Khan

Another anti-heroine who fits that bill (IMO)? EON's Raven. Especially in the beginning, before Sky Whitney gave her what she wanted most: someone who loved her and understood her needs, but never wanted to tie her down. (That brief monologue she gives about how she came to re-naming herself is just so good, lol).

LD was fortunate to have two great pairings on SaBa: one, with Harley Jane Kozak's Mary; the other, with NLG's Julia. Sweet Mary was such a delicious contrast to tortured Mason, while Julia stimulated him intellectually and sexually through 1930's-style wit while keeping his ego in check. I agree! The thing is, if SaBa had been more consistent - if the writers had taken more care to craft solid storylines and not just great episodes (that could help them win more Emmys) - would the show have been as special? I think you could glimpse some of what I mean in the final year with Pamela K. Long as HW. For the first time in I-didn't-know-when, SaBa was making a concerted effort to be more traditional and tell long-term stories with impact - B.J.'s sexual abuse tale comes to mind - but in the process, a lot of the quirks and eccentricities that had come to define SaBa were evaporating. Even Mason and Julia weren't as delightfully screwball as they had been before. It does, and you are absolutely correct, @All My Shadows! Man! Now I'm wishing (again!) for someone to reboot/revive/re-whatever PP for a streaming outlet! As iconic as the original series was, I think it's the kind of property - locale, characters, overall themes, etc. - that would play just as well today with modern audiences as it did back in the '50's and '60's.

Not B&B!

Only Beverlee McKinsey could shred another woman to pieces verbally and make it sound as sweet as sugar. She was too good for soaps.

I know NLG can be exasperating sometimes, too, but she's another actor who never bores me. IMO, she was BORN to play Julia.

I think GL blundered in domesticating Buzz and Jenna. You don't take someone as vixenish as Fiona Hutchinson and tie her down with a husband and kids and a business that she runs with another soccer mom.

AMC: Erica vs. Brooke. (Other folks may love Bianca as the Patron Saint of Lesbian Rape Victims, but I think AMC's writers missed a big opportunity in not pairing Binks with Jamie, thereby making Erica and Brooke mothers-in-law).

Exactly!

If Tyler Perry fired him, then that could mean one of two things: either he's really bad, or he's really good, lol.

With you as HW? My team: Victor Miller, Patrick Mulcahey, Frank Salisbury and Wisner Washam

I guess she snuck into his hospital room one night when the nurses were off-duty, lol?

Jamey isn't working for Tylerco anymore?

Ironically, I think a major reason why SaBa told their rape story was to take a swipe at Laura's rape on GH. But the twist of having her rapist turn out to be her gynecologist was just so tasteless that it ruined the rest of the story for me. Only a man (Chuck Pratt?) would think that would be an okay way to wrap up a rape story.

I agree. I also thought the inherent class conflicts in the beginning (between the Perkinses and Andrades and the Capwells and Lockridges) were a smart way to build a new soap, but I probably would have concentrated just on two: the blue-collar, Hispanic Andrades and the rich, eccentric Lockridges. Rita Stapleton Bauer is so fascinating to me. As I said years ago, Rita basically was a decent person, but with one major flaw: the truth just wasn't in her, lol. Like with OLTL's Tina, though, I never thought she lied with the intent of hurting people. Rather, she lied, but she lied for the right reasons. I'd love to read that novel someday.

The premise is pretty straightforward: pretend you are a head-writing a soap opera. (It can be one that is still on the air, it can be one that is no longer on the air, it even can be one you've made up). If you could choose your staff writers, who would you choose? And yes, they can be dead or alive. (I'm sure even a dead person could do a better job writing some of these shows than the live ones who are writing them!)

To this day, I don't exactly know who bumped off Mary Robeson, or whether she really was Laura's long-lost mother.

I wouldn't say SaBa was dreadful. (If you wanna talk about a soap that was dreadful, look no further than PASSIONS, lol). SaBa had plenty going for it, once they worked out most of the kinks. I just think the bean counters at NBCD and New World Television mucked it all up in the end. I remember reading a WATN interview with former OLTL HW Peggy O'Shea, where she talked about her time as a consultant on SaBa. TPTB asked her to watch the show for awhile and then give her thoughts. She said she told them there was nothing wrong with the show and to leave it alone. "So, of course," she said, "they went and changed everything."

You'd be lit, too, if you had to play those scenes, lol.

They also needed a sponsor and network who allowed them to write what they wrote best and not chase trends, which, clearly, was what they were doing when they wrote stuff like "Barbara Back in Time" or "Tom and Margo vs. Mr. Big."

Coulda fooled me!

Laverne?

For some reason, it reminds me of when Charlotte Rae (aka "Mrs. Garrett") sang part of "The Facts of Life"'s theme song during that show's first season.

I agree! For me, it's like I had to pretend that she really was playing a new character who just happened to have the same name as the character that MW once played. I think what annoyed me more than the changes in Liza, though, was stupid Chuck Pratt telling the press, "Oooh, chile, that AMC cast 'bout to find out, 'cuz Miss Jamie's 'bout to hand them they asses!" Excuse me, lol?? Now, God knows I have ragged a-plenty on many of AMC's later cast members over the years, but as much as I've loved JL, going all the way back to "Just the Ten of Us," I hardly think she was gonna have Susan Lucci waking up and crying on Helmut's big shoulder in the middle of the night, if you know what I mean. (By the way, I apologize for making Chuck Pratt sound like Debbie Allen. My bad.)

ICAM. But maybe that's because so much of their work is unavailable today. If not for the stuff that shows up from time-to-time on YT, hardly anyone born after a certain year would know about or remember the Dobsons' work on GL, for example. And we all know how the folks at YT just looooove to take [!@#$%^&*] down for no damn reason. I do, too. On the one hand, there's no doubt that the Dobsons would have breathed new energy into AW, giving the show a direction or purpose that it never really had after 1979/1980. But, on the other hand, unless NBCD and P&G were willing to give the Dobsons creative leeway, as well as invest heavily in promoting the show again, I question whether their writing would have increased AW's ratings all that much. As I said in another thread, I think there came a point when no one outside of AW's most diehard, core audience really cared anymore about the show, regardless of how well it might have been doing at any given time creatively. Moreover, I just can't see NBCD willing to work with the Dobsons again after everything they went through on SaBa. CBS and ABC might have taken a chance on working with them - I, for one, would've loved to see what they could've done with OLTL or GL again - but not NBC. Given the time and money they had spent litigating, along with the fact that SaBa ultimately failed, I think NBCD would've kept the two far, far away. TBH, I have mixed feelings about SaBa. There was a lot about the show that I loved, particularly some of its' cast (Marcy Walker, Judith McConnell, Louise Sorel, Nicolas Coster, Nancy Lee Grahn and Lane Davies, etc.) as well as the family dynamics among the many Capwells and Lockridges. In the end, though, SaBa was more about great moments - dialogue, scenes, even whole episodes - than about great storylines - at least for me. For example, I thought the Channing Capwell murder mystery, which opened the show, was pretty good, but Eden's rape, although violent and graphic, turned out to be a very distasteful and insensitive storyline. It's like, most of the time, whenever they actually had something good going, they'd always find some way to sabotage it.

Viki and Dorian. That is all.