prefab1

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).

Just wait, they'll probably create a new character for Roger Howarth to play. Like Franco's twin Branco, an annoying soap opera journalist.

Now would be a good time to bring back RH as Todd Manning and have him start flirting with Carly again.

Controversial opinion, but I actually think that GH's male cast isn't that terrible. All the "pets" that have been mentioned (Michael Easton, Roger Howarth, and even Wes Ramsey) are talented actors stuck playing poorly-defined characters in idiotic storylines that too often still fall into the Guza-era trap of assuming that morose and growly = deep.

Yes, I think Labine's GL was the absolute nadir of that show. Even when it got bad at times in the 2000s (like under Conboy/Weston), it was never THAT bad. Labine took the existing problems with the show (the emphasis on the mob and San Cristobel) and actually made them worse, to the point that I found the show almost unrecognizable. And the characters I normally like were written in such a way where they became insufferable (e.g. Reva, the savior of refugees).

Yeah, the show's treatment of Carly is one reason why I haven't watched a whole episode of GH in years. (I normally just catch up with the show via recaps and YouTube clips featuring my favorite characters, who don't include Carly these days). In some ways, I think Carly is a very similar character to Sami on DAYS, except there's no shortage of characters who will call Sami out on her crap, and the writers have a good handle on Sami's many psychological problems. With Carly, it feels like the GH writers want to depict her as a "fierce" heroine, so they sidestep any real engagement with her serious character flaws, which would make the show far more interesting. Some of the blame might go to Laura Wright herself. On Guiding Light, her Cassie was a similarly obnoxious and entitled "heroine" who didn't really gain interesting layers until Wright left and Nicole Forester started playing her.

You're so right! Back in his younger days, Wes Ramsey was genuinely appealing as Sam on GL. It's actually a skill to play a rootable "nice guy"; Josh Swickard (Chase) does it well, but very few of the other younger male actors on GH have been able to project that kind of warmth and personality. That's Wes Ramsey's skill set, and I agree that he could have pulled off a sensitive nice guy character like Lucky really well. But he's completely wrong for Peter, just like the guy who plays Cyrus is completely wrong for that part. It's frustrating, because GH has a lot of the elements to be a great soap, but then someone (maybe Frank Valenti) keeps making these mind-bogglingly bad decisions.

I think the show was supposed to be preempted for some kind of hockey game back in January, but when that got cancelled, the episode order was affected. So the actual "Friday cliffhanger" for last week aired on Thursday, when Rafe discovered Sami in Charlie's apartment. And that was followed up in the "Monday" episode, which aired on Friday, and had a lot of scenes with Rafe interrogating Sami.

I also liked the Abby and Gabi scenes, and I thought that Stacy Haiduk was making some fun acting choices as Kristen-as-Susan and as Susan-as-Kristen (even if it made Lani seem dumber than dirt for not catching onto the disguise). The one part of today's episode that really bothered me was the sentimental stuff between Gwen and Jack; I'm irritated that the show has rushed this important part of their storyline. I feel like there should have been weeks, if not months, of conflict between Gwen and the father who abandoned her.

I think that as fans, we sometimes dwell on the parts of the show that disappointed us and don't give enough credit for the things a show gets right. Case in point: in this whole thread on gay representation in ATWT, I haven't yet seen anyone mention Reid Oliver, who is by far the most interesting gay character I've seen on American soaps. And his relationship with Luke was also the most compelling one I've seen on a US soap, proving to me that Luke (who I'd always found pretty vanilla and whiny, like his mom) could work really well if paired with a character he had actual chemistry with. Of course, the less said about what the show did to Reid in ATWT's final week on the air, the better...