prefab1

Well, this IS Days, so they could mean the 2022 Christmas episode.

I'm not at all invested in the question of whether Ciara marries nu-Theo (who seems to have left all his personality traits behind in Africa). But today's episode worked for me on the level of pure comedy. I genuinely find it very amusing that Ciara, who had been an obnoxious cheerleader for Ben for years, picking fights with people who didn't believe the serial killer had changed, is now equally obnoxious in her hatred for Ben and desire to marry Theo. I've got to give credit to Victoria Konefal for not being afraid to really lean into the least likeable aspects of her character.

I liked Nicole with both EJ and Brady, but I also think she has good chemistry with Rafe. They just need to tone down the schmoopiness in the writing. Ditch the bear. And break up Rafe and Ava, who have no chemistry whatsoever.

I agree that AZ/GV work really well together in dramatic scenes like today's, although I admit I've never felt they had much romantic chemistry together. My big problem with Ericole is that, to put them together (and write around Ari Zucker's various departures and returns) the show ended up giving Nicole all this weepy "woman in peril" material, storylines that really should have been saved for Chloe (because Nadia Bjorlin sells that kind of haplessness a lot better). Thank goodness they're now remembering that Nicole's a schemer who doesn't back down from a fight.

Agreed. I actually hadn't been looking forward to those scenes, because I figured they'd just be a lot of Nicole sobbing and pleading for Eric's forgiveness. But I was pleasantly surprised that she called him out on some of his white savior BS and the ways he neglected her.

Here's one thing I really liked about Monday's episode: a bunch of other characters almost immediately figured out that Sami must have been behind Xander's public confession. I feel like the Sami plots work so much better when she thinks that she's being this stealthy mastermind, but the people who know her can see right through her. More generally, I think this is the perfect confluence of plot-based and character-based storytelling. We're getting all these precisely plotted "A scandalous secret is revealed!" moments, but most of the actions are coming out of the well-established flaws of these characters: Eric's savior complex leads him to neglect his wife, and then Nicole's desperate need for love and attention leads her to cheat with other men, and then Sami's impulsive, vengeful nature and hatred of Nicole leads her to recklessly expose the secret, even though it will lead to mutually-assured destruction as Nicole will inevitably then expose the Sami-Lucas affair. Ron sometimes gets bogged down in really cartoonish plots, but this is the good stuff.

So a well-written soap would take this opportunity to shift the show away from its claustrophobic focus on the Newman and Abbott families, by bringing in more young characters who have connections to other parts of the show's rich history (e.g. Fenmore). God only knows what Y&R will do.

I totally agree, Mitch. I watched the show off and on from 1994, and Peapack Reva is by far my favorite incarnation of the character. That's when Zimmer really showed off what a good actress she was, because she was able to calibrate her performance to suit the grittier, more naturalistic aesthetic of the revamped show. And even though she got plenty of airtime, she wasn't always the lead in every story, and got plenty of scenes that showed she was also a superb supporting actress; younger actresses like Bonnie Dennison (Daisy) and Michelle Ray Smith (Ava) had some of their best scenes opposite her. My least favorite Reva era, on the other hand, has to be everything from the clone story through the end of the Rauch era. I remember it being particularly bad when Claire Labine was writing. Reva was embroiled in a lot of the San Cristobel plots, and was portrayed in a saintly light, usually in an insufferable double act with Laura Wright's Cassie. I vaguely recall one storyline where she became the savior of some boat people and then another (which may have been from the same storyline) where she and Cassie disguised themselves as strippers to get dirt on sex trafficking in San Cristobel. Beyond awful.

Galen in a terrible "cowboy' accent.

Looks like Galen Gering has his Emmy reel for next year sorted out.

Wow, Mick Hazen has really aged well! I wonder if he'd ever be interested in doing another soap. He'd be a perfect JJ recast on DAYS if Casey Moss wasn't interested in returning.

Even that kind of "bombshell revelation" has been overdone in recent years. It won't have a real impact on the audience unless you surround that revelation with interesting characters and strong dialogue writing. If we've got a shock "who's the daddy" reveal, and both candidates are similarly bland hunks who just stepped off the assembly line at the Frank Valentini underwear model factory, no one will care very much. I think that JFP and a number of other veteran producers have a hard time wrapping their heads around this, because they came up in the business at a time when success was largely measured by sweeps ratings. If you could do three stunts a year and boost ratings in February, May, and November, you were golden. But now that the overall audience for broadcast TV has dwindled, and viewers have thousands more entertainment options, that model is largely obsolete. You need to produce a show that will get viewers tuning in every day, and the best way to do that is to craft characters that we care about and whose motivations we understand.

Interesting! Then I wonder who wanted Stuart Damon off the show. Did JFP think that killing off Alan would make for a ratings-boosting sweeps event? Or was this a Frons directive?

Another thing I loved about Damon's Alan is that he was one of the few characters who was allowed to really call Sonny and the mob crew out on their BS. Some of his scenes with the post-accident Jason were just dynamite.

I knew he was in poor health, but this is such sad news. I've been watching some old Alan and Monica clips, and they really did have a unique chemistry. They might just be the best dysfunctional soap couple of all time.

This reminds me--I came across this clip from the JFP-era of GL a few days ago, and I thought it was absolutely riveting, even though it deals with fairly minor plot points (e.g. I couldn't care less whether Alex attended Nick and Mindy's wedding). You don't see many scenes like this one on soaps today, because only a few of them bother to write their characters with this degree of complexity; you really get to see a ton of facets of Vanessa's character in this four-minute scene, and Maeve Kincaid plays it for all it's worth.

I totally agree with you, Mitch. Ideally a soap should have a balance of suspense--the factor that keeps you tuning in tomorrow to see what happens next--and character-based scenes, the factor that keeps you tuning in each day to see the more mundane interactions between your favorite characters. All in all, I think GL did a pretty good job of balancing the two modes of soap opera during JFP's run. I started watching GL during the later part of her run, which I know a lot of viewers hated. It was actually the Matt and Vanessa story in the summer of 1994 that got me hooked, and I remember loving later outlandish suspense plots like Brent/Marian, but I also loved watching the everyday interactions between complex characters like Holly, Roger, Jenna, Dinah, Bridget, and Vanessa.

I'm slowly getting back into the habit of watching DAYS everyday, and I really liked Monday's episode. It had a nice balance of scenes that moved the plot forward (e.g. all the Dimera Enterprises intrigue) and well-written funny scenes that weren't so plot focused, but involved characters talking about their feelings (Lucas and Sami, Paulina and Abe, Eli teasing Rafe about Nicole and the bear). I'm also interested to see where this tension between Chad and EJ leads, and I love how they're using Tony more in this mix. The only parts for me that didn't work involved Ava. I feel like they've defanged Ava too much, too soon. DAYS is a little too in love with this kind of "bad girl gets reformed by the love of a good man" plot, and the "bad girl" often loses all the characteristics that made her interesting in the first place, turning her into a kind of Stepford wife. (Seriously, what does Ava even do all day? Just cook for Rafe?) This happened with Nicole, back when they last paired her with Eric, but I'm relieved she's finally got her edge back. Now they just need to do the same for Ava. Maybe Paulina can hire her to do some shady stuff to the businesses in Horton town square.

I was talking about Paige, who also turned out to be Rafe's half-sister (although I think we only discovered that after she was dead).

Boy, the people in Salem are pretty forgiving. I couldn't stop laughing when police chief Rafe gave supportive relationship counseling to the serial killer who murdered his sister. I'm tuning in again this week after taking a few months off, so I'm not sure how I feel about this whole Tripp-Allie-Chanel storyline. (I still like the actress playing Allie a lot, but I'm not sure if she's got much chemistry with either of them). I do like the way the show is at least trying to engage with issues of progressive sexual and gender politics, even if the dialogue is a little clunky. And I also like that they've got James Reynolds in a love story that's getting plenty of airtime; I can't think of many TV shows (or movies) that would treat a 74-year-old black man as a romantic lead in that way.

Oh, so you've seen Friday's episode already?

Oh, good point! But maybe that could be something that Lily or Amanda would bring up in her defense, and maybe that could lead to a more nuanced discussion of various forms of prejudice and stereotyping. I'll admit I'm not a very frequent viewer of Y&R these days, but it just strikes me that as the most realistic (relatively speaking) of the soaps currently on the air, they'd actually be well-positioned to write stories that are relevant to current discussions concerning race and class. And it would be a way to generate some actual character-driven drama.

I think the most frustrating thing is that if the show just did a little more to delve into the things that viewers notice, like Lily's tendency to date white men, it could make for so much more interesting stories and compelling dramatic conflict. For instance, here's an idea I literally came up with in 10 minutes: Let's say that a younger darker-skinned black woman from a working class background (more like Lily's mother Dru) comes to town and applies for a job at Chancellor Communications. But Lily decides not to hire her because she thinks the young woman doesn't fit the "classy" image of ChanceCo. (For added drama, this young woman could even be a previously unmentioned Barber cousin). And when this young woman finds out that Lily was the one who blocked her hiring, she goes off on Lily, talking about internalized racism and colorism, bringing up Lily's history of exclusively dating white men, and so forth. And then Lily gets angry, and she's complaining to Devon about what this young woman said to her (like "Can you believe she thinks I'm a racist?") but then Devon calmly suggests that this young woman might have a point about Lily's internalized biases. And so on...

I think that with Isabel Durant on DAYS, the blandness and the accent work probably go hand in hand. I've noticed that a lot of Australian actors can be very charismatic in their native accents but seem flat when asked to do American accents, because they're so focused on flattening their natural inflections (see, for instance, Sam Worthington or Eric Bana).

I could be wrong on this, but I always thought that P&G kept Goutman in the EP position so long because he was good at staying within budget. He didn't break the show like John Conboy did over at GL with his massive cost overruns, and Goutman's ATWT never had to resort to the same extreme cost-cutting measures as Ellen Wheeler's GL. (That's not entirely a good thing, because the last few years of ATWT were sometimes pretty boring and might have actually been improved by having the actors deliver their lines in a snowy field in New Jersey).