Khan

Exactly, lol! So many episodes would end up being so short with so many plot holes left unexplained, lol.

LOL!! Why, @Errol, whatever do you mean by that, lol? Don't be surprised if Dan O'Connor returns in the next week or two.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Frank and his "new" HW's were rewriting a lot of PM's upcoming material even as we speak.

A long time ago, I remarked that the intelligence level of the writing on GH is exactly what you'd expect from a comic book aficionado and a YA author who (I kid you not) wrote this sentence: "This was clear to Cole Redeker, as his bus farted its way through a November slush to the entrance of Springfield High School." Dan & Chris might've been longtime ABC/GH fans, but watching their work was like watching two white teenage girls named Becky try and write a soap opera, and failing every damn step of the way. Frankly, I'm not interested in a return to that kind of mentality.

I'm not waiting it out. I'm done. I just don't see any point in sticking around even for a little bit longer.

No, I tend to think it was PM who wanted to redeem Heather, since he had worked previously with Alley Mills at B&B, and CVE was just the one who came up with how to do that. (Whether or not PM actually liked that idea or was, in fact, overruled by Frank and maybe EK remains to be seen). But, even without the evil hip, it'll still be easy for CVE and EK to say Heather hasn't really changed. Something else: I think this pretty much guarantees that Lane Davies won't be sticking around for very long again, lol.

My hunch: Nathan Varni (or someone else at the network level) decided a change was needed and went to PM, given his reputation, with the promise of being allowed to write the kind of material he wanted. Frank Valentini, however, had other ideas.

And that's another thing: all signs of Tracy maturing into a proper Q matriarch will likely vanish, and she'll be back to being the snarky grandma who says inappropriate and hurtful things.

Not necessarily. The last several HW'ing regimes seemed to prefer Heather as a recurring psycho. Chances are, we'll find out that Heather hasn't really changed her ways, poisoned hip or no poisoned hip.

And now we know why everyone in PC kept changing jobs. Those was likely the only ideas that PM could get past Frank - and now that he's gone, all Frank/EK/CVE have to do is have everyone say, "You know what? I think I'm better off going back to my old line of work!"

I agree with all three of you. It's clear Frank didn't feel the need to replace Dan & Chris, and resented that the network did (and with someone who had history with GH and a reputation for not being easily controlled), so he did what he could to sabotage PM's work and force him to quit, while keeping Van Etten around as "breakdown writer" for the moment when PM inevitably would quit. IOW, whether or not PM was "headwriter material," the deck was too stacked against him anyway. Whatever. I'm choosing to look ahead to THE GATES (where I have no doubt that PM will land, as a writer on Michele Val Jean's first staff) and saying sayonara to the rest of these sorry-ass shows. In a way, I hope it is. Because, it's clear the industry doesn't want an intelligent writer like him around anymore. Years ago, I said he was better off trying his luck in primetime and streaming shows. My opinion still stands.

I don't think it's that simple, though. You could replace most of the background music, but what about the pop/rock songs that Lisa Hartman often performed on the show as Ciji (and later, as Cathy)? You'd have to edit out those performances entirely, which, in turn, would affect the continuity of storylines, since music played an integral part in the storytelling during those years.

Yeah, for me, that was another, earlier sign (earlier than Van Etten's name showing up again) that something was amiss. Since I don't have to be polite anymore about it, I'll just say that I thought that idea (the poisoned hip) was junk from the beginning and smacked of the kind of idiotic bullshit that Van Etten would come up with.

Same here.

Damn. Although I was hoping everything would work out, the minute I saw Chris Van Etten's name back in the credits, I knew the end was nigh. Yeah, we're gonna need an exit interview from Mulcahey to explain why this did not work out.

Nobody, that is, except Myrtle Urkel.

In a word: music rights. (Okay, that's two words, lol). Streaming KNOTS on any platform is a challenge due to music rights, or so we've been told over the years by various folks. Whenever they paid for the use of particular pieces of music, it was for a limited number of airings (don't know exactly how many). Never had it occurred to producers that episodes still would be repeated decades later in syndication, let alone on the Internet.

My hunch: Frank Valentini has kept Chris Van Etten on as a breakdown writer, because Chris gets Frank's style (...and in case things w/ Elizabeth Korte & Patrick Mulcahey don't work out).

I guess this recession has been hard on everyone, lol.

Something tells me that was more Frank Valentini's doing (but I could be wrong!).

Years ago, I read that then-CBS Daytime VP Lucy Johnson allegedly had Munro on her short list of candidates to replace the recently departed Douglas Marland as HW on ATWT.

Only one way to find out:

Frankly, I'm not TOO hung up on the average length of scenes, for two reasons: 1) I grew up on KNOTS LANDING, so scenes that run 1:30 or less don't really phase me all that much*, lol; and 2) I believe that it doesn't matter whether a scene runs ten minutes or ten seconds, a bad scene is a bad scene is a bad scene. My number-one issue atm with GH remains the same: there are TOO. DAMN. MANY. CHARACTERS. (*I mean, I don't necessarily PREFER shorter scenes, just because of my love of classic playwrights like Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg; but this is television, after all, and there are worse sins being committed on shows nowadays). Don't worry, @Taoboi: the folks in the back heard me just fine, lol. I mean, if you're Frank Valentini/Nathan Varni and you're just looking for a HW who will maintain the status quo and nothing more, I'm sure there are at least a dozen, other scribes out there who'd be willing to take on that job. But you don't go and lure out of retirement a writer with a rep for not putting up with b.s. if you're not willing to give him his head at least a little bit.

I'll say this much: if you know anything about soaps, you don't hire someone like Patrick Mulcahey to be your "yes" man. If you do, you do it at your own peril.