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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?

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).

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...

What about any of the actors who played Craig with Yvonne Perry's Rosanna?

Yes. I've never seen the 1970s episodes where Flannery played Laura, but just the notion of Susan Flannery playing the mom of Melissa Reeves' character has always made me laugh. I can't exactly see the family resemblance! Speaking of the Horton women, I can't imagine Marci Miller's Abby having an affair with EJ or lying about sleeping with Austin.

Whenever I hear about Juan Pablo, I always think of this video. It's hard to forget!

That's the part that's so baffling to me. One actually could make a legitimate case that the late-1970s cast of DAYS was a little worn-out and contained so many middle-aged characters, it just couldn't compete with more youth-oriented soaps like General Hospital. (This was, after all, the time when Guiding Light poached Doug Marland, partly so that he could introduce more young characters). But for some reason, DAYS saw characters like Bob and thought, "Hmmm...can we replace them with characters who are also middle-aged businessmen, only more boring and one-dimensional?"

Agreed that killing off Nick was a short-sighted move, and the show could have benefited from having a "bad" Horton, because it would cause a lot of organic, character-driven conflict, with some Hortons choosing family loyalty over morality. But to the show's credit--and unlike, say, GH, with its litany of dead characters who no one ever talks about anymore--they haven't forgotten about Nick, and his death has fueled years of storyline with the ongoing war between Gabi and Julie.

I'm sure that Quinn Redeker was a magnetic performer, but I feel like everything Alex-related is happening way too fast. How has he become the central character in all these storylines so quickly? Why are all these women suddenly throwing themselves at him? That's just Bad Soap Writing 101, where the writer falls in love with the new character they've introduced, and they decide that all the existing characters on the canvas need to fall in love with them too.

TBH, I've been really bored reading about the various Anderson storylines in these recaps, though I can see how some of them might have played better onscreen, with the various scheming women in that family. But it does seem weird that DAYS wrote out their millionaire industrialist family right at the time when other shows were introducing them (GL's Spauldings, GH's Quartermaines, OLTL's Buchanans, AMC's Cortlandts, etc.). They didn't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the 1980s, did they?

Thanks for the info! I agree it's a shame he didn't do more with John and Lucinda both scheming. Because much later in the show's history, that resulted in one of my all-time favorite ATWT scenes: ah

I haven't seen much from this period of the show's history, but I recently went back and watched a lot of John clips on YouTube because he's one of my favorite ATWT characters. And it just seems weird to me that he was ever paired with Emma or Iva. There's probably no nice way to say this, but neither of them seem like his type. Most of his pairings were with glamorous women like Kim or Lucinda, or pretty young things like Dee. Did Marland really "get" John in the same way he appreciated some of the veteran characters like Kim?

Not gonna lie: this story with Laura the World's Worst Psychologist sounds amazing! Yes, it's an idiot plot like a lot of James Reilly's 1990s storylines were (requiring characters to be significantly dumbed down in service of the plot). But it sounds like all of this would be utterly hilarious to watch (and a lot more fun than the usual "forged antiques" and "forged Anderson company documents" storylines the show was running at the time).