prefab1

I hope not! This is the best use of Cameron Mathison I've seen since the Ryan/Gillian era of AMC. Smarmy, self-serving politician is really the role that he was born to play, and I hope they keep him around for a long time as a natural antagonist for Jason, Sonny, Carly, Nina, and the Qs.

You've really pinpointed one of my major problems with DAYS these days. Of course, all the soaps seem to struggle with this; it's only just now, after they've each been on the show for 5 years, that Sasha and Willow on GH have stopped being interchangeable. But I feel like DAYS used to be much better at infusing each character with an individual voice, back when the Cullitons used to write a lot of the daily scripts. I think at this point they could benefit from bringing back some of their female characters who really do have more distinctive personalities, like Melanie or Chloe or even Gwen.

Agreed, although I will say those Joss/Brennan scenes today might have worked for me if Charles Mesure was still in the role. He had a little twinkle in his eye that suggested he had a genuine soft spot for Joss and Carly. Chris McKenna, on the other hand, seems fundamentally shifty-eyed and untrustworthy, and I'm just counting down the weeks until he and his French assistant lady close down the Port Charles WSB branch and close the book on this whole silly storyline.

I think I'm enjoying GH right now a lot more than most of you are, especially now that Cyrus is dead. I don't think I've ever liked any of the performances Jeff Kober gave on the show, although I'll admit he wasn't bad in his final scenes with Elizabeth. However, even I was a little confused and disappointed that after what seemed like months of building to a "Who Killed Cyrus?" mystery, we actually see Joss shoot and kill him. This just seems like almost Josh Griffith-level squandering the dramatic potential of a situation.

Maybe that's what all the "Brad's been working out" dialogue last week is leading up to...

Having endured a year of Clone Reva, I had no problem coping with Geriatric Pregnancy Reva. But honestly it must have been tough for the writers to keep coming up with frontburner storylines for Reva, who'd already been through all the soap cliches: amnesia, cancer, long-lost child (twice). That said, I actually can think of a story I wish they'd done in their later years: Reva and Josh run against each other for mayor. It might have been a fun new spin on the Reva-Josh conflict, and we could have gotten juicy scenes of their mutual friends and family members having to pick sides on who to support.

I haven't read Zimmer's book, but I wonder if she also resented the fact that in the Peapack years she often appeared as a supporting character in other people's storylines (for instance, as a supportive grandma in Daisy's abortion storyline). As you say, Zimmer was actually great in this role and turned in some captivating naturalistic performances. It's a smart way to use a star whose guarantee says they have to appear 3 days a week, much better than the Rauch era which came up with increasingly ludicrous plot-driven storylines to keep Reva front and center. And Zimmer showed why she won all those Emmys by slipping seamlessly into those supporting roles and really connecting with her younger scene partners, boosting their performances as well. It's a talent I wish some other overexposed soap actors who appear in 150+ episodes a year (cough, Maurice Bernard) shared.

Right!? Mike is looking like a snack, while also being a good listener (which is equally sexy in its way). The other thing that strikes me as really stupid about this storyline is that it ends up killing off two of the only long-term characters who might organically cause conflict. You want to keep at least some schemers and your psychologically unbalanced characters on the canvas. And if I'm not mistaken, they killed Charlotte off in August 1973 and Kit in February 1974, making these both sweeps stunts. And it reminds me of the sweeps stunts General Hospital did in the 2000s, where they got some momentary thrills from killing off important characters, but then were left with long-term holes on the canvas they couldn't repair.

I don't know if they actually raised viewership (although the Emmy wins might have kept the show on the air a couple years longer). But I can see how the Inside the Light eps would be a great entry point for a non-viewer or even a reentry point for a lapsed viewer. They usually concentrated on one focal character, rather than jumping back and forth between storylines. So viewers would have fewer of the "What's going on? Why does this matter? Who are all these people?" questions I have when tuning into new soaps (or old ones I haven't watched for a few years).

The Inside the Light episodes are, I think, a great example of both the strengths and weaknesses of Wheeler's experimental approach. I loved a lot of those episodes, and I wasn't the only one, since reels from those episodes helped Guiding Light win a lot of Emmys in the early years of Wheeler's tenure. But they also often wreaked havoc on the show's day-to-day plotting, as character-based story arcs that might normally play out over weeks (and might keep viewers tuning in tomorrow) instead got compressed into a single episode.

For that matter, the '66 episodes online seem smart and youthful in a way that the '73 episodes do not. Even in the February 73 episode, which is considerably better than the July and August ones, the characters are extremely dour, with long pauses in their speech as though they were so depressed they could barely get the words out. Okay, Papa Bauer just died, so they have an excuse. But they have the same depressive affect in the Summer 73 episodes, only there the writing is much worse, and suddenly everyone is narrating their inner thoughts in voiceover. (By then, Soderberg and Sommer had left, and our old pal James Lipton had taken over as co-head writer, along with James Gentile and Robert Cenedella). We often talk about GL's lows in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but these Summer 73 episodes show that the 1970s shouldn't get a free pass. Even a story that sounds good on paper, like Kit Vested's descent into madness, turns out to be dramatically inert on screen, mainly due to poor dialogue writing, directing, and acting choices. The idea that three women at once would be (literally) crazy for Anthony Call's Dr. Joe Werner, who has all the sexual charisma of a block of wood onscreen, is at least as ludicrous as Reva time-traveling through paintings.

All this talk about Dennis Cooney got me curious, and I found a great interview Lydia Hirsch did with him in 1976 in which he talks critically about some of the edgier storylines ATWT were afraid to pursue in the early 1970s.

Seeing the year's episode count leaders laid out like that, it's clear that GH has arguably the strongest lineup of 40+ actresses on daytime, and those actresses are used regularly as they should be. But it's also clear that the show has some of the least appealing male leads on daytime. The men appearing in 2 or more episodes a week are the worn-out Maurice Bernard and Steve Burton, the dour and hangdog Chad Duell and Dominic Zamprogna, and Cameron Mathison in a sleazeball role. I think there are men in that cast who are capable of being fun and sexy male leads, including Josh Kelly, Rick Hearst, and Charles Mesure. I just hope that those guys get more airtime in the upcoming year, because it would really improve the show if our strong female leads had some equally compelling actors to play against.

I can see what they're going for with Michael's moping and inaction; it's just the wrong decision. In many ways, it's in character, as Michael has often defined himself as the peacemaker of the family, in opposition to his vengeful parents, Carly and Sonny. And it makes sense that he doesn't want to put the kids through any conflict. So if GH were a character-driven drama, the kind we often say that we want, this would probably be the right creative choice. But the key thing is--GH is NOT a character-driven drama. It's trying to juggle about 50 characters on the canvas, and the scenes are like 30 seconds long. The production choices don't allow for that kind of deep realistic sustained exploration of character psychology. So I totally agree that the show should embrace its plot-driven nature and have Michael go full vengeful psycho on Willow and Drew. It would be fun to watch, which Chad Duell's scenes rarely are.

On paper, Labine would seem like such a good fit for GL, because her best headwriter stints (like on GH) were sterling examples of character-driven writing, and GL's main strength was its deep roster of complex characters. In theory, GL should be a perfect playbox for a character-driven writer, since its lead characters had clear flaws and were often driven to behave in self-destructive ways. So a lot of the conflict that leads to great drama could just emerge organically from their interactions and reactions to ordinary situations. But it seems like the Labines weren't fans of the show and didn't take enough time to really learn about the characters and their motivations; during this era, a lot of the long-running characters seem like 2-D cutouts of themselves. And conflict is often coming from external bad guys, usually affiliated with either the mob of San Cristobel. During that September 2000 episode I shared, Reva is reduced to being an unwitting victim of her new boyfriend Noah and his shady associate. Love her or hate her, Reva is normally a human cyclone of drama, but in this episode she gets nothing to do except be pulled around by the plot machinations. What a waste!

Agreed that 1986 was an awful year for GL, for all the reasons you mentioned. It's also the year that the show went through a head writer change every couple of months, starting off with Pam Long and Jeff Ryder, then Ryder writing solo, then Mary Ryan Munisteri and Ellen Barrett, then Joseph D. Manetta, and finally Manetta and Sheri Anderson. It also feels like the year when the radical decisions they made back in 1983--getting rid of many long-term characters--really came back to bite them, as many of the hot young actors they'd built up as the show's next-generation stars left in 1984 and 1985. At least they got Chris Bernau and Robert Newman back by the end of 1986, but they probably should have brought back even more of the show's early 80s cast rather than bogging us down with duds like Calla.

I had to search the Soap Central recaps, and apparently they stretched this idiotic story out over more than 2 months. The scenes with the Feds come on November 30. Sam was one of the very few memorable characters created around that period. Some of that was down to Wes Ramsey's charisma, and some of that was because Sam was more well-defined than the typical soap teen. I feel like we all knew a guy like Sam in college, the sarcastic know-it-all who's smart, but not quite as smart as he thinks. And of course, the show had little idea what to do with him, so they mostly stuck him in a storyline where he had a crush on Marah but played second fiddle to Tony.

The short-lived "teens get in trouble when Sam burns CDs" storyline starts around 33:00 in this episode. At least they dressed Wes Ramsey in a sleeveless top that shows off his nice arms. As a whole, the episode exhibits a lot of the same problems the show was having in 1986, including a focus on boring newbie characters. Aside from Kim Zimmer, Robert Newman, Jordan Clarke, and Mary Stuart, there's no one here you'd recognize if you stopped watching a couple of years earlier (say, around the time of the clone story). And around this time, they were writing Reva like she was Joan Lunden--a TV host and polished suburban mom--so they weren't exactly playing to Zimmer's strengths.

Not sure if it's lower than 1986, but most of what I've seen from Claire Labine's run in 2000-2001 was pretty darn bad. Not only did she inherit a show that was completely losing its identity with the mob and San Cristobel mess, but she actually made it worse with characters like Mae the cigarette girl and wretched social issues stories about Reva saving refugees and the teens learning why they shouldn't use Napster.

Yeah, and it might have played better in context of the whole episode. I did think the scene I saw improved as it went on, when NLG gave a monologue about holding Sam as a baby in the hospital.

I saw the Alexis scenes GH had posted to their YouTube channel, where she's asking for a blanket because Sam is "cold." And I appreciated what they were trying to do, but it just didn't work at all for me. Maybe if it were a scene from a 1920s melodrama that I was watching onstage, I could suspend my disbelief and just go with it, but as it played out on the screen, I just didn't find it believable enough to be moving, and I was mainly thinking about how this was probably going in NLG's Emmy reel.

So I caught the scenes from yesterday's episode where they're trying to revive Sam, and I understand what people are saying about Van Hansis seeming over-the-top, but I thought it worked with the only-on-soaps dramatic situation of Lucas being the attending physician desperately trying to save his sister's life. I did have a question about Portia, however. Is she supposed to be a bitch, or is Brooke Kerr just playing her that way? The returns of Jonathan Jackson and Ric Hearst brought me back to GH after many years away, so I'm not very familiar with the character. But Portia's responses in that scene seemed so cold and uncompassionate that I couldn't figure out whether it was intentional--and if so, why?

Maybe they should just put Sam in a coma and have her wake up (ideally, played by a different actress) a year from now when they run out of story for Dante and Lulu.

I know soaps regularly let go of an actor in order to free up the budget to hire another actor, but I've rarely seen it depicted onscreen in such a symbolically heavy-handed fashion as it sounds like we'll see on Friday. "Bye, KeMo, we're taking out your liver to pay for Alexa Havins' salary! Er, I mean, we're taking out Sam's liver so that Lulu can live."

Just saw some of the scenes with Holly and Sasha, and taken on their own terms they were quite enjoyable. But this is the kind of "big reveal" that works for a character who's been on the show for 6 months, not for one who's been on the show for 6 years. Knowing that Sasha has been keeping her connection to Holly a secret for all these years certainly makes the character more interesting, but doesn't really square with anything we've seen onscreen. It's like if they suddenly revealed that all these years, Willow has been a spy for the DVX sent to take down the WSB. (Actually, maybe they should go with that idea so that Willow could finally have something interesting to do).