DeeVee

They were, and when they had good material to play it was sublime to watch them. I think they could have done the love/hate thing well if it wasn't mostly done for the plot purposes. There were times when I forgot she's a Bauer. Yeah, she was Bill's secret child and didn't grow up with them, so it kind of makes sense. But she was boring and irrelevant most of the time. Of all the characters that got the axe when Kobe took over, her exit bothered me the least, even though technically she was a core family member. How could I forget Ross and Justin? Jerry and Tom were very believable as brothers. They loved each other, they annoyed each other, they fought, they made up and helped each other. Definitely a real "big brother trying to keep his little brother from making similar mistakes" vibe between them.

Sometimes the Alan/Alex dynamic was very well done, but I think they resorted to them being almost cartoonishly antagonistic too many times. Strangely, I never really bought Ed and Mike as brothers. Or maybe it's not so strange, since Mike stole Ed's wife.

A lot of times on soaps friendships are just a way to convey exposition or for one character to be the sounding board for the other. Nola and her friend Gracie were kind of cute together, but mostly Gracie was a sounding board. Same with Hope and Amanda. I would have liked them to have a real, complex relationship, including calling each other out more, like when Amanda was screwing her pregnant mother's husband or Hope obediently stood by Alan when he stole the Spaulding presidency from Amanda. The nice thing about Rita and Evie's sister relationship was that they often disagreed about a lot of things, even hurt each other sometimes, but did support each other in the end. With Reva and Roxy...it was mostly about Reva, of course. I don't remember much about her and Cassie because my viewing of GL was very spotty at the time.

She worked at the hospital for a short time. That's it. That's the only connection. It's kind of wild that Reva, the show's de facto "star," had very little to do with anyone outside the Lewises and Spauldings other than her brief marriage to Buzz. Did she have much to do with Abby after she married Rick? Going back to GL being lousy when it came to friendships, that would be a prime example of dropping the ball.

I've seen the shimmy part of that episode (probably on The Locher Room 😂) but I don't recall the rest of this. WHY would Reva care about Ed?

That one was hilarious! Dinah, Dorie, the former stepdaughter who once hated her guts (yes, she was Kyle's niece, but still), and the sister who had been sexually humiliated by the groom. And wasn't Lillian in the party, too? They worked together at the hospital for like a minute? She was Hawk's girlfriend for a while, true. But were Lillian and Reva ever shown as friends after that? Yep. And while he wasn't my favorite, Mike. So much history to mine from those characters.

There was one remaining unseen female Reardon sibling, so they definitely could have done that. Or they could have invented a Reardon cousin or something.

It's kind of remarkable that they were able to get all these actors back multiple times over the years. Along with Kim, Robert, Maeve. I think someone mentioned once after GA came back to replace Bolger, the show saw him as key to the show's success and refused to recast with another actor. Obviously, they were never going to recast Kim, and the only time they recast Maeve was for her maternity leave. It's interesting to contemplate who they considered irreplaceable. Some important ones were replaced because of illness/retirement/death (i.e. Roger/Alex/Alan). Some were killed off rather than replaced (i.e. Jerry). I like O'Leary, but I think he could have been replaced. Unless they thought the chemistry between him and GA was too valuable.

For sure. It was most obvious whenever they did a wedding and the wedding party would be made up of people the bride and groom were hardly friends with. Or they had no wedding party. Or their kids would stand up for them.

Wait, what? Why would there be a fountain gag at Blake's wedding, when the fountain is associated with Reva and her "Slut of Springfield" scene? I haven't seen that wedding and would love an explanation, because that sounds incredibly bizarre. 😂

It was kind of all over the place. Reva was brought to SF by Alan to break up Billy and Vanessa. She told Billy their divorce never went through, and blackmailed him into giving her a larger settlement. So of course they were not on friendly terms. However, once Reva reconnected with Josh, she regretted what she had done to Billy. So she tried to fix things between Billy and Vanessa. She did not hold up the divorce and withdrew her demand for more money. She even encouraged Vanessa to reconcile with Billy and marry him. Later, when Vanessa was engaged to Alan, he was also pursuing Reva, so again they were rivals. But Van ultimately decided to leave Alan to help Billy, who had fallen off the wagon in Venezuela. Just before she left, she and Reva had a kind of friendly goodbye. That's about it until Reva returned from the dead, I believe.

RIGHT. I remember Lenz was getting a lot of acclaim in the soap mags for her part in the clone story and someone from the show was quoted as saying they were looking for a way to bring her back into the show. Well, heck. It would have been nice if they had finally confirmed Roxy was no longer in the asylum, regardless of whether they brought in their kid as a new character.

That made me so furious. Before seeing the episode, I could say, "Yeah, Alan's bad, but he was never a rapist." In fact, he gave Roger sh!t about raping Rita and Holly. He was a controlling bastard, and he could be emotionally and mentally abusive, but he was never physically abusive. Long did not understand Alan's character at all. Nor did any writer after Marland left the show, really.

One of the oddest things about watching older episodes of soaps (mainly from the 1980s, when they briefly moved over into the mainstream) is how many people are in scenes! Guiding Light, for instance, had at least one HUGE party per month, lasting over muliple episodes, with tons of extras dressed up in fancy clothes. The hospital scenes had lots of extras, too, and lots of "under-five" players (characters who would say under five lines of dialogue per episode). No more. It's a cost-saving measure. Creating firehouse buddies or family members for Derek costs money. It also explains the very limited number of sets.

It didn't help that Julie was horribly selfish during this time. Her mother risks her life (she had leukemia, IIRC) to give birth to Hope. Julie's reaction when she hears of Hope's birth? "I would have given him a son!" Even back then, I thought it was wrong to kill off a core--and popular--family member, no matter how dramatic in the short-term. At least they made Doug and Julie wait quite a long time before they were able to get together.

Yep, she was poorly drawn. A total stereotype. Belle Watling from Gone With the Wind updated for the 1980s. One of Pam Long's biggest flaws IMO was her obvious obsession with GWTW. Restaging the Rhett/Scarlett meeting when Billy and Vanessa met, the Civil War themed engagement party with two Scarletts fighting each other, Miss Belle, I mean, Miss Sally. And let's not forget, Reva's scarlett red dress. Recently on the German channel I came across an episode right after Reva came back to Alan after having sex with Josh in Venezuela. He knew she had cheated on him because he had a detective following them. He insisted they go to a party (I think it was in honor of Rick and Meredith who had just come back from their honeymoon) and that she WEAR THE RED DRESS. To a party where everyone else was wearing jeans. She complied. Just like Rhett made Scarlett do after finding out she had kissed Ashley. The insanity of this episde escalates beyond GWTW fanfic. Alan tries to rape her at the party. Phillip literally has to drag him off her. AND THEN SHE GOES BACK HOME WITH HIM. She only threw Alan out later when she found out he slept with Blake in Mexico. While they were "on a break." THAT was the red line? No bueno.

Kyle and Billy were HALF brothers! Yeah, one of those instances where they did this BIG reveal and...it hardly impacted the show at all.

Wasn't Brooke's mother the head of a drug cartel with the code name Cobra? Am I remembering that correctly? WAY back in the day Barry also played Addie Horton on DOOL, Julie and Hope's mother.

That is Miss Sally, a former madam and an old "friend" of HB. She is the mother of Kyle Sampson, a rich businessman who, let's face it, was a placeholder character because Robert Newman (Josh) and Chris Bernau (Alan) had left the show. Consequently, he became Reva's love interest and the "mover and shaker" character who drove a lot of plot. Going back to Miss Sally, at first everyone thought Kyle was HB's son. He and Sally let everyone believe that because they didn't want people to know BILLY was actually Sally's son by HB. Almost as soon as RN and CB returned to the show, Kyle and Miss Sally were written out, though Miss Sally came back briefly after Marah was born because she suspected she was Kyle's daughter. (She wasn't).

She liked that he made her a princess. The more we talk about Beth during this era of GL, the more destroyed her character seems. They just totally shredded her.

Edmund and Beth were NOTHING compared to Edmund and Cassie. I'll be honest--I LOVED the chemistry between the two actors. BUT HE CAUSED THE DEATH OF HER BABY. DELIBERATELY. One of the reasons I quit watching most soaps in the 2000s was this kind of thing. They just wouldn't stop putting women with men who abused/hurt them.

I am old enough to remember. I stopped watching DOOL after Bill Bell stopped having anything to do with it, which I guess tells you something. I think if you could watch those episodes today, they would seem VERY slow moving. And he had a some attitudes that would come across today as very old-fashioned. (He obviously evolved when he wrote Y&R, which from the beginning was meant to appeal to a young, hip audience). I was young at the time, and I did wish the show would move a little faster. But I could not stop watching. And while his lens would seem old-fashioned today, he did do some pretty daring stuff for the time. He an abortion storyline where the girl was not at all sorry for having one, he tried to create an interracial romance (which unfortunately got so much heat from some viewers he had to drop it), and I think he was the first to do a multiple-personality brought on by SA story on a soap. Yes, you would definitely see the genesis of certain things that ended up on Y&R and B&B.

I will never forget watching that barn scene. I was working from home (for myself, I had a little business that I ran out of home) and I was living with my mom (the business was not a big money-maker, LOL). Occassionally, I would take a break to watch soaps with her. When that scene came on, I kid you not, we looked at each other with our jaws almost on the floor. We were like, "What is happening? WHY is this happening?" 😂 Also, almost up until Marina was born, he thought he was her father! Also Dylan. And Peter, if you want to count him. Didn't Billy and Vanessa consider Peter their kid?

I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with that one. Or Rick and Blake. Or Jonathan and Tammy. I mean, if you're going to go for it, GO for it. An Irish soap opera had a half-brother and sister get together AFTER they found out how they were related. Don't do quasi-incest stories. Have to cojones to do a REAL one. So we're SUPPOSED to be disgusted by it. (Or not. I think that Irish story was popular, LOL).

OH. MY. GOD. THAT explains it. She's one of TPTB's pet. These things NEVER go well. As we are experiencing in real time. The wild thing is that over time Derek has become less annoying and most are not as critical of the actor. Yet Ashley/Jen continue to be the worst things about the show. If they are so committed to making the character work, they need to write her better. It's not all Jacob's fault.