DeeVee

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.

It's REALLY difficult to choose which was the grossest pairing Beth ever had--Alan or Bill. This was during the awful Lorelai Hills storyline. After Beth disappears in a flood (the second time she suffered a supposed watery death--we love things that rhyme), Edmund finds a girl named Lorelai Hills who looks remarkably like Beth and brings her back to SF to impersonate her. Lorelai was a stereotypical hillbilly character (if I was from the South, I would have been VERY offended by this character). Seriously, they may as well have named her Daisy May. In case you didn't get it, they made Chamberlin talk in a Foghorn Leghorn accent. Of course, it turned out she really WAS Beth. Lorelai was an alternate personality she developed to deal with the near-death trauma. She met Bill while she was Lorelai and they had an affair that started in a barn, IIRC. Because where else would someone like that have an affair with a stranger? Why Bill? Beats me! The whole thing was only slightly less ridiculous than the clone storyline. Lorelai came thisclose to making my list of all-time worst GL characters, by the way.

Thanks. Welp, that answers my question. Cringey that she says nice things about him, but that's understandable, since badmouthing a director who was also her ex wouldn't have done much good for her career. Yikes. This makes me dislike Kobe all the more. If the actors knew, she knew. Of course, she couldn't interfere with their personal relationship, but what happened on set is a different story. Makes me think of the story Maeve told on The Locher Room about her first day: Elvera walked up to her and said, "Don't worry, we're the NICE show." Sounds like that changed after Potter retired.

Whoa. When you say abusive relationship, do you mean he was abusive to her on set, or were they in a romantic relationship?When she was 19? Either way: 😬

If they had brought her back as a Hope or Amanda recast, it might have turned out differently. YES, I know she would have seemed too young to be Alan Michael's mother, but she was actually the right age for both characters. Poser was several years younger than Walker and MUCH younger than Cullen, but there was no SORASED child to make that look weird. I would have rather had Hope back played by a phenomenal actress than have her permanently off the canvas because it seemed a little awkward. I agree! Cady brought something out in Hunt that was much more palatable than when he played Ben. I loved the story about them trying to adopt a baby. (Until it got weird because someone thought the kid just HAD to be James's grandson by his heretofore unknown son).

Gee, he thought very highly of himself! I liked him (as an actor), but the character of Tony was never really THAT important to the show. (Did people demand he come back after he left? Not that I recall). Judi, OTOH, got the kind of stuff to play that they love to hand out Emmys for. And she was really good. So I'm surprised her costars were surprised and/or miffed. Was this before the young actor categories were created? Maybe it's because she was so young. I think she was only 19 when she won.

Yes, I've heard stories about him. Not in connection with Vincent, though.

Vincent also talked on the Locher Room about problems with an unnamed male co-star when he first started on the show. I assumed he was talking about Grant, but if he was leaving anyway, it seems doubtful he would have felt threatened by VI.

Challenge! Yay. Jeffrey O'Neill - this is a character you have yet to encounter. Let's just say he's not something to look forward to. Same problem as Ben. Just a relentless a-hole, SO unpleasant to watch. The kind of character that works great on a sitcom but is a disaster on a soap. Lacey Bauer - I suspect the actress was cast because they thought she was cute as a button and that the audience would agree with them. We didn't. Very poorly conceived, very cringey character with a very green actress who made it that much worse. Kelly Nelson - Don’t hate me, JWS fans. This is SOLELY about the character. I HATE that guy. I hated him 40 years ago, I hate him now. Self-satisfied, self-righteous clod who groomed an underage girl and gave HER lectures about controlling her sexual desires. I so enjoyed watching Morgan finally yeet that guy out of her life. Tangie Hill - I struggled coming up with this final choice, but I think this is the right one. I love Marcy Walker. I think what made me the most angry was how she was wasted. Casting her was a stunt. They didn't bother to create a strong character for her, so of course the whole thing was a big, embarrassing flop.

If I was composing a top 5 for worst characters in the history of GL, he would definitely make the list.

I would consider Phillip/Beth and Josh/Reva supercouples, at least in the Kobe/Long era. Yes, I would agree with that. And while many viewers didn't feel this way about them, Ross/Blake, Matt/Vanessa, and Danny/Michelle had some very vocal fans. So much so that they probably lasted a lot longer than they would have otherwise.

They definitely belong among the greats. Such a loss to the genre when Russell died at a relatively young age.

Right, thanks for the refresh! It's a great movie for soap fans. It makes fun of soaps but in a very affectionate way. The cast is phenomenal: Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Downey, Jr., Elisabeth Shue, and small roles by Kathy Najimy and Carrie Fisher. If you've never seen it, seek it out!

This conversation is reminding me of the scene in the movie Soapdish, where Whoopi Goldberg plays a headwriter told to bring a character back from the dead: "He's got no head! How am I supposed to write for a character who's got no head!" (I think the solution they came up with was brain transplant, which still doesn't explain the missing head). I believe when Pam Long was told to bring back Roger Thorpe she had a similar, if scaled down, reaction. IIRC, she said she watched the scene where he fell off the cliff many times because she had no idea how she was going to bring him back. Anyway, best return from the dead, in a way that mostly made sense and became one of the great soap moments of all time: Gerald Anthony's return after Marco Dane's "murder" on OLTL. My sister and I were watching Viki's trial when someone entered the courtroom and sat among the spectators. No fanfare. He just sat down. My sister and I look at each other and we're like, "Who is that? He looks kind of familiar...OH MY GOD, THAT'S GERALD ANTHONY!" Of course, at first they told the audience he was Mario, Marco's brother. We went back and forth endlessly arguing about who he really was. By the time we had accepted he was Mario...they revealed he was Marco. Mario had been killed in his place and when Marco found him he took his identity and vowed to change his life. And he did. The reveal was when he forced Karen to admit Brad had raped her, and she whispered afterwards, "Marco." (My sister and I jumping all over the living room screaming, "He's Marco! He's really Marco!) That was 👨‍🍳😘 soap writing.

The franchise is Pirates of the Caribbean. The message board is on a site called Wordplayer run by the screenwriters of the first four films. I haven't been active on there for a very long time (probably 15 years) but they're still there. I checked. Yes, there was war between those who wanted Kiera Knightley's character paired romantically with Depp's Jack Sparrow and those who wanted her with to stay paired with Orlando Bloom. It frequently got ugly. Do with that information what you will. 😁 I never watched Smallville, and this may be a stupid question, but I can't help asking...didn't they know who Superman ends up with?

Thanks for doing it so I didn't have to. 😁 Someone on the writing staff must have been a sports fan.

I would argue the problem with "Jeva" wasn't the shippers...it was the KZ fans that demanded she be front-burner all the time. They had the potential to become the patriarch/matriarch of SF, but KZ was not going to stand for that. She wanted to be the romantic heroine right up to the bitter end. They absolutely could have paired Josh successfully with someone else--they almost did with Harley. Of course, that was scuttled by RN leaving and Harley being not in a good place to be reunited with him when he came back. So that was the end of that. But he didn't have to be tied to Reva forever. I also thought that was great. They didn't forget Blake was Roger Thorpe's daughter. If they had remembered that a little more often, maybe she wouldn't have become a rather boring character in the end.

I think this is the key. When you have that kind of super-popular couple, you HAVE to break them up periodically. Mac and Rachel on AW were central to the show until Doug Watson's death for this reason. It's just the nature of the beast. But when you have insane fans threatening who-knows-what if you break up their darlings and keep them together long after the rest of the audience is tired of them, you do your show real damage. (And, yes, some of them ARE insane. I used to be on a screenwriting message board run by two very successful Hollywood screenwriters who wrote a hugely popular franchise. At one point, the board was overrun by shippers threatening all kinds of things if they didn't have the heroine end up with this guy instead of the other guy. They thought THEY were the reason the franchise was successful, when in reality the majority of viewers didn't care about the romance part of the movies at all. It was like being in an alternate reality).

The attitude of TPTB on soaps back then reminds me a lot of the people running failing restaurants Gordon Ramsay is trying to save. They'll have a cheapo all-you-can-eat menu that they're losing money on. Ramsay will tell them to get rid of it. "But we'll lose the customers we have!" No matter how much he tries to explain that they're losing money on those customers, and how getting rid of the cheapo deal and adopting a good menu people actually want to eat will bring in a lot more new, higher-paying customers, they still don't listen. We don't talk about it as much as the other reasons many soaps went down the tubes, but kow-towing to shippers (or fans of certain individual actors) was definitely one of the big mistakes many of them made. They were the squeaky wheels, they got the grease, to the detriment of the stories.

I would add to that Ron Raines was a terrible recast as Alan, his return was awful, and they never wrote the character beyond a cartoon villain the rest of the life of the show. It was always going to be difficult to replace Bernau, but there were better, more charismatic actors out there, and Raines was not responsible for the lousy writing for the character.

Kobe, of course, was wrong. The best stories on soaps come FROM character. A perfect example of that, IMO, is Dark Shadows, which was TOTALLY over-the-top as far as plot, but I think why people loved it so much and why it remained a cult show is because everything came from character. The characters even remained consistent through different timelines. Barnabas, for instance, is always a guy fighting against the curse he's under by trying recreate a long-dead romance. Pretty much everything he does comes from that, even after he escapes the curse. Quentin is completely ruled by his dick. (As a kid, of course, I didn't pick up on this 😁). That's consistent from story to story. When DS stopped being consistent (i.e. putting Jonathan Frid and Lara Parker together as a romantic couple instead of adversaries) that's when they lost the audience. If you look at the older soap storylines, so many of them came from character. Rachel on AW and Jill on Y&R wanting more than what they were born into, Iris having a daddy fixation, Laurie's jealousy of her sister Leslie, Katherine Chancellor refusing to let anyone put her on a shelf because she was over 40--those are just a few examples. Soaps could have done the wild stuff just fine--IF a lot it come had come from character. It was plot driving characters instead of characters driving plot that damaged soaps, IMO.

Doesn't Geary's return as Bill Eckert belong in this category? A huge flop. I remember Geary talking in interviews about being very excited at the chance to get away from the Luke character. The character was awful, the storylines were worse, so they had to kill him off and bring back Luke. Am I remembering that correctly?

That's one of the many missed opportunities with GL...they teased Ross and Vanessa many times and never saw it through, even though Jerry and Maeve had fantastic chemistry and the characters had a great backstory. Yes, they could have been the core patriarch/matriarch...ironic, since both started as a bad boy/bad girl. But it makes sense for this show because Bert also was far from a perfect person in her younger days. She grew into the role, and these two could have, too. I know, silly, isn't it? And Bernadette would have not been a modern soap heroine name, either. MY thought was they should have invented a pretty, more fashionable MIDDLE name for Bert, and name a kid that. "Did you know Bert's full name is Bertha BLANK Bauer? Why don't we call her BLANK? Isn't that a pretty name? And so in fashion now!" So. Simple. Especially since ED is called that after Bill Bauer's middle name. It's even a kind of tradition in the family.