DeeVee

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.

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.