Inversely characters like Taylor and Lexi were *more* interesting when they were not used as Amanda's foil because by that point writers were writing Amanda as the center of the show and not only would she inevitably get the upper hand but the characters going up against her had to be as unlikeable as possible on the way to it. One reason the Allison/Amanda dynamic worked is that while Allison was weaker, she was a character we were supposed to root for (even though, frankly, she didn't always deserve it) so while Amanda would win the professional bouts, things usually balanced themselves out for her in some way.

We are not going to agree at all, it seems, on OLTL gay characters because the Luke/Fish was poorly received pretty widely because of how extremely preachy it was. I am gay and even I felt talked down to. It had the subtlety of a hammer on a nail. And to be clear we are discussing the characters themselves - the mere fact of featuring them was 1) good 2) daring, I suppose, although a gay wedding in the late 2000s was not as gutsy or adventurous as it would have been in the 80s or 90s. But let's not redefine as adventurous just writing in a gay character, at least not in the context of this discussion. We are trying to determine what makes a character type and storylines for a LGBT character conservative in nature vs "adventurous". We all agree a show writing a LGBT character deserves credit and was usually a pretty adventurous endeavor in itself. The fact OLTL gave it several go over its history is to its credit. B&B never having featured a gay character is certainly ridiculous. However I will defend them on the transgender character by pointing out that they sideline EVERY character not from the core six after a heavy storyline or two so it wasn't specific to her. They actually used her and kept her and Rick married pretty long by the show's standard. But the fact Bell brings in new characters and actors to make a splash and then quickly loses interest is a pattern that has happened three dozen times in the past twenty years, regardless of gender or sexuality. As for Y&R, yes. Absolutely. Adam's bi- or pan-sexuality has been dropped altogether - despite the fact Muhney was eager to go there (even if it was probably because he would have liked the attention). It made sort of sense at first because they wanted Sharon to be the endgame but it has been a lost opportunity not to nod at it further since. Where YR deserves credit is that Greg Rikaart is still the only openly gay actor to have come out during his run and continued to be featured (both on YR and DOOL). And they brought back Thom Bierdz as an openly gay man as well (story was horrible and so is he as an actor but still credit where credit is due). In the end AMC's Bianca is still the only LGBT soap character that I consider to have been well-rounded enough with several girlfriends/wives, non-lesbian related storylines, well-woven into the cast, sympathetic but also real. And even she had to endure some atrocious writing (the rape is still a sore point for all of us I think). Will and Luke got saddled with "soulmates" almost right away and never had a chance to spread their wings into full realized characters. Will's first kiss (not with Sonny) was also strangely aggressive and there was a weird tiptoeing around Will suggesting a threesome with Paul one time. But it is true that soaps have been reluctant to show gay intimacy. We are above "Matt only hugs his boyfriends" on MP but there are ways to go.

In all fairness, and that's a big issue for me with TV awards, I do think the system that makes people win based on single scenes/episodes is fundamentally flawed. It is ESPECIALLY true of daytime soaps but it applies here. Someone creating a well-rounded layered character over time is doing just as hard a job - if not harder - than someone acting well in a single emotional scene. Acting is not just expressing feelings and emotions but creating a character in full and I wish there was more recognition of that aspect of acting. I don't think Heather had many award-friendly big emotional scenes on MP but she did manage to construct a character that was complicated, layered and that the audience took to despite her being not outwardly very sympathetic. That's a LOT harder to do than crying over a dead husband or whatever "big scenes" people like to get for their reels because it is subtle and takes a lot of skill to create an entire persona. And yes the female ensemble was clearly superior to the male cast - and the female characters were, barring Michael, collectively a lot more interesting and driving story a lot more than the male cast. Which is generally true for a lot of soaps tbh.

That's actually a very interesting angle. As anyone who has watched RPDR, has heard of the funü phenomenon in China or been to a gay bar in the past ten years, knows, there is a huge market for women-who-are-into-gay-men. We can debate the merits, drawbacks and psychology of that but come to think of it based on your comment, it does seem to me that the dynamic between Luke/Noah or Will/Sonny on Days seem more directed at the image a female audience has of a gay relationship and that gay characters on soaps seem to fit the expectation of women rather than what gays would recognize as each other. I think it is important to note I am NOT endorsing the Daniel story whatsoever. But placing yourself from the perspective of writers and producers, it is not hard to see how they could read the audience's reaction, justified or not, as being partly about blowback from creating an unsympathetic gay storyline. We will disagree on the extent to which that was grounded in reality but it seems pretty clear it wouldn't have helped writers feel adventurous about how to write such characters going forward. And the best proof of that for me is that they ended up overcompensation wildly in the other direction with how preachy the early times of Fish as a character, not too long after, were. And to be fair, *that* was about as poorly-received by fans. Perception of what they can get away with is often a huge factor and if they misunderstand the audience's reaction one time, overcoming the bad memory can take a long long time, even if the reaction was simply to the quality of the underlying story or the actor. Soap execs are pretty temperamentally conservative: not risk takers by nature. "Once bitten, twice shy". Or as we say in French, "A scalded cat won't get anywhere near even cold water"

There is not much I can add to this. 100% agree. Saying her first year was decent is not much to say. Most headwriters start off OK when they are fresh and we are relieved they are cleaning up the mess that got the previous team fired. What is particularly galling about her tenure is how much long-term damage was done. Killing a legacy character like Colleen is appalling. And how it is not just the writing that was bad: it is how many behind-the-scenes decision were mishandled from start to finish, The way she messed up bringing in a giant of soaps like Maura West and f***ed it up from beginning to end from miscasting her as Diane rather than creating a character to writing weird non-sustaining stuff for her to the insulting way she was written out. And that's the most glaring example: Genie Francis, Debbi Morgan, Darnell Williams. The number of great actors she mishandled and miscast is long. Bringing Ricky in... Casting a good actor (I will grant her the casting team did a lot of good in her years)... And then turning him into a cheap psycho that was quickly written out. On the other hand, we got MANY rounds of Daisy. Hum, what? Goddard being fired... then rehired. And Phillip... Unwriting Phillip's death was bad enough. Making him gay just because Thom B. is gay (I am gay for the record) was just such an insult to the intelligence of viewers. I will give OP that, yes, bringing back Tricia Cast even for this dreck of a story was a highlight and boy did she knock those scenes out of the park but this was still unforgivable lazy and insulting writing. Putting Sharon and Victor together was just horrendous and the overall treatment of the Sharon character just reeked of behind-the-scenes shenanigans. PS: Oh and it is a small thing and I am sure few remember it but it still sticks in my craw all these years later: writing Victor pushing Diane out of a moving vehicle - domestic abuse AND attempted murder - and playing it for *laughs* should never ever have made it past the draft stage. That was a huge low for the show because it went beyond bad writing to an actually offensive and morally bankrupt plot point that, for all its flaws, Y&R had been better at avoiding than other shows.

I stand by my observation. Back to ATWT matters.

I don't either! I just don't think it should have been Billy and Allison's fate though who, as caroline said, were the end game when the show started. I do agree having Amanda keeping that bond off-screen was a nice little detail but nowhere near the amount of satisfaction fans-from-the-entire-run deserved I also think they too easily picked death as their unhappy ending of choice - Sydney's exit should have been cleverer considering her track record for instance. They had already used the institutionalized thing with her but something along those lines might have been more twisted and "fun". The one exit I absolutely loved was Craig's. Didn't care for the character but I got to say suicide was an extremely ballsy to write off a character and it very very very rarely happens on TV. It worked for what the character had been and actually made him more sympathetic in death than he was while he was on the show. So I give them credit for this "unhappy ending". But otherwise killing them off or seeing them off at an airport were the go-to write-offs and ... meh.

B&B has gone there and trust me: no, you don't lol

I don't want to belabor this OLTL story on the ATWT board but my point is: those were gay characters that were different from cookie-cutter boring gays and people reacted badly to it like you are here. You can criticize bad writing but that was equally true of straight characters around that time. Sometimes gay men manipulate and are manipulated just like straight men/women are and reacting to this to gay characters, while understanding because of limited representation, is why characters like ATWT's Luke end up being vanilla and boring because soaps didn't dare create more layered characters lest the reaction be this.

Obviously don't want to stray too far away from ATWT on the ATWT thread but as a gay man AND a fan of soaps, I think soaps have been given a sometimes unfair hard time on how they write their gay characters - particularly gay men. They were mostly reflective of their times and their audience and while we can discuss whether they should have been bolder, earlier, we underestimate how the small steps strategy ended up working for them. Anytime a show has tried to give a gay character something else than a very conventional relationship, fan reaction - in the gay community - has been very aggressively offended. While I disliked the OLTL Paul murder story and I understand why people were bothered by making his "gay" secret his motive for killing, I was pretty excited with OLTL's Daniel because here was a gay character that was *something else*. But I was fairly alone in that. Truth is most LGBT viewers wanted to see characters *like them* on-screen and weren't ready for their small representation to be as messed up and potentially unlikeable as some of the straight characters. We see it from today's eyes where TV shows have started to give us a richer tapestry of LGBTB characters but I think we underestimate how much the hunger at the time was simply to see gay characters fall in love and settle and break stereotypes by being "boring". I think a gay character bed-hopping the way straight characters do would be received, fairly or unfairly, as an offensive stereotype. So I honestly don't think ATWT has too much to be ashamed about on how it handled its gay characters *for the times they were respectively written*. They didn't write anything outwardly offensive (like AMC's Bianca constant victimization) OR fall too far in the other excess of becoming extremely preachy (like OLTL). Luke and his loves were mostly boring but Luke was boring and the show was pretty bad by the time he became a major character so in a way the fact he was an average character was a small victory in itself. And boring as he was, he still managed to be one of the few "newer" characters that I wish I had seen what had happened to them over the course of the 11 years since.

Well, I am not entirely there. Peter was unlikeable for sure and it is absolutely true he never was given enough layers to justify bringing him back after being evil - contrarily to the way they managed to keep Kimberly around for instance. But JW, irritating as his acting ticks can be, had great chemistry with a lot of people and the Michael/Peter dynamic was one of the rare bright spots of the later seasons for me. Howeer I believe that Amanda getting together with him after he tried to kill her, no matter the excuses or how much time had gone, was out-of-character for her. Early Amanda doesn't forgive, let alone that kind of stuff. I didn't think Peter was necessarily the downfall of the show but I do think it was the beginning of turning Amanda into something... different than she initially was. She had managed to be the core of the show while being a bitch and she had managed to have a lot of rooting value while being a bitch. It is unfortunate the writers didn't trust her to continue carrying the show without softening her (writers make that mistake often; see Days' Sami) and turning her into a romantic heroine and a victim. The focus should have stayed the other way around: not as a protagonist with an edge but as an antagonist with rooting value. Yes! But it would have been even fine not even going to that trouble and just showing him landing in... Atlanta. Not even saying a word about Allison. But fans of the show would have gone Hmmmm and that would have been enough to give a bit of comfort to the fandom. I know Melrose Place was never known to go for the subtle route but watching the cool trailer for the incredibly disappointing series finale underscores how much they screwed the pooch by not using the enormous library of plots and characters they had to at least give fans just a bit of satisfaction.

While we will agree to disagree on whether the writers intentionally or not stopped writing for the OGs, I 1000% agree with the above sentiment. That Billy walked in the sunset with Jennifer of all people, a relationship noone cared about, seems particularly insulting. Even if they couldn't get CTS to do a cameo by then, they could have simply written that he was "joining her" in Atlanta and leave it to the audience's imagination to root for them to get together. We got CTS for the finale... how did they not even nod to it for early fans is just puzzling. Such easy fanservice. But Billy is the perfect example of why I stick by my opinion that the writers had gotten bored and stuck with the OGs: while the very early Sam/Billy stuff was alright IMO, the dreck that was their marriage lasted incredibly longer than the runoff to his departure. Similarly, Sydney's storyline drought lasted an entire season long - until the better late Craig stuff that was clearly intended to tee up her departure, ironically. I could go on. Of course, your reply could be that if the writers didn't know what to do with the OGs, they should have changed *the writers* rather than the characters and I'd agree! It is not like it would have been impossible to give them fun stuff to do. But something had to give by that point because a show can't run on eight cylinders for three seasons in a row before the engine starts to hurt.

Maybe I am misguided but Knots Landing seems to be a rare primetime show where groups of cast members still seem to meet regularly. CmC and BD on one hand and of course the three ladies (DM, JvA, ML) seem to hang out quite often for people who haven't worked together in thirty years. It is nice to see.

That's the key moment the show lost its balance for sure although I personally still very much enjoyed S5/6 contrarily to a lot of fans. Only S7 was a chore for me to sit through and only my love for Jamie Luner made it fun at times (although I believe Lexi was SO much more interesting when she was written as complicated in her first season than as simply the later-times relentlessly-bitchy antagonist against Amanda which felt like a poor attempt at reproducing Savannah's Peyton). Anyhow I disagree with your point inasmuch I actually don't think the producers really knew what to do with the OGs anymore by the time most of them walked so I seriously doubt hanging on to them would have done much good. They clearly hadn't known what to do with Sydney for at least an entire season - LL is so brilliant that she made it work but she was reduced to being comic relief rather than the layered character she initially was. As others have said, that Allison/Jake pairing just didn't work and stayed stuck in neutral for most of its run. They hadn't known what to do with Matt, well, his entire time on the show. And the Billy/Sam/Jennifer triangle lasted longer than most relationships in the early seasons. I think the point is best proven by Jane's later return. I loved Jane and JB but honestly did anything interesting happen to her after she came back? It was nice to have her on but the show didn't get better for having her back. I think they just had exhausted the amount of material they could - several personality changes included - and while the show would have been more comforting had it been mediocre but with familiar characters rather than mediocre with unknowns, it would still have been mediocre. I think ultimately the show's problem was it treated its first few seasons as a sprint - and definitely won that - but that wasn't sustainable.

I know neither of these folks personally and it could very well be that he is horrible but I have been around long enough to know former romantic partners are very very rarely the best witness of someone's character. Breakups can warp people's perceptions of people and interpretation of events that until then were not problematic. Take the gossip with a grain of salt, me says. Anybody who knows a divorced couple knows as much.

Color me three. I like CH and Lindsay very much. It is unfortunate that the character's immediate family was mostly unpopular performers and characters because it didn't give HER enough grounding in Llanview to survive as a character in the long-run but she had a great run when she was there.

To be fair, Marty's butt is *literally* how he got the role. And we shall leave it at that.

All I remember from that era of male-butt-showing on butt was Mark Collier's Mike on ATWT.

I liked Katie and Simon well enough but the entire Lily/Simon love affair they started with just never rang true to me for reasons that shall remain unexpressed out of respect for Martha Byrne.

There is an implied read in here lol

No need to apologize at all; it is on me that I took it to mean more than what you were saying. I am not going to lie: I love BTS gossip and I was excited at the thought since she *did* get screwed over which was doubly weird considering she had also a primetime career so you would have thought they'd try to capitalize on it. But she is a pro so you're right. She probably wouldn't.

Both your and the post a month ago had given me the impression there was more explicit knowledge that she would have harsh things to say. I mean, the way they treated her was BS but so was other veterans and it wasn't speculated other veterans would "spill T". So I thought I had missed some fiery interview or something and I was interested. If it is just speculation based on the fact they didn't treat her very well, then: indeed they didn't but I hope we get to hear in an interview, spilling T or just sharing her experience like many of the other actors have, including some that were mistreated by TPTB over the years. She is a wonderful actress.