Darn

Why was the first Beth recast so quickly? She was younger and much more glamorous than the actress who replaced her.

What brother throws his sister’s bachelorette party?!

I'll give B&B credit for one thing: consistency in unhealthy obsessions with the love lives of each others relatives. Beautifully shot, the music is exquisite, the sets are enormous but the writing is awful. And the episode is so creepy. Ridge, Thorne and Kristen discussing their parents marriage like they're little kids. Ridge in particular is intensely concerned with his parents marriage. Maybe it's because Ronn Moss can't act but he's talking about the problems in his parents marriage like it's nuclear armament. And then we have the Logan actively encouraging their mother to have an affair with Eric. That's bad enough but then you have them on the kitchen set of the Hogan Family and it's like what twisted sitcom is this??? Naturally every scene with Stephanie is elevated because SF is a force of nature. The end scene is weirdly, wonderfully composed. You'd never see shots like that today.

He's beautiful but he really wasn't a very good actor.

Travis Schuldt was in the season 8 premiere of American Horror Story. Minor role but he's aged exceptionally well into dad territory.

The real start of a classic soap feud, the moment Stephanie first learns of Eric and Brooke's affair. Susan Flannery is magnificent here. I can't believe it took her until 2000 to win an Emmy for this part!

This interview is fascinating. She's claiming that in 1969-70 that a 1/3 of the audience was black and that ABC had the numbers to back this up, although because she didn't have representation she wasn't privy to this. Wasn't there research from the 90s-early 2000s claiming the same thing? Say Erika Slezak had one of the most high powered agents in Hollywood when she was cast, considering who her father was I'm not surprised. Al Freeman made 4 times as much as Ellen Holly on the show. When he joined the show his lawyer negotiated a contract for 100k a year. Says she made less in 1973 than she did in 1969! Wow. Agnes Nixon did her dirty. It took her 5 years to realize that Agnes Nixon wasn't she just the writer of OLTL but the creator and soul owner. Wow. She was really kept out of the loop on the business side of the show. Sounds like most of that ignorance was bore out of fear of losing her job. As someone stuck in the middle, too light to be black, too black to be white, I get it but damn. And wow, just like Victoria Rowell she wrote for the show with no recognition or pay. Also she mentioned that AMC had some big black story when it first started? Did it? I feel like the black presence on AMC started (and ended almost) with Angie and Jesse. What a smart woman. She knows the industry and she KNOWS soap history, she listed other soap stars off like it was nothing. Watch the whole thing. Heartbreaking!

Imagine if instead of bringing on Shaun and his family (I don't remember their family name), they'd have brought on Carla's (they could've given her and Ed more kids, adopted or bio, doesn't matter). It would have been great. Sigh. I know they tried with Joshua and Ed but they didn't really try. And that they didn't get Ellen Holly to come back is such a missed opportunity. Thanks for sharing this. I know what I'm doing for the next hour.

I'd kill to see that Sadie/Carla cliffhanger. The fact that OLTL ended up so incredibly white and insular is a damn shame (I know the show was "diverse" or WHATEVER but I don't think any soap has embraced having a truly diverse cast of characters where people of color feel fully integrated into the story and as important as any of the white characters). My mother tells me that the black audience knew Clara/Carla was black. We're usually good at spotting our people. Was Carla a lighskinned black woman or biracial? Did we ever learn anything about her father?

She may have but the show never did. OLTL and Days have had similarly outlandish stories for their lead heroines and they...worked somehow, for the most part. The stories for Reva are almost universally panned.

And it's wild to me that after the debacle of the clone saga (™ Marvel) they had San Cristobel and THEN Reva jumping through time via a portrait of Olivia. It's absolute insanity to put her character through those high concept stories one after the other and then like someone else said give her realistic stories like cancer and a late in life baby. Other soap leads were given similar stories, Viki for example, but they were usually years apart. Sometimes decades. Reva was thrown into these nonsense stories one after the other. How was that time travel story resolved anyway?

That's clone Reva again lol It's wild that GL went from the realism of Maureen's death to cloning in 4 short years. I don't know how the Josh character recovered from that...he basically created a girl in order to fück her.

EJ Bonilla (Rafe, GL) was on the most recent episode of Insecure. Looking hot af I might add.

What a weird scene. I wonder why they did this. And the contacts on Joy Lenz are super weird.

Thanks. I'm surprised the ratings didn't go up. I think she's just great as Alex. And she seems to be relishing the material.

I can't believe Vincent Irizarry was popular as Lujack or Nick. He's super obnoxious in all the clips I've seen of him. Was Joan Collins stint really not well-received? She's so good as Alexandra, closer to the Beverly McKinsey's Alex than Marj Dusay by far. I wonder why she joined one of the lowest rated soaps, anyone have any idea how much they paid her? Did her casting impact the ratings?

I was watching a series of scenes surrounding Maureen's death in 93 and even then she was matronly. I felt like she was written to be more vivacious than Keifer's portrayal. And after a certain point they stopped trying. The age difference between her and Ross seemed to disappear.

Ah okay. Thanks, I had a feeling it wasn't an out and out affair based on the Maureen/Holly scene I watched earlier. Do you think Blake was diminished by the recast? I'm watching 92 GL and she's a much more interesting character, a real combination of her parents and not nearly as matronly looking as Elizabeth Keifer's version. I always thought she looked too old to believably be Maureen Garrett's daughter.

How many times did Ed cheat on Maureen? I know there was Michelle's mother and Lillian but he slept with Holly too while they were married? What were the circumstances?

I'm sure this has been posted but here is a behind the scenes look at the 80s live episode (the first clip is from Entertainment Tonight, featuring the recently departed Robin Leach). It is exceptionally boring. Hearing the interactions in the control room was more exciting than the entire thing. There wasn't one gripping moment in the whole episode. I wonder why Jo wasn't in the show, you'd think they'd feature their leading lady even if they had to shoehorn her in.

The ending credits to Guiding Light series finale are great. Shame it ended in 1993. jk

Yes and Obba Babatundé, who plays Julius Avant on B&B as her husband. And I was just trying to figure out how old VR was in the commercial and wow she was 31 when she was cast as Drucilla? I always thought she was like 20...wasn't Dru supposed to be that young?

Wow I never thought I'd see this scene again. I added the Elvis Costello song played at the end there to my rotation soon after. I think this was Malone's first or second week back? @Vee would know. AND I think you were the one who said at the time that Troy went on a trip to the hershey highway with Lindsay in this scene. It sounds like something you'd say!

Thanks, @DRW50