DeeVee

It's funny, the sitcom Soap, which was a parody of soap operas, had an ending like that, too. The heroine Jessica was facing a firing squad and you heard shots fired, the end. And that was a comedy. They weren't given much notice they were being canceled so they just said screw it and ended it on the season cliff hanger they were planning. (Everyone adored Jessica, though, so no one was celebrating, LOL). As someone who has watched telenovelas for eons, I don't mind giving stories an ending. My problem is having characters who lived through years of toxicity being the symbol of hope and happily ever after. I felt the same about Sex and the City, I felt the same about Friends. I totally LOATHED those endings. It was enough that Carrie broke up with the Russian and went back to her true loves, her friends. It was enough that Monica and Chandler finally got their kids and the group as a whole was moving on to the next stage of adulthood. I feel the same about the Four Musketeers reunion and the implication they would all get together with their erstwhile partners. 25 years (more in soap years) and you couldn't get it together before this? Come on. This might upset a few people here, but I feel the same about Vanessa and Billy getting married, too. You didn't need weddings. You didn't need to pair up everyone. Good grief, they even paired up Blake and Frank. WHY? WHO CARES? Alan's death could have brought everyone together to talk about the past and remember the highlights of the show's history. While leaving most things open-ended. It would have been enough. Better than that sappy drive past the lighthouse. Because you knew Josh and Reva would get divorced again. Just like I'm certain somewhere in sitcomland Ross and Rachel are divorced.

Yes, Reva was always looking for what she could get from a guy. What he could do for her. Vanessa used to chide Alan about it all the time. She had Reva's number. I don't think it was always about money for her (though it DID help). Stability is a good way of putting it, though in the end she never seemed to find it. That's the kind of pandering shows frequently do at the end. Doesn't matter how toxic the relationship, they're convinced (and they're not entirely wrong) that the audience craves a happily ever after.

I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I THINK Bradley found out while in prison that Alan had lied about Beth being dead. Then Alan told Phillip because he was trying to make up to him for, you know, shooting him at his own wedding. IIRC correctly, it's why everyone was skeptical, because Alan and Bradley were both congenital liars. Yes, he was trying to convince Lillian and later Beth that he had changed. For a long time Rehborn was one of Hollywood's best character actors, so yeah, it's another case of a soap wanting to keep a really good actor who was playing an irredeemable character.

It's kind of hilarious when you think about it because his stint on AMC involved fathering Erica's baby, then fathering another with his ex-wife, then ANOTHER so they could have a donor to save the first one from cancer. Let's face it, there are a lot of baby storylines on soaps.😂

I can understand him feeling that way, but they HAD to do that storyline because Zimmer was pregnant.

I'm familiar with Walker--yeah, I think he could have worked. I don't recall Lockerman that much, but looking at photos of him from when he was young--I TOTALLY can see him as Kyle. (As long as I ignore the awful 1980s moussed-up mullet hair style in some of his pictures, LOL).

He played a New Yorker on AMC with a father who had an American accent. (I suppose they explained he was brought up in Europe with his mother? I don't recall). Nothing will ever be funnier than the character on OLTL who was Dutch or Scandinavian with a strong accent. One day it magically disappeared (still the same actor, too). I keep thinking Kyle has to have that Black Irish look like Malloy. For instance, Malcolm Groome, who played Patrick on RH. (He said in interviews he was disappointed they changed Pat from a bounder to a super nice guy. Here would have been the chance to play against that).

I have always said that the GL canvas could have easily accomodated two mutl-millionaire business guys--Y&R has had that going on for literally decades. And, in fact, could have made the business stories more interesing. (Lewis Oil was never really a contender against Spaulding). So who would have been a good replacement for Malloy? Ooooh, I have to think about this.

Hmm, Lillian. Yeah, she was NOT a good person when she first came on the show. She utterly failed Beth, looking the other way while her husband Bradley physically abused her. She refused to face the fact that Bradley raped her. In the beginning. Later, she supported Beth. Beth, at the time practically a saint, forgave her mother. She forgave everybody, except for Bradley. Even Alan, who treated her like dirt. Then when Alan came back to SF, he treated her like dirt again. I know this is hard to believe because 1990s-2000s Beth is SO different. Anyway, BACK to Lillian: there was a brief time where they were playing around with a love triangle involving Lillian/Mike Bauer/Alexandra. There are a lot of theories around why this happened, but for whatever reason, they decided to fire Don Stewart, the actor who played Mike. So it never went anywhere. After that, Lilian was pretty much the devoted mother and dedicated nurse. Dinah came to live with her. When Beth went missing, she and Dinah were very close. She was devastated, of course, when Beth declared dead (falsely, by Alan, because he wanted Phillip to "get over it" and stop looking for the missing Beth). Beth was eventually found, and they were happily reunited. (For some WILD reason, they brought Bradley back into the story. He was in jail while Alan was in jail. I never figured out the point of that). Then a few years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. During this time she and Ed, who were always friends, because closer and had an affair. Lillian (who was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier) wrote Ed a love letter. Mo found it. That's when she confronted both of them. While trying to get away from Ed, she crashed her car and died. Of course, Lillian was really, really, REALLY sorry about her part in this, as was Ed. And then...pretty much everyone forgot about it. It was never really brought back into the story, when it should have been. Bridget and Nola adored Mo, there should have been scenes of them tearing Ed and Lillian new ones. Just goes to show how that storyline was used simply to get rid of a character rather than growing into more story over the years. And, yeah, then after that, she was pretty much just the nice nurse lady. It's a shame they didn't use more of her complicated past, with her daughter, with Dinah, with Ed, with the people who loved Mo.

I hate when soaps have that kind of amnesia. No way would Van ever be friends with Lillian. She may not have been directly responsible for the death of the only real female friend Van ever had, but she hurt her deeply. Van would not forgive that. Not only were Dinah and Lillian close, she almost became like a surrogate daughter to her. Lillian was heartbroken when Dinah found out she was Ross and Vanessa's kid and left to go live with Ross. Again, amnesia.

Fletch was ALWAYS romancing some random woman. 😂 That was Susan Piper. This epsisode was The Founding Day celebration, which kicked off the rather dreadful Barbados storyline. She was the villainess in that story.

Bridget and Nola were the wrong characters to take that role in the boarding house. Bridget was too young, and Nola HATED the boarding house when she was young. All she wanted was to get away. Making her the wise matriarch, quirky or otherwise, would have been a waste of her character. She needed to be doing things, not talking to others about what they were doing. Same with Bridget. You can understand why some actresses would have pushed back against playing that role (i.e. Zimmer). Back in the day, Charita Bauer was probably happy to still be a vital character on the show, even though she was no longer embroiled in central storylines. But by the 90s, actresses, especially those who had been really popular, didn't want to slide into that role. And I can't totally blame them. But it caused some serious holes in soaps once the actresses who filled that fuction started dying off.

Yeah, he obviously had some issues. I think Terrell Anthony, who played Rusty, said Malloy was threatened by him and made comments about how he was the male star and don't get in his way, or something like that. I will be forever p!ssed at him because if he hadn't left GL, Alan never would have been pulled into Reva's orbit. I wonder, since they had mentioned both Rita and Hope during that era, if they would have brought one or both of them back into the story if Reva hadn't needed someone to worship her during the Sonni story. Also, Ina, on OLTL. Who ran a boarding house, like Bea Reardon did. They really made a mistake, IMO, when they got rid of Bea. The boarding house was the perfect place to have disparate characters flow through it every now and then and where they could use Bea as a sounding board and dispenser of wisdom. As it was used during the 1980s. It's where Beth and Lujack fell in love, for instance.

Thank God for small mercies. 😂

When Robert Newman (Josh) and Chris Bernau (the OG Alan) left the show, they filled in the gap by hiring Larkin Malloy as rich businessman Kyle Sampson. He had been very popular as Sky Whitney on Edge of Night. They attached him to the Lewis family. My theory for why the audience accepted Reva and Kyle was that Newman left not that long after they had established Reva and Josh as a star-crossed romantic couple. If he had stayed another year it might have been different. When both Newman and Bernau came back in 1986, the story goes that they wanted to keep Malloy and have a love triangle with Josh/Reva/Kyle, but Kyle was going to be the odd man out. Malloy didn't want to play the losing side of the love triangle, so he left. They had Reva become involved with Alan instead.

Whaaaaaattttt? I rarely ever watched B&B, but I do remember when they revealed Eric was really Bridget's father, and she was like 5 or 6 year old? Ridge thought he was her father for all that time! That beats AM and Marina by about a billion miles. The only male Spaulding Blake missed was Gus. Olivia slept with Alan and Phillip. Cassie slept with brothers Richard and Edmund (and didn't she almost sleep with her b-in-law Josh?). Didn't Vanessa sleep with Justin early on? Or am I hallucinating that one? (It seems like a safe assumption, LOL).

Right. He wanted to leave school because everyone was certain he had knocked the girl up and was responsible for her suicide. I think that's the excuse they came up with for him to transfer to SF. Definitely during Marland's tenure. He seemed to really like stories about male characters being blamed for the deaths of their girlfriends. 😁

He had already done Animal House before GL--he was never going to stay. I guess he did a soap so he had work while trying to get his movie career going. It's just funny that they didn't seem to know what they had. It's also bizarre that of all the teen/YA characters of that era, he was the only one with a real connection to the canvas and he was treated almost like an afterthought.

Can you imagine having Kevin FREAKING Bacon on your show and thinking--nah. TJ/Tim/whatever was never going to be anything but one of the roadblocks for Kelly and Morgan. That was basically his only function. They kept him on longer after they got married, but never really did anything with him. Partly the recast was not great, but the character's usefulness had faded.

No, TJ was not killed off. He left SF to be with his girlfriend who was going to an out-of-state school. Sara might have mentioned him once in a while afterwards, but that was it. I find it hard to believe that Anthony Call was the problem--he went on to OLTL and became very popular even though the viewers hated him at first because he was the attorney who harangued Karen Wolek in the famous trial scene. He and Robin Strasser were a great pair. Maybe they wanted to leave Sara free for the Justin/Jackie story, but she didn't stay in that storyline for that long. It's funny--I think one of the very first scenes I ever watched on GL was Joe, Sara, and TJ celebrating Christmas. They were so happy. And then of course soon after Joe had a heart attack and died.

I can't help but wonder if that was the original plan for Amanda's mother. We'll never know!

I often thought not putting them together for real was a mistake. In the beginning, Alan wasn't interested in her, not so much because he was in love with Hope, but because he didn't like to be chased. Diane would practically drop her panties in front of him and he'd be like, no thank you. In the beginning Hope was forbidden, then later when she forgave him and Mike kind of accepted them being together, he got bored. Rita was forbidden because they were both married; then both spouses left them and he was back to chasing Hope again. Both times he was after Vanessa she wasn't really that into him, so he was again the one doing the pursuing. The first time it was going to go nowhere long term because Chris would be exiting the show soon. The second time it was Maeve who left. So, yeah, third time might have been the charm (YES, with a different actor). Vanessa was no longer chasing men for the hell of it. I think it could have been very interesting.

I can imagine Vanessa saying this, and at the same time conveniently forgetting that other than Ross, men weren't quite as susceptible to her charms as she made herself out to be. Alan was not at all interested in her at the time. (If he was daydreaming about another woman at this point, it probably would have been Rita). But he knew Hope was young and jealous, so that's why he came up with the telephone ruse. Ben was also oblivious to her. Chaos agent is a really good way to describe Vanessa 1.0. She liked causing trouble and watching the outcome.

Ah, yes, back in the day when Vanessa was the town vamp. 😂 Glad you got to see the REAL Alan and the REAL Amanda. You also got to see the infamous Rita (Lenore Kasdorf) . This was right after Lenore came back from maternity leave. The character left because Roger caused her to lose her baby so lots of sympathy for her at this time. But she had her notorious moments. Most definitely, MG has a portrait in the attic. As does Maeve. Even though she looks her age now, she's still SO beautiful. Both blessed with amazing bone structure.

Bert was such an unusual soap character back in the day. Most soap wives who wouldn't let go of their husbands were rich, imperious types, like Phoebe on AMC or Katherine on Y&R. They were clearly meant to be antagonistic characters, making life miserable for the lower or middle class heroines who truly loved the husbands. Yet Bert was the central female character. She was so complex. I wish we could see more of that on soaps today.