Khan

Won't argue with you there, lol. Meanwhile, I think his story - disgraced politician goes into business/private practice with his daughter - has the seeds for a really good, one-hour dramedy.

John Edwards might be a shitheel, but he never gets credit for predicting that the WWC would turn away from the Democratic Party before most everyone else. If they had listened to him instead of pursuing his "baby mama drama," things might've been different.

Probably not. Just as I don't think DALLAS would have lasted as long as it did, had Friday nights not become such a wasteland by then (ABC's "TGIF" lineup notwithstanding). Definitely. In order to have survived against a juggernaut like "ER" and the rest of the NBC Must-See-TV lineup, KNOTS would have needed to reinvent itself from the ground up, but do so with a severely reduced budget. Frankly, I think that would've been impossible. It's almost as if you could have put all three shows (or at least KNOTS and MSW, since I'm not sure when ITHOTN switched networks) on Sunday nights, lol. Frankly, unless Olivia was, in fact, his killer, and Abby took the rap in order to protect her daughter, I didn't see the point - certainly, not the point of having his murder be any sort of mystery, since it didn't seem like that many had reason to kill him in the first place.

Exactly. As absurd as the premise was - even the suggestion that Josh would agree to clone Reva because he was so upset over her second presumed death was so out-of-character and a huge leap for viewers to take - there still were opportunities for the audience to connect with the storyline, and with Reva, emotionally. But, as James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten admitted after leaving the show, the Rapid Aging Serum became a bridge too far for the folks watching at home. Leave out that plot device, and I think the story could have worked (or, worked as well as any story about human cloning could work, lol). I don't get it either, but I would imagine that Paul Rauch championed the idea, likely because of a similar story that he had done in the '80's with OLTL's Viki. As a matter of fact, if you were to do a side-by-side comparison of Viki and Reva, you'd see that, under Paul Rauch's care, both characters were at the center of some very OTT stories. However, the difference between Viki's stories (Heaven, Eterna, Wild West, etc) and Reva's - and the reason why Viki's stories worked where Reva's didn't - was that Viki (that is, when she was Viki and not Niki) was not a larger-than-life heroine who wore her emotions on her proverbial sleeve the way Reva always did. And that's absolutely the secret to making an outside-the-box type of story like time travel or cloning work, IMO: it has to be told through a character who isn't so larger-than-life that they're actually battling for attention with the outrageousness of the plot. (Case in point: Dr. Marlena Evans Brady).

Even with KZ still in the cast, GL finally had in Robert Calhoun what it hadn't had since Allen Potter left in '83: an EP with a real sense of story. Unfortunately, Calhoun had the same problem that all EP's at GL had once production moved from Chelsea to EUE/Screen Gems: godawful-looking sets. Seriously, from, like, 1987/88 onward, very few GL sets were all that attractive to me or made any sense at all, lol.

I think the main reason why Erica Kane's stories never felt inflicted upon AMC was because AMC itself had what Michael Malone once described to SOD or SOW as a "bright, cartoonish quality." It always was in its' DNA to be a little broad and campy. Here's the thing about Reva (and what I think TPTB had forgotten after a certain point): whenever it came to her emotions, Reva Shayne Lewis was an all-or-nothing gal. If she loved you, she loved the hell out of you; and if she didn't....! Her circumstances, therefore, NEEDED to be mundane, run-of-the-mill soap opera - like they were when she married H.B. and when she miscarried their baby - or else she becomes too much for the audience to take. That's why stories like Ghost Reva, Amish Reva, Clone Reva, Princess Reva and so on didn't work, IMO. Not because they were too larger-than-life for GL, but because they were for a character who was already larger-than-life herself.

If there's ever a point in KNOTS' long run when following along becomes a chore for me, it has to be S13, when the show is being run by someone (John Romano) who displays no knowledge of KNOTS' history, no aptitude or affinity for the type of show KNOTS has always been and no willingness even to redefine the show in ways that could attract a new and different audience. Even the Lechowicks at their most audacious still could keep you from tuning out, if only to see just how far they'd hoped to go with some of their [!@#$%^&*]; but S13, IMO, commits the even greater sin of being boring, something you could not ever say about any other season that comes before. I agree. It might be a little too "smooth jazz" for some, but I think it works perfectly for the post-Reagan era, when everyone was coming down from all the excess and getting back to basics, so to speak. I think the only mistake they made that season with that opening was not including shots of each cast member as the camera surveys the sandcastles.

Pro-tip: If you want to know whether a particular season of KNOTS is...not bad, just look at Michele Lee's hair. If her 'do looks good, then the show is doing okay. If it isn't, look out!

ICAM!!

Serial killers' pathologies rarely are coherent on soaps, which is why I detest them with a passion, lol.

Yes. Even daytime's answer to Rip Taylor, Ron Carlivati, understands how to structure a story and even a scene better than Tyler Perry.

I hope it is, because trying to dip in and out, as I had planned to do, isn't working for me. Watching KNOTS isn't like watching "Murder, She Wrote." I have to watch this one from the very beginning and then all the way through at my own pace.

Even worse, I've heard TP complain in the past how he was "forced" to take on other writers but that their work didn't meet his standards. Bruh, I seriously doubt there's a writer alive who writes worse than you, lol.

It *is* insane, and one of the many reasons why I think most of his stuff is pure junk. Yet, it seems his core audience - mostly older, African-American women who love them some Jesus - can't get enough of it. *shrug*

I agree. It always comes down to execution in the end.

Frankly, I don't believe it will. Y&R remains firmly on top of the ratings, and unless/until that changes, I don't believe TPTB ever will see a need to improve anything.

That would have been the perfect tagline in all the ads for the show, lol.

I've always felt that a perfect storyline for latter-days DALLAS or KNOTS would have been J.R. enticing Val with an offer to "ghost write" his memoirs.

As far as daytime talk show hosts go, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey define much of my early childhood. Even after he'd left the airwaves, it still was hard to turn over to my local ABC affiliate and not see him on there every afternoon. He will be missed.

I particularly love Kamala Harris' "We're still the underdog" comment. She knows just as much as we do that we cannot afford to be complacent no matter what the polls might say.

I don't believe EB or Bill Bell ever took for granted how much African-American audiences meant to Y&R's success - even in the '80's, when Bell had Phil Morris in whiteface and thugs named "Jazz" and "Kong" running around Genoa City - which is why it pains me so much to see how the current powers-that-be seemingly disregard their AA cast members by not featuring them enough in front-burner storylines.

EB is a true mensch AND he's no fool. He knows he'd still be in TV Guest Villain Hell if not for the millions of African-Americans who have looked to Victor Newman as an icon and sex symbol.

Y&R's Nikki Newman and OLTL's Karen Wolek both had to learn the hard way that no amount of money in the world can clean you up or make people forget about your past. On the one hand, Nikki deserved most, if not all, of those barbs, simply because she can be so hypocritical whenever it comes to judging other women and their behaviors. But, on the other hand, I also feel sorry for her the same way I feel sorry for any sex worker who has been shamed simply for using their body and/or sexuality to make a living. I *think* if I were in Sharon or Diane's shoes, I could come up with other ways to put Nikki in her place verbally without resorting to "strip-shaming" her.

I remember someone saying that Helen Wagner didn't believe Nancy would have remarried after Chris' death, but I'm not sure whom. (Maybe it was Eileen Fulton or Don Hastings?) One story that I liked from Nancy's later years - and one which probably would be viewed as problematic today - was when she helped Lauryn Hill's character overcome illiteracy (even to the point of incorporating rap music, lol). To me, it played very well into her background as a teacher and just seemed like something she would have done to help another person.

To me, GL's Reva and AMC's Erica had the same problem: neither could be friends with women, because both were the type to flirt with every man in the room without even being aware that they were flirting or that the men they were flirting with belonged to other women. Women don't respond well to women who behave like that, IMO. (Which makes Melanie Wilkes from "Gone with the Wind" all the more remarkable to me, lol).