FrenchBug82

I don't know whether I have a specific point at which I knew the show was going downhill. But I know the point at which I lost my connection to it - I keep watching and I have enjoyed storylines since but I do not defend it anymore. After years of building up Brooke/Thorne - pairing that I understand not everyone enjoyed but that I was fond of - with a LOT of character destruction on that path, they broke them up in one week. ONE WEEK. Three years worth of storyline done in a number of episodes I can count on one hand. Everything is fine then Thorne overhears a conversation one day, confronts Brooke the next. And boom they are done. After all of this. All the drama, the build-up. Macy killed and all. That felt like both a betrayal to those who had liked the pairing for it to be discarded so abruptly and felt like such an inacceptable way to present material to the audience, period. If he wanted to break them, write a proper story, a proper breakdown of the marriage. Heck, there'd be a very in-character way to solve this: Brooke losing interest once she had Thorne and there was no threat and the marriage frays because of the lack of "challenge" that Brooke always seemed to thrive on. It could have been interesting and help explore Brooke's psyche. But nope. ONE WEEK. They got us invested in something but another idea popped in his head and they were ready to discard years worth of material without warning and not willing to put any effort in the U-Turn. So I still watch and enjoy stuff. I don't like people say they hope the show gets cancelled. I'd be sad if it did and I am not losing hope some good stuff can come out of it if someone starts to tell Bell no. But that's around the time I shed any dillusions I could be a real passionate fan of the show like I had been at times in the 90s.

The article I link to above has just this line "Dane has been replaced in the show after some disagreements with the producers" Of course "disagreements" does a lot of work here and could mean a lot, particularly coming from Dane's then-girlfriend.

Alan probably did. "Oh no, something remotely controversial might be said!"

Your theory definitely makes a LOT more sense. Three years is definitely more standard for a contract for one, and on the flip side a one-year extension - or rather eight more months extra aka two months of extra SB for one month gone - seems reasonable enough. Because I am a suspicious Suzy by nature I wonder if there isn't a personal reason for her to fudge the dates and obligations in her contract for reasons unknown to us (maybe because of her relation with Dane Witherspoon) rather than simply "forgetting" but it is true that, OMG, all these events are thirty-freakin'-five years old so she could just be confused. UPDATE: So I did some digging and in an article published in 1986 she says that she has a three-year contract that ends in Summer 1987. http://santabarbara-online.com/articleRWright-DWitherspoon2.htm UPDATE 2: I also found this 1987 Interview from a magazine called Interview and while it wasn't a secret she wasn't happy and she wasn't hiding it, there are still pretty uncool things to say, especially while still on the show: “People who never see soaps—those with nine-to-five jobs—well, they ain’t missing a damn thing. I tell you, being on a soap is the hardest work, and it gets so old. Get on your mark, get in the light, don’t turn too far upstage—that’s all it is. It’s melodrama, it’s suck, it’s puke, it’s ughhhhh. Plus, you have to memorize 40 pages of script a night. Right now I’m really champing at the bit to leave, to do another movie, so that I can act again. In nine months my contract is up—I’ll be a free bird. Free to go to a place that’s been calling me for a long time—Brazil. It’s the center of the world, you know, a spiritual center. It’s where all the gurus are—the healers. After three years on a soap, I could use one.” Yikes.

Yeah American network executives have not believed in daytime soaps as a genre for twenty years. I think their beliefs about why the genre has declined here are very offbase: in other countries like the UK or NZ or France (France didn't have ANY daytime soap fifteen years ago and now has four) soaps are doing very well and it is not like things like the Internet or attention span of viewers is different there from here. The differences are in tones and in content (a lot more socially progressive in any of these shows) and what time of the day they air - all of them air in late afternoon, early evening over there. But I think the contempt of Hollywood for soaps means it is unlikely they will take a chance at trying to revive the genre barring an executive who has a personal interest in it.

So many culprits there. -The writers first and foremost who fail to understand that a character that can be funny DOES not have to be merely comic relief, particularly when it has a layered relationships with many characters, a lot of history and a good actor. - Tuc Watkins who, I am sorry to say, just phoned it in and let the camp take over even though he can act. He clearly was written as a buffoon but there was stuff he could have played understated and he chose to amp it up instead. Was he over it and just cashing the check? - Robin Strasser who is a fantastic dramatic actress but who cannot do comedy. As her stints on Passions and Days showed, she just thinks comedy is over-the-top and broad. And since they were written as a twofer, TW kept up with her instead of, again, trying to rein it in since David should not have been the "straight man" (comedy terminology obviously, not the other kind) in that dynamic. But when you have camp interacting with camp, you end up with the disaster of these last few years. - And finally the soap press. Boy did they love the "shenanigans". But in the small world of NY soaps and publishing I bet a lot of that was about personal friendships. And instead of calling them out, it encouraged them to think the audience loved it A shame really. I hated the retcon of Bo as his father but if they were going to go there, so much more could have been, considering what had happened between David and that family, rather than turn it into an odd couple comedy show.

It is one of those small things that show how deeply conservative (not in a political sense) American soaps are, as we had discussed earlier around gay relationships. Part of it is because its audience is probably more conservative than the US at large or that their similar counterparts abroad where the demographic discrepancy isn't as pronounced. But as always with these things, there is a bit of chicken and egg dilemna: American soaps get a somewhat conservative flavor on social issues (from marriage being the goal to discomfort with gay sexuality to women with abortion being "punished" in some way to the dreadful way race topics and people of color are tackled in soaps) because their audience is somewhat more conservative. But as the audience shrinks, its audience becomes more and more reliant on those conservative viewers because they are eskewing more modern stories that could attract different audience and new generations. And the more their remaining audience relies on them, the more they have to stick to those stories and the less attractive to any potential audience they become. It is a self-fulfilling spiral of decline. I have always said there is plenty of room for a show that would intentionally take the risk to break out of the pack and be bold and push the envelope on social issues and commentary.

I wouldn't put money down on it but I think one of the first characters they made that mistake with - at least in my memory - was Y&R's Victoria back in 1990. When they SoRased her her FIRST story - while still a teenager - was her getting obsessed with *marrying* Ryan. That was the first of what you describe: not just erasing the normal steps of young adulthood by giving people jobs right away (see current YR Kyle being somehow in position to be CEO of Jabot that it took decades for his father to arrive at) but also making them marry and have babies right away. There was no need to introduce marriage into the Ryan/Victoria story to make it work. Young teenage girl gets infatuated with older man is a perfectly fine story to tell and the conflicts with VICTOR being her father write themselves. B&B did the same with the first of their "legacy children" to be SoRaSed with Rick in 1997 and BOOM he dates his babysitter, gets her pregnant and marries her while still in his teens by the show's math. I can accept young characters getting more dramatic stories than real-life young people because, well, it is a soap but I agree with you that giving the same adult beat to their stories as other characters lessen the connection we have with them. American soaps rarely get to hang on to the same actors who grew up on the show (Starr and Robin being the exceptions I can think of) the way British soaps do - which is brilliant for them - but they could at least fuel the illusion we know those characters by making them go through the motions even after they recast.

That's exactly why it is maddening to see them kill off legacy characters that could fuel story for decades WITH ties to existing families.

Now that you say it it does read that way. I thought it read a bit off, even abrupt at times, but this makes more sense as an explanation. That might also explain the confusion around how Elaine and Paula "acted". The phrasing is probably a translation issue.

It is ironic that she would say that about the two actresses that, outside of Eddie Cibrian for other reasons, probably had the best career outside of Sunset Beach so that's why I was wondering. But it is also true that Harring always looked a little lost to me on the show. But if this had been a better soap that doesn't silo its stories as someone said earlier, she could have been chemistry-tested with other actors and thrown into a different more interesting direction than the third wheel of the Gabi story. 1. I mean we saw that Ricardo was indeed angry enough to turn somewhat vengeful but it would have gone against so much of what the character was supposed to be to turn him into a villain. Typical SB plot-driven writing. They couldn't possibly imagine that the triangle story would be more interesting if everyone in it had rooting value: they simply saw Gabi/Antonio as popular so the easy way was to simply turn Ricardo into a villain all of a sudden. 2. It may be because I adore her as a journalist now and she sounds like a great person but I actually liked LG. Granted, Francesca as a character... meh. But I love LG 3. Except for the baby switch that had to involve some long-term planning, I think the lack of story planning was pretty obvious all throughout the show. I guess it takes skills to manage to keep that many balls in the air by bluffing for so long but it still showed. 5. I think there was a part of the audience that liked Amy and Brad as comic relief. I just couldn't buy Sean as a center of female attention at all, Richards money or not, so this all was lost on me. 6. I am going to defend Tomlin here and simply say that we often underestimate how much BTS shenanigans explain on-screen plot changes we find at first sight crazy. Drawing a line that actors cannot come lobbying the producer for story was probably the right move in terms of cast discipline overall even if it deprived the show of some of what Noone had to offer. I won't name names but other shows should have done the same a long time ago. 7. In very related news, Y&R is indeed known for having the most toxic behind-the-scenes. And the point I make in 6. is one of the ways in which things must be complicated for writers over there.

I was just reading how Gillian Anderson was offered HALF of what producers offered David Duchovny for the revival of X-Files as recently as 2016. It is so insane that misogyny can be SO ingrained in producers still today so I can't be surprised back then either. I don't doubt HL was the best paid on ML but I wonder how her paycheck stacked up against the best paid men in primetime in the 90s.

No. It is emphatically not the way soaps are usually written and the fact SB was is extremely unsurprising if you watched the show and explains why the writing wasn't ... good. I find a lot of her answer disingenuous (she doesn't remember anything that was rejected? Gimme a break) and stilted and sometimes unkind but there are some tidbits in there I found interesting so thanks for sharing. Is she saying this as a criticism of the actresses or of the writing? As in they didn't "act" (have any reaction) or the characters were written to be doing nothing and they realized they were superfluous? I agree. Annie was by far the most interesting central character of the show. And one reason SB failed IMO that the character they SO wanted us to root for and like and who was intended to be the lead just wasn't liked or interesting (Meg). I give them credit that they realized Annie was gold and used her in every storyline they could. That said, if we are talking lead vs supporting, Annie, Meg and Caitlin were definitely leads. I would also put Olivia in there and I actually think Olivia was more of a lead than Caitlin but that may be because I thought her character was more interesting. Gabi started as supporting but moved to lead later on.

Yep there were some really wasted opportunities in that list. Allison never gelled for me either. I would quibble with Will though. I think they did use him smartly for a while. Yeah, making him a child killer was huge risk but they did "rehabilitate" him pretty well and he grew to be an interesting layered character until the Gwen pairing dragged him to, well, nothing. But in itself that Barbara's son and Paul's brother might have a dark side wasn't a bad idea at all and if they had kept it up, there was some long-term potential. And Jesse Lee Soffer was good casting - again if we forget the awful latter years. But they just didn't know how to write good characters for the younger set. And instead of retooling to give a chance to future HW, they sacrificed and killed off many of them.

Yeah I mean it doesn't know much BTS knowledge to know Sydney was used as a supporting comic relief rather than a full integrated part of the cast in Season 4 so I think this version is a lot more plausible. And if she did ask for parity, it has to have been a gamble to either get the negotiations to fail or a Hail Mary to justify staying despite her unhappiness if it somehow succeeded Who's PSM? CPW is another can of beans. Despite not working overall, still had some nuggets of brilliance (Machen Amick's Carrie still on my top three of favorite primetime soap characters) so it was heaps away of "Titans".

I don't know. I have to be honest that while Beverley Mc was one of the best actresses on daytime I never managed to buy her too much in romances, even in Another World and Texas. That wasn't her strength and even the romance with Roger always looked like an arrangement to me more than love. She and Fletcher were kinda cute in that he wasn't taking her s**t. But I am not sure Alex ever worked as a romantic lead with either actresses anyway.

I am very confused about this. The only actresses who could have plausibly expected as much money as HL would be the OGs and of them only Sydney was killed off. And Laura Leighton was certainly one of the best things to come off of the show but I seriously doubt she would have demanded the same salary as HL expecting it to be granted, especially since she was not used very much in her last season. Kimberly/Marcia Cross also was killed off but I don't think MC would have been delusional enough to ask HL money. The only one that could have had a strong case to ask would be CTS since she had been there since the beginning and was a central character but she wasn't killed off. Neither was Josie. So I am confused about this interpretation of the cast goings.

I don't think it had nearly the same impact but it was indeed an extremely idiotic move. Don't kill off younger heritage characters, soaps. That's Soap 101. Ferrin was great but she was, what?, the third sort-of grown-up Jennifer by that time? After the parades of Paul, it wouldn't have been that hard to recast later on if she really wanted out of soaps altogether - Ferrin was not legendary enough to feel irreplaceable.

This is a pretty awesome list you gave us here and very on-target. Great memory you have! I had forgotten 90% of those. This one in particular though is indeed a forever question mark but we know why: Ashley didn't want to know. As far as she was concerned John was her dad, biological or not. And Bill Bell was not shy about memory-holing stories that he was not comfortable having written in the first place, although Ashley parentage came out again during that awful dirty battle for the chairmanship between Jack and Ashley before her last departure.

Are these new? Because releasing a new cast pic of Cady a month before she leaves is... weird? To be entirely fair, the whole "the-person-you-are-dating-is-your-long-lost-relative" story is a pretty old and common staple on soaps. Y&R has done the story many times (Christine actually went pretty far with Scott Grainger before it was revealed). I guess the current porn craze was predicted by soap writers!

This. That mom story (that also wrecked the sister thing with Sydney that I thought was a key relationship) really felt like an afterthought to pad time until Josie B's exit. They knew she had only a handful of episodes to go so they gave her a throwaway story to keep her occupied until she leaves. I am of two minds on this. Her bitterness and crazier antics certainly were out of character but on the other hand, she had been such a doormat until now that I didn't think it was absurd she'd lose her marbles a bit. And since she was a fundamentally good person, she wasn't very good at being bad. But it was in service of bad stories (and the ill-conceived Allison/Jake couple) so it didn't work.

I know we were supposed to root for Ally and Casey but I always liked Cooper/Ally. And I really wish Lisa Peluso had continued acting after AW ended. I don't know if her born-again faith is why she moved on but she really was great.

Especially since by that time Blake had been completely defanged in turn.

See I didn't remember that the timing coincided and I am surprised because I would have been pissed if I remembered. Let me just say that was not a good trade-off LOL I saw recent photos of Buxton and she looks great but yeah indeed it looks like she has moved on from acting.

Chelsea is one example I think about when I am tempted to say an actor or actress sucks because their character is subpar and I bite my tongue. Because it really shows how the magic for a performer sometimes comes from finding the right role and often the writing is to blame (which is true for recasts as well when recast actors get blamed for the writing changing the character rather than their portrayal). KdP is a superb actress but Chelsea was a huge dud. Casting good actors *in the right role* is as important as casting good actors. It is also true, dare I say it, for Kim Zimmer. Reva was hers. I am not sure I was ever impressed by anything else I saw her do.