Khan

I felt like I was watching a National Airlines commercial. ("Hi! I'm Karen! Fly me!")

I think that would have been a smart move on ABC's part.

I agree. JT could put out a slammin' album tomorrow, but no one under age 40 is gonna care. He's truly ready for the Vegas residency/talent show co-host circuit.

Ironically, when I think about the stuff that worked for me as a viewer, it tends to be the OTT stuff, like Jeff's obsession with Trisha, or the Loving murders, or even that whacked-out mess that had Dante keeping Curtis in a cage and referring to him as his pussycat or whatever, lol. I think I've said before that LOVING needed to be ABC's answer to DAYS, with stories centered around high romance and adventure (or, as "high" as a half-hour show with a limited budget could get, lol).

Yeah, I know she's a bit of a wackadoo IRL, lol. But I think she's basically harmless. I just wouldn't talk about politics with her, lol. To this day, I'm amazed at how no one at any network ever tried rebooting "Peyton Place" after "Desperate Housewives" became such a hit. To me, it would have seemed utterly natural to try and revive that franchise.

I remember when "Murphy Brown" did an episode that was inspired by all the drama surrounding that time, starting off with a montage of NFL footage set to the Supremes' "My World is Empty Without You," lol.

I think it all goes back to one, sad truth: no one - not the network, not the people who worked on the show BTS, not even the ones who created it in the first place - ever, truly knew what their show was about. In fact, there are times when I suspect LOVING actually was two, separate shows welded together - with Agnes Nixon's show being the one centered around a university, and Douglas Marland's being about economically diverse families struggling to co-exist in the same, small town - to give us one show with two halves that never quite gelled. And I agree about TC's intro not aging well, despite it giving their show a sense of identity or purpose that LOVING had lacked.

I agree. I think I've seen a fair amount of Mary-Ellis Bunim's work on ATWT; and in the beginning, at least, I think she had a lot of interesting ideas for how to freshen up and modernize the show. By 1983 or '84, however, ATWT had become such a mess, due to so much of it revolving either James and his circle or the Steve/Betsy romance that the rest of the show was suffering from neglect. SBH and Robert Calhoun, therefore, really had their work cut out for them, as they had to recalibrate the show after a period of so much excess.

If I'm not mistaken, Y&R's actors also had difficulty getting any "Emmy love" before Terry Lester finally broke through w/ his first nod either in '84 or '85. But I tend to think the Academy was biased against the West Coast-based soaps in general, and biased against Y&R in particular, due to its' heavily stylized nature. Conversely, actors on DAYS and on AW started out as front-runners and odds-on favorites in Emmy races, but after Douglass Watson's back-to-back victories in the early '80's, it was difficult for them to receive nominations, let alone wins. Which makes the rare NBC win afterwards (like Leann Hunley's in '85 or '86 for DAYS, or all of AW's wins during the JFP era) all the more remarkable, because, aside from SaBa, it's as if the Academy had written off the NBC shows as lightweight.

I don't think so. And, like Jennifer Weiner writes in that column posted upthread, even if he is cancelled, it won't be for long. This country is all about giving people a second chance, especially if the person in question is white and male.

At this point, I'm begging Josh Griffith to make Sharon the Genoa City Slasher's inaugural victim. Killing her off has to be better than not writing for her at all, lol.

Trust me: no matter how great the Greene siblings might be atm, Ron Carlivati will do something to make us wish them all into the cornfield someday. I'm as sure of that as I am that the sun will continue to rise in the east and set in the west.

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear it was Sam Hall and/or Peggy O'Shea who wrote that scene. OLTL's the only other soap I know of that would have something like that on their show.

I don't agree that Susan Lucci's one win was for something (more) substantial. As a matter of fact, I would place the episode(s) that got her that Emmy more-or-less on the same level as everything else she'd ever been nominated for (and I say that as one who worships the rain that waters the grass that grows on the ground she walks on). It's just that (IMO) she won in a year when the other Lead Actress nominees' work was either weak and underwhelming (Hubbard, Scott) or country-ass dumb (Zimmer and the damn clone, lol), with Jeanne Cooper being the only nominee that year that you could argue was "robbed." I think the reason why GL always under-performed at the Emmys comes down to one thing: GL's cast and directors might have been among the best in daytime, if not THE best, but the show didn't always have an EP and/or HW who wrote and produced the kind of flashy, eye-catching, submission reel-ready material that Academy voters obviously love. Even Lisa Brown's work as Nola, as stunning as it was to watch, couldn't have touched, say, Judith Light's work as OLTL's Karen Wolek, or Jane Elliot's as GH's Tracy Quartermaine; and for all the reasons that Beverlee McKinsey gave over the years for not even submitting herself for a nomination as Alexandra, I think the REAL reason is that even she was astute enough to know that GL didn't write/produce for her the way Paul Rauch and Harding Lemay had at AW. Moreover, I think it says something that GL couldn't make headway in terms of getting their actors nominated, let alone helping them win, until Pam Long became HW. Whether or not getting actors nominated for awards was her true intention, It seems like Long was the first HW who knew how to give GL's actors the kind of just-give-'em-their-damn-Emmy-already material that usually helped the actors on the ABC shows win. And I think THAT comes down to two things: 1) Long's own acting background; and 2) her tendency to write big, emotional stuff that challenges the actors to swing for the proverbial fences. Next to Sheri Anderson/Leah Laiman/Thom Racina, no one writes soap opera with more "heart" than Pamela K. Long. Except, I would say that Hubbard routinely had better, less degradating (sp?) or humiliating material (which is why I consider her perennial snubs as Lucinda the real travesty of the Daytime Emmys in the '80's). Yes, I always enjoyed watching Bev do her thang, but I feel like the only time she had the kind of material that said, "Yes, nominate her for the Emmy TODAY!," was 1991-92; and even then, McKinsey deserved to be nominated, not because she did so brilliantly with such great material - because, in retrospect, what they wrote for her absolutely amounted to character assassination - but because she performed a minor miracle in retaining Alex's humanity at a period when GL was clearly turning her into the Evil Bitch Monster from Hell. And by the way, I'm not even including JFP at all in this discussion because GL's wins during her tenure, while not entirely undeserved, were truly the result of bloc voting more than anything else. JFP had cracked the Emmy code at SaBa and so she gamed the hell out of 'em. (And I think the Academy low-key resented her, too, even as they (begrudgingly) awarded her actors. Don't believe me? Ask yourself why, with all the attention that the press and the blue ribbon panels lavished on the show in the '90's, GL never won the Best Series Emmy during the JFP era.)

I'm with @I Am A Swede: no lies detected, lol. Ladies and gentlemen, the REAL Justin Timberlake, a white kid who's cute enough in his western attire, but who's really just an average performer:

There's a character named "Chad" and a character named "Everett" and they're involved in the same storyline. Please tell me that that was unintentional and NOT an opportunity for Ron Carlivati to give a shout-out to "Medical Center."

I think the shows were more willing to phase out older or veteran characters when they still believed that the genre as a whole was thriving. Once reality set in, however, and shows like AMC and GL, among others, started getting canceled, I think TPTB panicked and began keeping those characters at the forefront, even at the risk of not allowing them to mature, out of fears of losing the fans they still had.

It does seem as if ATWT was a show in search of some fresh, modern ideas by the late '70's, but I'm still not sure whether the steps they undertook to reach those goals were the wisest.

Asking Ron Carlivati not to [!@#$%^&*] up something...well, like the song says:

ICAM! Once upon a time, Bill Bell phased out most of the Brookses and Fosters out of necessity. I think it's way past time for Y&R to do another similar reset.

JT has only one issue, and that's being a mediocre white male who's over the hill and who had to appropriate Black culture in order to be successful.

I think former Y&R EP David Shaughnessy (sp?) had the healthiest attitude about trimming casts and writing out even longtime characters: it might suck initially to "lose" them, but if you give the audience brand new characters who are compelling on their own, the audience will, in time, adjust. (Of course, I'm paraphrasing what he said, but you get the idea).

And he wonders why Y&R won't return his calls anymore, lol.

I don't remember Tom Verica being on the show either! Forgive me, y'all, but I think that man is so hot, lol! IIRC, Debi Mazar and Alan Rosenberg played the same characters on "L.A. Law" that they had played previously on "Civil Wars," a legal drama series (created by "L.A. Law"'s final showrunner, William M. Finkelstein; and co-EP'ed by Bochco) that ran for two seasons on ABC. Being the Bochco semi-fanatic* that I am, I watched CW as well as "L.A. Law," and I gotta tell ya: even back then, I thought it was weird and wrong to see two characters from one failed show being shoehorned onto another, dying show. Especially because, for all the talent that was BTS at CW - not just Bochco & Finkelstein, but Charles Eglee & Channing Gibson as well - I thought CW was just okay. (*I still can't get into "NYPD Blue." Sorry.)

The fact that many of us here think Bryan Craig returning as Morgan to GH remains a real possibility should prove to anyone that GH and Frank Valentini are trash.