Beach Climber

I feel like the negativity towards JFP is with her work on every soap other than Santa Barbara. With this show, it’s mostly been positive, though she had her issues with the Dobsons and was the one behind centering the show around Cruz and Eden, which fans had mixed feelings about.

For as much as the show rightfully gets the criticism forgetting about characters who weren’t tied to the Capwells, I think they also tried to hard to make the wrong characters happen. Both Caine and Father Michael should have been dumped way earlier than they were. They worked for the initial summer storylines that they were cast for as well as a foil to an established pairing but there was no reason to keep them around afterwards and give them more storylines. They were boring and frankly I think they brought down the female characters they tried pairing them with. Michael, especially. I felt like they threw the kitchen sink at him post Julia and the priesthood and he was so dull.

That honestly never tracked for me. I think they wanted more angst for Julia and Mason to have people be against them other just Tori and CC was an easy option because he already had all of those issues with Mason. The rest of the Capwells were close to Julia or pretty friendly with her so they wouldn’t be opposed to her and Mason. Tori conspired to steal Cruz away from Eden and CC knew the kid wasn’t Mason’s so why did he really care if they stayed together as long as the secret was kept from Eden?

I’ve never heard of that movie but I looked it up and lol, yeah they ripped it off. The SL is way too similar. Socialite is murdered, husband is suspected, female lawyer reluctantly takes his case and falls for him despite not being sure of his innocence and after he’s acquitted discovers evidence that indicates that he did it and he attacks her.

This is going back to the earlier years but with Madeline Capwell’s murder, was her sister always intended to be the killer or did they change their minds as a way to write her off? I saw the David Laurent trial and the aftermath at the cabin and they made it pretty clear that he did it and was snowing Julia. None of these scenes make sense if he wasn’t the murderer. Side note, I only recently saw the first few seasons because I didn’t start watching the show until 87. I can now see why Julia gave up on the traditional route and went with the baby contract. They gave her some whoppers for LOs pre-Mason.

It felt like by the time the truth came out, it was about tying up the loose thread. Everyone’s reactions were so muted. I don’t know for sure but I assumed that it wasn’t the original plan for it to drag on and be ignored the way it did. Maybe there was too much going on with Cruz and Eden or the Julia/Mason/Tori love triangle got in the way of things. Had Mason/Tori been the couple and Mason was actively parenting Chip when the truth was revealed, I would guess it would put the 2 couples against each other and divided up the family. I think she overreacted during that reveal. Perhaps it was because she picked up on Julia being in love with Mason but it was a lot. The baby contract was unconventional but it’s not like they were together when it happened and Mason didn’t know Julia was pregnant when he married Tori. Honestly the only weird part of the story was that Mason wanted to have the kid the traditional way versus artificial insemination.

I didn’t either. Maybe because they kept having to her go on about how she was glad she didn’t have to do this alone when she found out Julia was pregnant and she was the one who chose to lie to Cruz. Then when she figured out Mason was Julia’s baby daddy, she went off the deep rail trying to ensure that Mason had nothing to do with the baby and would offer no financial support to her. Her exit was leaving town for an acting job. It sounded temporary but she never returned. Her character was disliked but I think that’s expected when you come on as a foil for the show’s most popular couple and then she had the bad luck of Mason/Julia becoming popular since they turned her into the spoiler when it was supposed to be the other way around. Fans of Cruz/Eden and/or Mason/Julia made up a good portion of the audience. I also think she, like many others, floundered once she was moved away from the Capwells. The writers quickly lost interest in characters once they left that sphere.

I think it was an interesting story when it came to Mason’s grandfather’s inheritance and one upping CC but I had a hard time believing that anyone thought Mason/Tori were a real couple or didn’t question Chip’s paternity. Also IA that the Tori and Mary comparisons were really bad and honestly Julia was more like Mary than Tori was which made it even weirder.

While Gina and Cruz were great characters, I don’t think they would have gotten the focus the did had they not had those ties to the Capwells. Brandon fueled a lot of stories for Gina throughout her time on the show and I could see the show losing interest in Cruz over time since he was as close to a perfect guy as you can get on a soap and needed more ambiguous characters to bounce off of.

Was that a writer’s strike story? When I saw it during my rewatch, I assumed it was just a summer, let’s give Julia something to do while Lane Davies is on vacation storyline. I actually liked it thought that might be unpopular. It was also the only time Michael was remotely interesting for me as well because I found him to be a huge bore afterwards and he lasted on the show way too long. My theory is that it had to do with Capwell storylines being so front and center. They would introduce a character, give them one or two storylines, but if they weren’t tied to the Capwells in some fashion, they would disappear once the stories started cycling around and the writers would forget about them. They had some decent non-Capwell characters throughout the show but that’s why I believed that they never lasted for long. The Lockridges were probably the biggest exception to this but I think their feud with the Capwells helped and Julia’s ties to them didn’t hurt.

I was a Cruz/Eden fan but they were definitely used too heavily. I think my main issue was the times the show had them be pretty much the entire story. Having them be the lead couple would have been fine but the other characters spent most of their scenes talking about them.

There were a few reveals with Samantha. Victoria figured it out when Julia was still pregnant because of how Mason was acting towards her, CC found out when she was born because the hospital accidentally called him when Julia was in labor instead of Mason, and everyone else who didn’t know found out not too long after she was born after they located a kidnapped Mason. With Chip, the truth came out when he was sick and they needed Cruz to be his donor. I found it a bit lackluster though since it was so long after he was born and Mason and Tori were long divorced and he hardly acted like a father towards Chip by that point.

Mason/Julia weren’t the plan but their baby contract scenes were a much more obvious build to a pairing for me than Mason and Tori were. I never bought the Tori/Mary comparison they were initially pushing and never got why Mason would have fallen for her. Of course, what little build they had died as soon as they actually got married which made it more baffling that they were the planned pairing.

You know they never gave Cruz a chance for a decent romance post Eden. Eden was really omnipresent while he was with both Suzanne and Kelly. I assume that had A not left, they would have hooked him up with Jodie Walker but I saw some potential problems there as well. First was this whole backstory and this giant connection with someone that we didn’t know. Second was that she was the female Cruz. Same occupation, big hero moments, everyone loves her, spouse with flaws.

Soap characters hook up with their exes’ siblings all of the time but it didn’t help matters that the show kept pushing how similar ED’s Kelly was to Eden when they never were before. It just made it more creepy.

I do recall a lot of relatives for both Cruz and Gina popping up throughout their time on the show but I don’t think I took to any of those characters. I saw the attempt to expand their circles outside of the Capwells but they weren’t very successful at it. In that respect, Julia fared better since she had ties to the Lockridges via Augusta so she almost always had 1 relative or pseudo relative on the canvas.

Some might disagree but I think Eden would have fared better. Cruz was the perfect SO and hero at all times so it was harder to see him move on. Eden was the soapier character who had flaws and I think there was more they could have done with her outside of that pairing.

Does it seem like Santa Barbara recasted more than the other soaps? They all recast but it did feel like SB did it more often given the short time the show was on. Maybe it was a side effect of focusing on such a small amount of the cast since they wouldn’t have survived with losing 3/4 Capwell kids but we also had recasts for the Lockridge kids, Gina, Santana, and CC.

I enjoyed it and thought the actress did well but her whole storyline brought major angst to Cruz/Eden and some forced separations so I could see why that would be unpopular with the general audience.

I never bought Terry Lester as Mason but I did really like him with Julia. It’s with Mason’s other ties that I found a bit lacking. I found Mason/Julia to be one of the few soap couples to have chemistry across multiple recasts, which isn’t easy to do. I used to think Terry’s Mason was only comedic. To be fair, there were a lot of wacky hijinks involved with the Sasha storyline and trying to win Julia back, but upon my rewatch, he did really well with some of the more serious stuff too.

If Mary gets discussed more, I think it’s because a lot of fans think the character left too soon and had such a memorable death. Plus with Lane’s Mason, the spector of Mary was always around. Of the 2 pairings, I preferred Mason/Julia but Julia was a more fully realized character since she was on much longer and got a semi-happy ending so the what if’s with the character and pairing aren’t there as much as with Mary.

I think they sort of hinted at this but never fully. I don’t recall if they ever talked about where Augusta was getting her money from when she returned in 88 but they did talk about money being the reason she got involved with Anthony Tonnell when she returned in the 90s and not getting much in the will being the reason for her various business ventures. They also had her living on and off with Julia throughout her various returns, which made for good scenes, but I doubt she would have stayed at Julia’s tiny beach house if she was still wealthy. Alongside that, I can’t remember if they ever discussed why being wealthy was so integral to Augusta. Both she and Julia hinted at a tumultuous upbringing and poor relationships with their parents but I never got the impression that money was that important to Julia despite marrying into a wealthy family.

I think it was mainly because they didn’t know what else to do with her character after the initial SLs, which seemed to be a trend with a lot of characters. Lane’s comments about her departure also suggest that part of the reason she was let go was that they didn’t know what to write for her while he was on vacation. He used to take the summers off so they would have needed to come up with a storyline for Mary while he was gone. I don’t think they wrote his absences in very well.

That sounds dumb but I don’t recall a lot of those homes having kitchen sets. I know the Capwell mansion did but I’m struggling to come up with others that we saw. Normally, we just had the living room and bedroom sets for most of the houses. One thing I always see is that the biggest misstep on the show was killing off Mary. Admittedly I don’t feel the same connection that others do to Mary because I started watching SB after she died so I only saw her scenes for the first time during this rewatch I’m doing. Had they kept her, what direction could they have gone with her character? She was so earnest and good which doesn’t always make for an interesting soap character and I could see Lane getting bored with the happy relationship and family story since he later did with Mason/Julia.

I think from what we saw, any character who wasn’t a Capwell or involved in their stories had a short shelf life. There were so many supporting characters who were on for a couple years and just disappeared