DeeVee

I had no idea that was a real town! I thought they made up the name. That's very cool.

Y&R was also supposed to take place near Chicago. The Bells were from there and lived there most of the time. I believe the lore goes that they were driving through a town outside Chicago and decided to base Genoa City on it. (Years later, its location was specified as being in Wisconsin, but characters would still talk about taking a drive to Chicago. Eric Braeden has said interviews that Genoa City is a small midwest city similar to Wichita). I guess it makes sense to position a fictional soap town near a real big city--it expands what the characters can do. Every small town has rich people, but if you're going to have millionaires that own multi-national companies (which became more common on soaps during the 1980s) having them living in the boonies isn't very realistic. So you solve that by having the town be very close to or part of a bigger city.

She was WAY more interesting when the Dobsons wrote her. She was truly damaged by the way Lucille treated her, socially awkward, afraid of her own shadow, terrified of displeasing Lucille. But like I said before, she could be very selfish and manipulative, too. She used the way Lucille browbeat her to get Ben to feel sympathetic to her. She would turn on the waterworks and he'd comfort her. Lucille made her terrified of sex, so much so she couldn't consumate her marriage to a guy named Gordon. But she was so turned on by Ben, she finally seduced Gordon and realized she liked sex. Right after they had sex, she dumped Gordon. She totally used him just to make a point to herself. It was kind of brutal, actually. Once Gordon turned her on to the delights of sex, because Ben was still with Eve she would pick up random guys and sleep with them. One time she disappeared and Lucille was hysterical because she was missing, so Ben went to look for her. He found her with her latest pick-up and insisted she leave with him. They got caught in a storm, and of course ended up in a barn. She tried to seduce him, but that time he resisted her charms. After Eve left him (for catching him with Diane, not Amanda), Amanda was all up in Ben's business. She became his friend, his confidant, and showed interest in everything he did, especially with his art career. IIRC, she was the one who got a Chicago dealer to look at his work. (The guy Justin and Ross's sister Lainie ended up marrying. Can't remember his name). She arranged to be in Chicago at the same time and ran into him "by accident." They ended up having dinner but oh, no, she never got a reservation for a room and it was too late to get one, could she stay in his room, etc., etc. You can imagine how that turned out. Sometime after, Evie was getting ready to forgive Ben. I can't recall exactly how, but Amanda talked him into a spur-of-the-moment marriage. It's the kind of manipulative stuff you could imagine Alan doing to get a woman. But she always had this outside aura of niceness and shyness, so she fooled people without consciously trying to do it. Also, Lucille was such a hideously bad mother. Watching the way Lucille treated Amanda made it really hard not to feel sorry for her. When people say Cullen was dull, that was the Marland years. He had no idea how to write a woman with that many layers.

They seemed to forget that BOTH her parents started out as very ambitious and angry at the way the world had effed them over and willing to do almost anything to get what they wanted. It would have made total sense for their daughter to be like that. I think they were trying to re-capture the magic of the Four Musketeers, so Dinah got stuck with the "good girl" role. When that flopped, they hustled her off the canvas. It would have been SO much more interesting if Dinah had been the schemer, maybe with a "good girl" mask, who made Harley's life miserable. Then later on, "Mean Dinah" would have been consistent. Right, she didn't have to be nice, she just had to be Amanda. Amanda was smart, ambitious, yes, but she was also pretty selfish when it came to wanting the men she wanted. (She went to a lot of trouble to corral Ben, for instance, even though he really wanted to go back to Eve). I mean, she's Alan's daughter. (Well, she was). Even though Lucille had beaten her down when she was growing up, from the beginning she showed a very selfish, ruthless side. But it was done in a way that was way more subtle than just saying nasty things about Cassie and laughing about it with Dinah.

No way. I refuse to believe this. 😂 I don't get why they thought so many women would be into this guy. Some, sure. Because everyone has their own personal taste. But how he ended up the GL Lothario, I'll never understand. There was no consistency to that character. For me, that was the biggest problem. They changed her to suit whatever plot. And for those of us who remember the introduction of the character back in the 80s, it's even more baffling. Even though the two iterations of the character back then were different (she started off as a spunky girl who had had a rough childhood and then evolved into a sweet ingenue) she always was nice, even though she had problems with Vanessa giving her away. I had the same problem with 1990s Amanda. She was not Amanda. Just create new characters if you want a young adult mean girl duo in SF.

Wait a second. Vanessa dated Fletch? Is there ANY female character that they didn't put him with? (Yes, Reva, but they did tease it for a while when they became friends).

Wait, there's more: Cassie slept with brothers, Richard and Edmund. Olivia slept with father/son, Alan and Phillip. (She probably only missed out on Alan Michael because he wasn't around much at the time). I would say the Alan/Olivia/Phillip situation was a triangle because she was with Phillip while she was married to Alan. The one time they did a true triangle (Amanda/Mark/Jennifer) it sucked, so maybe that's why they stayed away from that kind of story. That was a big hole in the show. Even though Bob and Kim were the stable couple, they still had storylines. They weren't always just in the background. Bill and Bert were constantly at odds with each other. It is possible to have that kind of married couple on a soap, but GL never found the right pairing once they ended Bert and Bill's marriage.

Considering how many GL characters survive plane crashes/falling off cliffs/driving their cars into the ocean, it's the least unbelievable part of the story. 😂 Now that I think of it, they could have brought back Jackie, Mo, and Ross any old time. Wouldn't have been much more unbelievable than some of these other "resurrections."

The soap critics adored Tammy Blanchard. So that may be why GL tried so hard to make the character work. She went on to have a very successful post-soap opera career, both on Broadway and TV.

That's news to me. I never heard she was pregnant in real life. Cullen's pregnancy was written in. She talked on the Locher Room about how protective Jerry and Stephen were when she had to faint in the courtroom scene after Jennifer reveals she's her child. After Amanda lost the baby, that's when they had her regress to acting like a child and dressing in big, Shirley Temple style dresses. She also sat at the piano a lot to hide her belly. Deering was gone way before the rape story. She left around the time Ed and Holly got divorced.

Yes, I agree, he was definitely created to fill the gaps that were there after they left. But I think the canvas could have supported two powerful millionaires. Especially after they spent SO much time connecting him to the Lewis family. As @P.J. said, Reva and Kyle had a fan base. They were popular together. Having Josh come back, you then have the audience divided over who she should be with, which is a fantastic position for a soap to be in. Who was begging for Alan and Reva to get together and stay together? I know I wasn't, and I sure don't remember them having a fan base clamoring for them to stay together.

You would THINK. But from some of the things that I've heard about Larkin, he seemed to want to be Number 1 in any story. With Long writing the story, Kyle was never going to be Number 1. Reva and Josh were always the end game. By the way, I found a list of the Reardon siblings in order of birth on a GL Wiki: Sean Reardon James "Jim" Reardon Maureen Reardon (deceased) Anthony "Tony" Reardon Lana Reardon Nola Reardon Chelsea Reardon So according to this, Lana would have been the sibling between Tony and Nola.

Yes! Here's the first time he appeared: Gee, Matt does a lot of whining in this episode. Was he always this whiny?

I don't think they wanted to. They were kind of forced to do it. Zimmer was pregnant. Larkin wasn't wrong about becoming the third wheel. That's exactly what happened to Alan. He got stuck being the spoiler/third wheel for Josh and Reva. So he did the wise thing and ended up getting a better gig at AMC.

If he had stayed, they never would have done the Reva/Alan pairing. Damn you, Larkin. 😂

I also remember Tony saying he was 8 years old at the time his father disappeared. It was mentioned that Nola was a baby at the time. So there could have been a sibling in between Tony and Nola. Who knows, maybe Marland had the Reardon siblings' names and birth order all written down in his soap bible, but once he left no one cared and they just did what they wanted.

I think they did that so they could do a "who's the daddy" story. Wasn't Zimmer pregnant at this point? They were writing her pregnancy into the show. If that hadn't been the case, they probably wouldn't have jumped back into bed and back together so fast. But we are talking about the Slut of Springfield, so....

I believe the order is: Sean, Jim, Mo, Tony, Nola, Chelsea. There is one more female sibling who was never seen (though supposedly was named Lana). I always think of her as either before or after Sean. So oldest or second oldest. That's just me, though. I don't believe her place in the order was ever mentioned. I recall Mo and Jim once discussing being the two oldest and in charge of the younger kids, but it's obvious to me that was retooled later when they introduced Sean's kids. Let's face it, once they changed Nola's status as baby, there was no reason other writers couldn't change the order again. 😁

Yes, this is definitely a big problem. I don't think they should try to appease the viewers all the time, because we don't know what's coming and it takes time for a new show to get its footing. But when you see in multiple places the same few actors/characters/stories being complained about, you need to course correct. If you're taping so far ahead, you can't really do that.

I've been thinking this is inevitable, too, and I wonder...will they use this as an excuse to introduce Doug and Vanessa's kids? They were mentioned again recently. Has anyone heard of possible casting for these characters? Although Doug is likely on the way out, seems to me a perfect opportunity to create a family unit unconnected to the Duprees. (DNA-wise, I mean).

Jacobs could be a Shakespearian level actress, and we wouldn't know it for exactly the reasons you state. I LOVE when actors who are underrrated are given some great material and surprise everyone. But she needs the great material and she ain't getting it. Which is kind of puzzling, because it's not like they can't write good stuff.

This is a problem a lot of soaps have, even to this day. They don't know what to do with married couples. The same thing happened with Nola and Quint. Long tried to create a triangle with Tony/Anabelle/Jim, but that was absurd. Jim's girlfriend had just blown up, FFS. Of course they dropped it like a hot potato. Even their participation in the Barbados story was ridiculous--it had nothing to do with them, except for Anabelle's "psychic" visions. And don't forget the "Nolarobics" nonsense, which literally drove Lisa Brown off the show. Alan and Hope's marriage was a little different because there was the spectre of Alan's illegal dealings hanging over them, along with the Amanda reveal and his affair with Rita. As soon as all that resolved--boom, they were on the backburner. Breaking them up was absolutely the correct choice--the mistake was writing Hope out for good. Hillary and Leslie Ann getting croaked had to do with Kobe's determination to clean out most of the Dobsons' and Marland's characters. It's always been a mystery to me why Trish didn't last. The Lewises basically took over from the Bauers as the central core family, she was definitely a needed character. Oh, I have tons of criticisms to level at Long. And I didn't hate everything Marland did. They both had certain things they did better than the other. If you were Josh's friend, wouldn't you want to? 😂

The thing is, none of those flirtations went anywhere, and I think that was intentional. Kelly was always destined to be in a triangle with Morgan and Nola, Josh flirted with anything in a skirt, the Tony thing went nowhere. Even the Derek relationship was mainly filler. She never got an actual story. The closest was her being Roger's lover while he was married to Holly. The Derek actor (I forget his name now) apparently was popular with the audience. People were upset when he was written out. So maybe if Marland had done something with them other than having Hillary constantly going back and forth about the relationship, it might have gone somewhere. The thing about the Marland era was that he had a lot of characters--Vanessa, Tony, Josh, Hillary, Trish--not really in a focused storyline or in a real love story. Pam Long corrected a lot of that. In Hillary's case it didn't work out, but she at least tried, and she had some big successes, like Van and Billy and Josh and Reva.

Oooh...oooh...and they still could have given her a past with Alan. Like the reason she's so tough is because the Spauldings screwed up her life. And even though Mo's dead, she never stopped being jealous that Mo got the kind of life she could have had if it wasn't for those rotten Spauldings. Maybe she would pursue both Ed and Alan with a mind for revenge. SO many possibilities. I bet Ellen would have had a blast playing a bad girl.

I agree. With the right actress and a writer interested in giving her some good material play, she could have helped to revive the Bauers. It seems to me Pam Long tried to make Hillary a more prominent character. Marland had turned her into a rather sanctimonious side character. Long put her in a love triangle with Jim and Fletcher, but it belly flopped. Then I think the BTS story goes that Kobe got mad at Clark because she went to Hollywood for pilot season, making it necessary to pre-tape a lot of her scenes. So the character was killed off. Like killing off Lujack, it was a very short-sighted decision.