DeeVee

You could say the same about Fletcher. They threw nearly every female character at him, too. With exception of Reva, who never became more than his friend. (I guess they had to have ONE guy who wasn't in love with her, LOL).

Another possibility is they created his character especially for him and then they grew a whole family around him. If they let him go, they would have had to admit they were wrong.

There was a short time when they tried to make Frank and Sam a thing, and it came across as EXTREMELY creepy. We have frequently speculated on here why Frank D. had such a long career on GL. He was a good looking guy, but did not have much of a screen presence or much chemistry with his pairings. Clicking with Melina probably saved his GL career. His casting story is also very interesting. He was originally supposed to play a Bauer. They were trying to create a new branch of the Bauer family. He was going to play the oldest brother. The attempt flopped, so they created the character of Frank for him instead. The reason the Coopers are Greek American is because he is.

I don't think she was a star before GL, that happened after she left. But her casting is an interesting story. Frank D. told it on The Locher Room. He and Melina knew each other growing up. Their parents were friends. When she was auditioning, she ran into him and told him, "Hey, guess what, I'm auditioning to play your wife on the show!" So possibly their on-screen chemistry came from them knowing each other when they were growing up.

From what I remember of when she first came on the show, she was a very nerdy girl, almost like a genius. (I got annoyed when they tried to recreate the early Phillip/Beth dynamic when Dylan wanted her to quit school and run away with him, and I thought, "You're going to crash your schooling for THAT guy?" I was not impressed by Dylan in the beginning, LOL). Her relationship with the Spauldings was a little weird--even Alan seemed fond of her, but not in a creepy way. I don't know--maybe because she was his ex-wife's child? Maybe they thought putting her with the Spauldings gave her more opportunities to interact with her brother. It makes sense she became close to Alan Michael because of their connections to Dylan and Harley and their drama over baby Daisy. Yeah, another case of a core family member disappearing into the ether, along with her father and her Aunt Lainie. They did that a lot, unfortunately.

I just don't get it. Alan-Michael should have been a much more important character. He was a Spaulding and a Bauer. It's almost like they cared as little about him as Alan did, favoring Phillip even though he was not always on the canvas. This is why I think they should have made him Mike's heir apparent, have him go to law school, and take Mike's place as the other resident attorney in SF. By making him Alan Lite, they pretty much scuttled the character.

WTF? All the talented Latino actors out there and they're 0 for 2!?!? I really don't get it. If they wanted to make Jacob look good, they needed to find someone who's going to elevate her. Go find some unknown who has charisma and can ACT. Every time I think the show is finding its footing, they throw out something like this. 😭

IIRC, that's exactly what they used to break Alex and Mike up. And, oh, how ironic--he was appalled at what she did to her brother. You know, the guy Mike hated more than poison! So he stayed in character to the very end, I'll give them that. I will say I think Stewart and McKInsey had an interesting vibe. They seemed to have fun when he was teaching her to fly. From reading some of his interviews, it seems as though what Stewart really wanted was to be more of an action hero than a romantic lead. Marland kind of leaned into that with him--having him and Ed chase Roger, the action scenes in Tenerife when he was after Alan, and there was that scene on a ski tram where he was fighting some guy who was out to kill Alan. Maybe it wasn't that he didn't like his screen partners, he just wanted to do more action stuff. It sounds like Long was going to give him the chance to do that, too, before Kobe fired him. It says a lot about Simon and Dolan as a pairing that their biggest threat in the beginning was her brother. I think part of the reason for the Reardons fading away was that they simply lost interest in writing for them.

I only remember Brandon having scenes with Lucille. There's a scene when Alan and Hope were on the island where he tells her his father is in a nursing home but he never sees him. Possibly they had phone call scenes? Seems to me Alan must have kicked Brandon in the teeth once more to get him to leave everything to Amanda. But I don't know for sure. This is the kind of thing that really aggravates me. WHY create a core family member with no plans to keep him or her on the show more than a year? They could have created a character to play that dopey Dreaming Death story who had no connection to anyone on the show--it was completely unnecessary that he be a Reardon. Not to mention that having a Reardon who was a doctor pop up after two years of hearing Tony bash educated people and Nola sneering at her family for having little ambition was bizarre. Not that it wasn't possible, but you'd think Bea and Nola would have bragged about him all the time. Crazy lack of thought there.

Yes, and I'm guessing that was Long's intention, but she was thwarted by higher-ups. It was a perfect opportunity to diversify the cast by creating characters who were part of one of their central core families. All these decades later and only now do we finally have a soap about wealthy Black characters, so it's not hard to imagine there was pushback at the time. The same thing happened when she wanted to introduce a Jewish family. I believe she ultimately quit GL over that when they didn't let her see it through. I give Long credit for trying, even though I thought that Barbados story was kind of terrible. Maybe it would have played better with what she originally planned out.

Hang on. I believe they MIGHT have. In fact, it's possible that it was Mike who helped Brandon with his will, where he left his Spaulding stock to Amanda. There was an episode from late August 1979 recently uploaded which had scenes that implied Ross knew Amanda was the Spaulding heir before Brandon died. He was really sneaky back then, and possibly found out by snooping around Mike's office. I can't say this is correct with absolute certainty, as this is over 45 years ago and I wasn't watching the show regularly at the time (had to fight my sister for the TV because she watched GH). Also, not much survives today of scenes with Brandon before he "died" the first time. But if Mike was his lawyer when he wrote that will, then him being involved in the Barbados story would have made sense.

I think that was potentially a good story. Especially since once Alan came back, it would have put Mike and Alan back in the same orbit. How odd that they paired Alex with two of Alan's most dire enemies and he wasn't around for either storyline. I don't know how much of the murmurings are true, but seems like Stewart groused a lot about who he was paired with. It was probably only a matter of time before someone was going to get annoyed enough to let him go, so this story does not surprise me. Definitely. Billy and Roger were fond of each other while Roger and Peggy were married. So there was history already built into their relationship that some viewers would have remembered. It's too bad they never took advantage of that.

This was a TERRIBLE misstep. I adore Carl, but let's face it, if he had never been on the show we wouldn't miss him. They could have SORASed Alan Michael only a few years or parked him in a boarding school while Hope returned. They did that with Rick and Phillip and it was fine, their parents didn't seem overly young. Basically, they made it impossible to bring Hope back without aging the character like 20 years. Which would have made her around Ed's age. It has been suggested that instead of bringing in Ed's sudden godson Kelly, they should have brought in Peggy's son Billy Fletcher. Well, they could have done that at this point, too, with Peggy sending Billy to her good friend Ed, and he could have taken AM's place in that teen story. (Although they would have had to do something about his name--they couldn't call him Bill or Billy or even Fletch, LOL). Or they could have brought in Dylan sooner. They could have still had a young AM involved in stories with the Spauldings--feeling like the afterthought compared to Phillip, Alan still trying to find a way to mess around with his trust fund...he didn't have to be 18 years old. Yeah, that would lose the Harley romance, but maybe they could have involved her with Phillip sooner. I didn't know he was fired, I thought he left because he wanted to. There had to be some good will left because did come back briefly. TBH, I was never a big fan of Stewart--it was so obvious he was reading a lot of his lines off the cue cards. I think it would have been much easier to recast him than Alan or even Ed. Yes, bring him back married--sure, with a stepson, there's someone else who could have taken AM's place in the teen story. And have a biological child with the new wife, to beef up the Bauer presence. Oh, I had the most WILD idea the other day--we all were talking about the possibilities if Holly's ex-husband Dietrich Lindsay had been brought on the show as a regular character. How about if Hope returned--with the news that she was engaged to Dietrich! Of course she would be attracted to another rich, powerful man. She could have met him while visiting Holly in Switzerland. Maybe...she could have even been one of the reasons Holly and Dietrich split? They could have recast Alan sooner and had him fuming in jail about it. 😂

So I found this photo of Alan and Beth's (gag) wedding. Now I need someone to explain something to me: How did RICK end up being ALAN's best man?

I think Long deserves at least some of that credit. It's obvious the Lewis/Shayne families were a labor of love for her. (One reason why people point out they act more like they're from Alabama than Oklahoma, most likely). She created the Four Muskateers, she created Alex--and to this day, I'm impressed by how seamlessly she brought this never-before-mentioned Spaulding into the story. She had to deal with the fallout of two writers strikes, and IMO she set the ship right pretty quickly. She had to deal with the fallout of Bernau's exit and quickly reset when they decided to bring Roger back from the dead. She quickly realized Maureen Garrett would be an asset to the show, so she grew a short stint into a long-term story. Obviously, I did not like every story she wrote or every choice that she made (coughRevaandAlancough) but I UNDERSTAND the reasoning behind a lot of those decisions. Kobe, OTOH, made decisions I don't get at all, starting with decimating the Bauers, getting rid of most of the characters from the Dobsons/Marland era, killing off characters out of petulance because the actors wanted to give Hollywood a go. I'm sure she made good decisions, too, but the bad ones kind of stick out.