DeeVee

The resurrection of Brandon Spaulding on GL. He was a physical wreck before he died on screen, knowing that Lucille Wexler left him to die--the idea that he could/would fake his death and take off to Barbados so he could shag his old girlfriend was the height of absurdity. It messed with previous storylines (the will where he left most of his Spaulding stock to Amanda, for one thing) and added absolutely nothing to the story afterwards. Possibly Pam Long intended to bring on the Barbados Spauldings as regular characters, in order to add some major Black characters to the canvas, but it didn't happen. Much later, they brought one of them in, but that story was a bust, too. The other absurd rewriting of Spaulding history was making Amanda Brandon's child instead of Alan's--short term shock effect which added nothing over the long-term. The only thing it did was make an already cringy storyline even more cringy.

Or Hope. Isn't that what Mindy always was? I really liked Krista, but it seems to me they never developed her character, and that includes when Long was writing her. She was initially little more than the spoiler for Phillip and Beth, and after that she was put through a series of very dull romances/marriages that never caught on because there was no internal conflict to any of them. For me, the solution to that would have been to pair her seriously with Rick. Spoiled Mindy trying to become a Bauer--that could have been interesting, and given the character a chance to grow, the way Holly did, who also started out as a spoiled brat.

How serendipitous! We were just talking about Barbara Crampton, and earlier Geoffrey Scott as Mindy and Billy. Just so happens an episode featuring both showed up in my TL on YouTube this evening. I vaguely remember Crampton as Mindy, but I don't think I'd ever seen Scott as Billy. WTF? This is exactly what we were talking about--getting name stars in most cases is not a great idea. He's just not Billy. No wonder they were shipping him off the show at this point. Is it my imagination, or did they make Crampton wear a wig to make her look more Mindy-like? (And poor Sonia Satra, someone thought it was a good idea to put an ugly beanie on her head. Who was doing the costumes?) Anyway, if you've never seen it or need a refresher on why these were bad casting decisions:

I think soaps, even now, prize "name" stars way too much. It wasn't just that people loved Marcy, they loved Liza and Eden. It's a mixture of the actor/character, not just the actor alone. If you don't create a good character (or write well for an existing character with a recast), just sticking a name actor in the role will not make any difference. Besides, soaps are not about stars. I will die on this hill. If star power was all it took, then KZ could have saved GL from folding. She had a lot of vocal, devoted fans. That's not enough. I also would have loved to have seen Marcy as Morgan, but ONLY if they had a strong storyline for her and picked up on the relationships the character had a decade previously. That includes Josh, Alan, Phillip (was GA around then?). I would have liked to have seen Morgan doing something other than modeling. The show was bereft of lawyers. Maybe after all that time Kelly treated her like she was a dummy who was bad at school, it turned out she was actually pretty smart and became a lawyer off-screen. She could have come to town and asked Alan for a job, as he was always fond of her. He treated her like she was another daughter. (And maybe she had a secret kid who turned out to be Josh's kid? Why should Reva have all the secret kids?) The point is, this stuff could write itself if you don't act like the past never happened and also don't act like the characters were in cryosleep or something for years, so that there was no progression in their lives. Instead of bringing in a new character, slapping a weird name on them, and not really figuring out a way to weave them into the show, because you think their star power will carry the day.

Why? He's not the first sociopath she fell in love with. She married Will. Honestly, it seems to me they never knew what to do with her, she bounced around so many failed pairings and careers. They had the same problem with Roxy. Reva also followed that pattern, but it was the success of pairing her with Josh that gave the character a throughline, I guess you could say.

Almost anyone you could name ended up with healthy careers outside of daytime. A lot of the big daytime stars are people who were happy to have a long-term career on daytime, while other actors preferred to move to other areas. People like Forbes, Stringer, Watros, and Lenz were never going to stay on daytime. (Evans left for an entirely different reason and moved on to other daytime roles). Zimmer made her own bid for a career outside of daytime. When that didn't work out, she came back and settled in for good. I'm not sure she had to be supplanted. She just needed to be pulled back, but it's clear she wouldn't stand for that. She had her own cadre of vocal fans, just like the shippers. Soaps were declining so badly that they clung to anyone who had fans that were making noise. It takes a great deal of chutzpah to think you were going to win an Emmy for that story. It's the kind of story created to keep a certain star front-and-center and to get a lot of buzz. Even if it's negative, people are talking, and that's what you want. The stories you win Emmys with are almost never in that category. I'm often surprised when people speak negatively about her. She was O.K., but then, I loathed the whole mob thing, so I wasn't that invested in those characters.

I think it would have been fantastic if they'd had Roger come back with a complete memory wipe. Imagine hearing you did so many heinous things but not being able to remember them. It's sort of what they did with Sonni, which would have tied her closer to Roger, especially since she was a psychiatrist. A story like that might have tempted Forbes to stay a bit longer. Since the "old" Roger was a liar and a grifter, of course most of his enemies would believe he was lying and out to prove it. He was the suave, sexy villain the show desperately needed. Unfortunately, they made him way too bad. I don't want to spoil anything for @alwaysAMC, but suffice to say that no amount of chemistry could make me buy into a certain pairing.

Thomas Pelphrey (Jonathan) won an Emmy tonight. Pretty good for someone a lot of us couldn't stand when he was on GL! 😂 Seriously, though, he gained my admiration way before this. Over the years, he has grown into a really fine actor. Very pleased for him. (And the fact that Widow's Bay broke the Emmy record for most wins, yay).

No, in fact it's very rare for amnesia patients to get their memory back at all. (I'm rewatching Mad Men. At one point Joanie is reading ATWT scripts and she asks her doctor fiancee about this--whether people who come out of a coma lose their memories. His answer was that people rarely come out of comas. Not on soaps! 😂) I think Jason on GH is one of very few soap characters who never regained his memory. It's the kind of thing you shrug your shoulders and say, "It's just a soap." If it had been in service of a good storyline, I doubt we'd care. Danny and Michelle also had vocal shippers, which is probably why Carmen was on long past her expiration date.

I felt the same way. I don't know...somehow GH and DOOL found ways to weave in these kinds of characters into their shows. They've had royalty and gangsters, some of whom remained long-term characters, and popular ones, too. I don't know what the secret is. Whatever it is, GL never found it. No, but it did create some annoying and vocal shipper fans, kind of like the Quint and Nola fans. Wasn't Reva also supposed to be in Italy during some of her missing years?

Yeah, the whole idea that a prince would be so crazy about Reva that he wanted to make her his princess is just too funny. The same reason I couldn't believe Alan would be entranced by her. To want to sleep with her? Sure. Desperate to marry her? Nope. Even the Lewis men all putting a ring on her finger was stretching it. It's the Victor Newman/Don Draper syndrome--almost everyone of the opposite sex who knows her falls madly in love with her. No other woman can really compete with her. It's just silly. Cassie was different--in that case, the Cinderella aspect worked a little better. It was silly, but not AS silly.

My jaw hit the floor reading that. Somebody didn't get the memo that Josh and Reva were sacrosant, regardless of who either one was with at any given time. With the exception of Kyle, Reva was never really in love with anyone but Josh. And the fact that Reva got over Kyle in a New York minute indicates that she wasn't really that much in love with him, either. Having Reva almost cheat on Josh at Cross Creek? Blasphemy! I watched one of the episodes where Reva had come back to SF, and Annie was really giving it to her, calling her a tramp (something actually not as nice as that, LOL). Annie had a point, but pretty much every other guy she was with was a placeholder for Josh, because Reva had trouble being without a man. We complain about Reva taking up so much of the show, but that's who she was, and not having a basic understanding of the characters is one of many reasons GL was falling off the cliff the last few years.

That's Ellen Barber. I remember her best as Joanna on The Secret Storm. She was also on Somerset.

People being idealized after they're dead is not uncommon. Maybe Martha was a drunken hoe, but HB didn't want the kids to know that. If Sarah could have an illegitimate baby, I don't see why Martha couldn't.

Well now that you mention this, we were talking recently about how it was obvious they were setting up an Alan/Billy rivalry that got scuttled by Bernau's first exit. Since Kyle was meant as a replacement for both CB and RN, and they set up that whole (very convoluted) storyline about Kyle maybe being a Lewis, and it turned out Billy was his half-brother through Miss Sally, not HB, maybe something like that was originally meant to happen with Alan and Billy. There are a few possibilities: Penelope (Alan's mother) had an affair with HB (which gives even more of an ick factor to HB's romance with Alex) or Brandon was actually Billy's father. But as @Khan pointed out, we were supposed to believe that Miss Martha was practically a saint. (He could have raped her; more ick). Since they showed Penelope pregnant with Alan and giving birth to him on Founders Day, I guess they couldn't have used the Miss Sally gambit, but maybe the Barbados storyline would have been written differently if CB and RN had not left and Kyle had never been created. Alan and Billy being siblings would have not been hard to believe, because CB and JC had a mild resemblence to each other--tall, the curly dark hair, etc. Maybe Long would have tried to revive the Alan/Billy rivalry after Bernau returned, but, again, it got scuttled, this time by JC leaving the show. I'm sure there was a lot more to the Reva/Alan storyline that never played out because Bernau had to leave. So who knows? It makes sense to have the Spaulding/Lewis families at odds. It also makes sense that Josh wasn't a real Lewis, as he always felt disconnected from his family, especially from HB.

I've been busy so I haven't kept up commenting on the SOD summaries, but that exit was even MORE harebrained than I remembered it: I always thought Alan got involved with some shadowy people (they literally were shown in the shadows, LOL) who wanted to sell the virus to "the other side" to use as a bioweapon. But in SOD, they kept saying Alan was trying to sell the anecdote to "Third World powers." And, I'm like...that's a GOOD thing? That's actually almost a HEROIC thing? (Well, giving it to the Third World would be heroic, but it's definitely not an evil thing to do). One of these days I have to go back to the German channel and see if that's right or if the SOD writers got it wrong somehow. (Which did happen sometimes). It's probably wrong because how did Alex blackmail him? "I'm going to tell everyone you're not a traitorous, heartless, greedy pig." Nah. Either way, the storyline was stupid and one of Long's major missteps, though I strongly suspect she was told to write it so they could try to compete with GH's storylines of that ilk. Oh, definitely, he was created to fill the gaps caused by RN's and CB's exits. Almost as soon as they came back, he was out. (Supposedly voluntarily, which I believe, because he wanted to be the top draw on any show he was on). It's practically the first thing she did when she returned, so you're probably right about that.

Most of that storyline is on the German channel. Or just to annoy Billy. They were setting them up as major rivals, which didn't quite pan out because Bernau left the show. I don't know what Alan needed an heiress for, that motivation never made sense to me. Long did give her somewhat more complexity. It's a shame they didn't build on that more.

This reminds me: although I thought it was good that they finally gave Hollen a storyline, I never could understand why Alan would have been interested in Trish. She was practically Hope's twin: blonde, daddy-fixated, passive and weak-willed, and both were alcoholics! Alan chasing Rita made sense because she was Hope's opposite.

I found her soap opera reel on YT, and YEAH, she's like a taller Elvera! Very similar vibe. (Off topic: How the hell did I never know Shaun Cassidy was on GH?)

Worse than Shari Shattuck? I don't know about that...😁

Geoffrey Scott had been a regular on Dynasty--maybe they thought that was a good way to bring in viewers (though that had been 10 years previously). So it could have been worse--Lane Davies could have played Billy. 😂

I think Long's intention was to totally replace the Reardons with her own blue collar family, the Coopers. That pretty much happened under her second tenure--only Maureen remained, and by that time she had been totally absorbed into the Bauer orbit. Even though there's that backstory about Dicopoulos originally cast as one of the faux Bauers, and how they made Frank Greek-American because he's Greek-American, he's not the one the Coopers were built around--that was Ehlers. IMO, Harley was the Nola of the Coopers--Ehlers was a find, like Lisa was, who had a family built around her. It seems to me that Long saw Harley not as a Nola redux, but as a Reva-like character at a younger age. That easily could have been a disaster, but Ehlers made Harley her own thing.

I remember that episode. It was excellent. Compton and Flood did an amazing job.

I know, I thought that was funny, too! "Oh, a nickname will come later in life." Did it EVER for Alan Michael? I know by this time most of the show's history was forgotten or ignored, but I can't help remembering Phillip crying about how he always wanted to change his name to Alan Spaulding, Jr. when he found out Alan wasn't his biological father. (Is there anyone who really prefers being a Junior?) I don't get why they named him after Alan in the first place, since Phillip spent about 90% of his adult life hating him, or, at the very least, mad at him. I watched the 1996 episode that was recently uploaded. I rarely look at episodes from that era. It wasn't a great episode, but it wasn't a terrible episode, either. Alan was paralyzed for, what, like the 12th time? Let me guess: he's going to recover and not tell anyone about it. Just like he did the other 11 times, LOL. I'm not sure which Alan Michael this was--I thought he was O.K. Maybe if I had to put up with him for more than a scene or two I would feel differently about it. The Ross and Blake twins were just born--what a dumb storyline. But in this particular episode it was sweet, everyone happy about the twins being born. The one part of the episode I quite enjoyed was a scene between Nola and Bridget. Bridget wanted plastic surgery because she wants to be gorgeous, and Nola was trying to talk her out of it. I wish they had leaned into this kind of thing more. Quint shows up and it's not Michael Tylo. I knew Josh Taylor had played him briefly, but I had never seen him as Quint before. I was not impressed. He's just all wrong for the role, I'm not surprised he didn't last long. I could have accepted him as a recast Tony, but not Quint. Then at the end Meta arrives for the first time. For some reason, they have her behave like an idiot, erroneously assuming everyone she sees is either Michelle or Rick. Not a nice thing to do to Mary Stuart. I've never understood this way of introducing characters. She could have just said, "Hi, I'm Meta, who are you?" And that would have been fine!

Chris and Bev played Alan and Alex like old money/faux American aristocrats. Ron and Marj went in a different direction, making them more bombastic, like new money millionaires who may have had rough beginnings. Maybe that was how JFP saw the characters? And it just stuck after she left? I'm not surprised Raines sounds differently now--voices definitely can change as people age.