Romalotti

I have always liked John McCook as Eric. I can’t see anyone else in the role now. He has a certain charm and his acting is serviceable. He was kind of a wuss but that’s what happens when you’re married to Stephanie for decades. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Oh yeah that’s right! Latham didn’t show up until around 2006 or 2007. How did John F. Smith get the OK to move forward with THAT story? 🤷🏻‍♂️

What storylines do you consider to be the rough patch?

I have been watching from the beginning and season one, episode 120 is so bizarre. Suddenly Stephanie is showing up at the Logan house to see Caroline for the first time AGAIN. She meets Beth for the first time again, even though all this happened a few episodes ago. Except now Caroline has already identified her attacker in the lineup. There’s all new scenes with Storm and Beth and Stephanie together in the Logan kitchen….it’s all so bizarre. I feel like they decided to move around some scenes after they were already shot and they accidentally messed up the continuity. Surprised no one noticed before it aired or else they DID notice and weren’t going to spend the money for even more reshoots. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I think that ANY soap these days would benefit from Bill Bell’s magic touch…especially and ironically Y&R. 😏

A HUGE agree from me on that. I’ve seen paternity reveals totally derail soaps over the years. I’ll never forgive Y&R and Lynn Marie Latham for the Katherine/Jill reveal. And it was all reversed a few years later anyway. Also, I groan when I think about Richard Channing being Angela’s son on Falcon Crest (that reveal was handled HORRIBLY by the writers too — somehow the whole town just suddenly knew about it but no one was shown being told about it and it had almost zero implications on the characters overall). I feel that most of the time, these “shocking reveals” that change family dynamics hurt the shows overall. And like you said, after the shock, often the writers have nowhere to go with the story. There’s plenty of drama to be mined from characters without half of the town finding out that they have a different mother or father than they previously thought.

Hunter Tylo said that when she auditioned for the show, she was auditioning for both Caroline’s doctor and Caroline herself. Bill Bell was trying so hard to find a suitable recast for Caroline and then just realized it was futile and decided to have her succumb to cancer.

I loved reading your analysis of the episodes! I’m on episode 113 at the moment.

I did share it on the message board a few weeks ago. It feels good to know that they are actually listening to and responding to the viewers.

I had some issues with the audio through the first chunk of season one episodes. Mostly the background music was so insanely loud that sometimes you’d see the actors speaking and wouldn’t be able to hear anything. I switched over to watching episodes on Tubi because the audio levels are normal on there. I’m hoping they fix the issue before I reach season two.

As soon as I saw your post, I bought the book for $10 on Kindle and just finished reading it. It’s a good book with lots of information I didn’t know about before. Bill Bell will always be one of my creative inspirations. Thank you for leading me to the book!

I’ve been watching the show for the first time. I’m at the end of season seven and I agree with pretty much everything you said. Season seven was the first season where I felt disconnected from the show. It felt like there was no plan and characters were suddenly pawns of the plots and nothing else. Half of the cast disappeared for multiple episodes and when they WERE onscreen, they got thrown into one disjointed storyline after another. It’s kinda sad that the show fell off so far, so fast. But your opinion of season eight has me a little hopeful, at least.

I remember the scenes you’re talking about. It’s very early in the first season. Chase and Maggie act surprised that Angela would do something so underhanded when Angela had JUST done something underhanded in the previous episode. Actually this happened because they reversed the airing order of two episodes, rather than the writers trying to be explicitly episodic.

Personally, I love Marquita Goings in this role and I’ll be saddened to see her leave the show. So, with that in mind, I am a bit forgiving of the writers for stalling the poisoning plot. I figure when Hayley is exposed, she’s leaving the show soon afterwards and I don’t want her to go. That being said, YES they need to advance this storyline. Hayley was revealed to be a scammer back in OCTOBER. It’s over half a year later and the only advancement in the storyline is that Lynette has come and gone and now we are back to square one — Hayley brazenly poisoning Bill’s drinks in public. 🙄

I kinda wish I knew more of the inner workings of the soap world. Like, did they sideline Nicole because they only budgeted for a certain amount of actors in an episode? Or because she is needed for multiple episodes later in the week so they wanted to give her a day off? I need to find a good autobiography written by a soap scribe. Too bad Bill Bell never wrote an autobiography. It would have been a classic and we could have learned so much from it.