prefab1

2 hours ago, AbcNbc247 said:

There definitely should have been more people. If there hadn't been an explosion, poor Will would have had no one to dance with at the reception lol

I mean, obviously Will would have slow danced with Ben. To "Cupid's Chokehold." 

This is going to sound mean, but I feel like the show is clearing out some of the dead wood. Characters like Eric, Hope, and Rafe have been taking up a lot of airtime for years, but the show has labored to write interesting storylines for them, because the characters themselves are a little stolid. There are plenty of characters on the canvas who behave in more dynamic, unpredictable ways and can generate drama through their own character flaws and conflicts. 

3 hours ago, Riverdalefan1 said:

Is it just me, but I don’t find Julie likeable, she annoys me so much lol

I actually love how "unlikeable" the show makes Julie. It would have been so easy to sweeten the character up and turn her into a kind of Alice clone. But the way they write Julie, you can absolutely believe this is the same character who, in the show's first episode, was arrested for trying to shoplift a mink coat. 

5 minutes ago, victoria foxton said:

Oh Wow! Bland under developed Eric is being shown the door too. No big loss there.  He always sucked all the bitchiness out of Nicole. I do wonder when the dust is settled. Who will remain?

I wonder who they'll pair Nicole with. Lucas and Brady might each make sense. 

1 hour ago, DramatistDreamer said:

Stunt casting clearly began in the immediate aftermath of the OJ trial because until then, I'd never really heard of soaps just bringing in a character for a long run just for the sake of bringing the actor/actress on board without a plan for story.  That's not the way it's supposed to work.

 I think it depends on what you consider "stunt casting." For instance, when One Life to Live poached George Reinholt and Jacqueline Courtney in 1975, that was a kind of stunt casting. And, speaking of another GL character that didn't quite work, Jane Elliot's Carrie might be viewed as stunt casting, given that she'd just played a very popular character on the #1 soap (and GL's timeslot competitor).

Relationship goals: find a man who looks at you the way Will looks at Ben. (What do you mean, those two aren't the ones getting married this week?)

I actually liked that the short talk with Marlena didn't automatically erase all of Ben's fears and doubts from his head. He murdered several innocent people, so he really should be haunted by that. 

I just wish the show had spent more time in the past few months showing us this tortured part of Ben's psyche--his fears that he's not good enough for Ciara and that he might someday "snap" and hurt her. That would go a long way toward humanizing the character and giving him psychological depth beyond the "reformed bad boy" sex object.

45 minutes ago, Darn said:

It's because he's short. I will die on this hill.

I think you're right. Bryan Dattilo doesn't fit the producers' romance-novel inspired vision of what a male romantic lead might look like. It's a shame, because he's aged very well and often generates a lot of chemistry with his female co-stars. When he had scenes with Nicole last week, she actually came alive, and there was some great banter between them. (Unlike with Greg Vaughan, who has the "soap hunk" look, but tends to suck the life out of his romantic scene partners). 

4 hours ago, AlexElizabeth said:

I know we're in the middle of all these weddings, but it's weird how characters like Sarah and Xander just totally disappear for a bit.

Or Brady, who just ran off with Kristin a couple weeks ago. It's pretty funny that no one's commented on his absence yet, not even in an offhanded, "Wasn't Brady supposed to be at his stepbrother's wedding?" or "Who's running Titan?" kind of way. 

23 minutes ago, titan1978 said:

That was how I felt with Jacob Young.  Here we had an attractive, more sensitive leaning young male lead and they replaced him with someone that looked like a model and did not have a good handle on the character.  I think he grew a lot as an actor by the time he left and certainly on AMC and his return to B&B, but not on GH, especially once the Nikolas recast happened. They were awful together.

 

Oh god, Jacob Young! I never saw the end of his run on GH--the constant mob stories and Natalia Livingston finally drove me away--but when he started, he was incredibly wooden. The best thing I could say about his performance is that he convincingly played a man who had been brainwashed. 

57 minutes ago, katie_9918 said:

I’m not sure why, but I never got over JJ’s Lucky treating his mother like garbage and the pleasure he took in his cruelty. I was happy to see him go because I could never like him after that. 
 

The recasts (but especially Greg Vaughan) made me not want the character to die for real in another fire and I was pissed when JJ came back only to almost immediately level another misogynistic, self-righteous nasty little diatribe at yet another woman he was supposed to care about (granted, Elizabeth deserved his anger more than Laura did, but he was still a worthless prick in those scenes just like his half-brother was).

 

Granted, I wasn't watching much during the Greg Vaughan years, but I just could not accept him as Lucky. He looked nothing like the original Lucky, and his personality was totally different as well. (Didn't Lucky suddenly decide to become a cop when GV was playing him?) JJ might have often played Lucky as a sanctimonious prick, but at least that was in keeping with the very distinct character we'd seen grow up onscreen in the 1990s, who got suddenly replaced by this bland "soap hunk" pod-person. (It's like if GH decided to recast Robin with Chrishelle Strause). 

I think this is one of the things that's killing soaps: fans demand to see "legacy children" of "core families" onscreen, and so producers trot out these periodic recasts, but put very little care into casting choices or character consistency. 

24 minutes ago, AbcNbc247 said:

Love them or hate them, they really provided a lot of buzz for the show. If they had been written better, I'd probably like them.

Agreed. The two actors have a lot of chemistry, but if the show wanted to present RSW as a romantic lead, they should have done a better job coming up with an excuse for his serial killer storyline. It could have been anything from a brain tumor to "Clyde brainwashed him," and it would have been better than the half-hearted "recovery" story we got.

Now Ciara just looks like a naive, deluded young woman who believes that her love has "redeemed" this violent, dangerous man. And if Days wanted to lean into the psychological realism of that, it would be an interesting story to tell. But they clearly have no interest in realism, instead selling Cin as a fairytale romance. And it doesn't really work--Ben's murders are just too close to reality for many viewers to suspend their disbelief and buy into the fairytale. Maybe if he'd been a vampire instead of a serial killer...

5 hours ago, te. said:

Imagine how exciting this wedding would be if it was for a couple we all gave a [!@#$%^&*] about?

The thing about Ben/Ciara is that the audience does have strong feelings about them (unlike, say, Eli and Lani). It's just that about half those viewers are hate-watching Ben/Ciara. So I think this is a pretty brilliant way to handle such a divisive couple's wedding, because half of the audience will be rooting for the bomb. 

2 hours ago, janea4old said:

 

I get so tired of hearing comments that women are exhausting, hysterical, unhinged, cray ... because they speak up.

I don't know Rowell personally, but from her many social media media posts, I get the sense that she's both a tireless campaigner for social justice who's done important work calling out institutional racism in the soap industry AND a relentless egomaniac. I mean, her posts contain more "I"s than a Roman arithmetic textbook. 

I think that's probably true of a lot of the divas we enjoy watching at a safe distance. If we had to regularly interact with them closely in person, it would be exhausting, because the diva would suck up all the oxygen in the room, leaving none for us. 

34 minutes ago, Neil Johnson said:

 

Didn't Don Stewart go off script and give some rambling speech at the party?  And then they had to severely edit his appearance?  I remember hearing this back in '97.  Does anyone else remember anything about him doing something off-the-wall that had to be edited out?   

How funny! I'd never heard that. I wonder if the show was thinking about bringing Mike back (as they did for so many of the characters who came back for the reunion, like Phillip and Harley). They definitely did seem to be reinvesting in the Bauer family around that time, giving Rick and Abby a lot of story, as well as Rebecca Budig's Michelle, then bringing on Mary Stuart as the long-absent Meta and bringing back Robert Gentry, who'd last played Ed about 30 years earlier. 

On 7/12/2020 at 1:32 AM, BillBauer said:

 

 

Not bringing Mike and Hope back NEVER made sense.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I just wanted to point out that GL actually did bring Mike (and Don Stewart) back very briefly in 1997, for the 60th anniversary. You can see him around the middle of this clip, interacting with Rick, Meta, Ross, and Blake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBLINo71kLA