Khan

Ron Carlivati has the comedic sense of a goat.

TBH, I never cared even for that original retcon, as it felt random to me. It was as if the writers had already exhausted all their other options and couldn't find one that was entirely satisfactory, so they just settled on making him Forrest Gump Alamain so they could move on.

I love MST3K, but it's like they picked two of the most boring GH segments on purpose. And they are MERCILESS on Lucille Wall.

Agree. And it doesn't matter if CBS or Sony or both are interfering with Josh Griffith and Tony Morina's plans. (That is, if they HAVE plans.) Josh and Tony's names are on this crap, so they're the ones who should be held responsible. Please let it be someone new. And please don't let the mystery woman be Patty. That last one cannot be said enough. You mean, besides making voodoo dolls of everyone at Y&R who hates her?

It's the "Seinfeld" of daytime.

What else? Singin' this song:

No, I'm not talking about soap opera fanfic. I'm talking about writing an original screenplay - one which mixed battle-of-the-sexes comedy with psychological thriller - that was inspired by, if not outright stole from, the original Roman/Marlena/Salem Strangler story. Like I said, I've had my moments where, as a writer scrambling for ideas, I've said, "Hmmm, I wonder if I could get away with it," lol.

For sure, I would have loved to have seen an episode where Mike, accompanied by his new wife/gf, comes over for Thanksgiving and has to confront Gloria, who's never remarried, for the first time since their divorce years before.

Didn't Frank or Ron want JS to play the drums on Rick Springfield's performance of "Jessie's Girl" at the Nurses Ball? Or was it something else that caused John and Ron to have their Twitter fight? Personally, I felt it would have been more substantial to have Blackie Parrish, long since paroled, show up running some sort of community center for troubled and underprivileged youth.

Oh, [!@#$%^&*]. Now who's gonna help Sykesha find her baby daddy?

"704 Hauser" had an interesting and novel premise -- for those who don't know, Archie Bunker's old Queens neighborhood has become gentrified, with a Black family (with a left-leaning husband and wife constantly exasperated by their conservative son and his white gf) now taking up residence in the old Bunker homestead -- but the writing made even "Archie Bunker's Place" look good.

I must admit there have been times when I wanted to, um, "pay homage" to their original romance - icy blonde psychiatrist meets her match in the rough-around-the-edges cop who's assigned to protect her from a maniacal serial killer - with an original script of my own. I don't think anyone outside of DAYS fans would notice, do you?

Idea: We find out B&B isn't real, but a daytime soap opera that has been on the air since 1987; and then we watch as the show itself transitions into being a show about the BTS doings at a long-running daytime soap.

I feel like Laura is the perfect character around whom to build a new, multi-generational core family for GH with substantial ties to the hospital.

IIRC, CBS tried to counter-program with original movies based on Harlequin romance novels - a precursor, if you will, to the kind of entertainment that the Hallmark channels would perfect in later years. Poor Jamie Tarses. I think she was a talented executive who was just in over her head.

I give Possession 1.0 a (slight) pass, because I feel like there was a point to the story, even if it was a point that I didn't exactly understand or agree with, lol. But one of the WORST things you could do as a writer is tell a story with NO point, and I'm afraid that's the category where the others you've mentioned belong. If crap like Virtual Eden or Melaswen had a point, then it totally passed me by.

Again, you "play it small." You don't go immediately for camp. You play it as realistically as possible, because the more natural it comes across to the audience, the more terrifying it'll be for them to watch. And that goes not just for the actor who's supposed to be playing the one who's possessed, but for everyone else involved in the story, too. Look at how Katherine Helmond handled Jessica's climactic confrontation with the devil, who had possessed her newborn grandson, on "Soap." In that moment, she didn't go for high camp or wacky histrionics. She played it absolutely straight, as a woman who is fighting to save her family from evil itself. IMO, her performance in that one scene was better than all the performances in Possession 1.0 or 2.0 COMBINED. IMO, it would have made the most sense, but I feel TPTB were more concerned with shocking and surprising the folks at home with that story rather than simply telling a good story. I mean, at the end of the day, no one really CARES who John Black really is or how he became Roman Brady, but they care about how those revelations impact his life and those of Roman, Marlena and their family and friends as well. THAT's what you play, and play up, not some b.s. about Romulus and Remus and some damn coins in a knapsack tucked inside a Mayan temple or whatever. Well, if you get any hate, just send them my way, and I'll take care of it.

In a perfect world (of my own design), Chris, John and Roman would each own a third of Brady's Fish Market Pub. Roman might be retired from the police force, but Chris and John would still have their regular jobs (whatever they are, lol), and all three would take turns tending bar, with an able assist from a young, male barkeep not TOO unlike Woody Boyd on "Cheers."

First of all, it's not that I love WN, lol. (Although, I thought he was pretty hot when he played the chauffeur and Fallon's boytoy during the first season of "Dynasty"). But, I loved his initial pairing with DHall/Marlena. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the old Tracy/Hepburn movies, with DHall's Marlena as the sophisticated, cerebral psychiatrist to WN's Roman as the blue-collar, goes-by-his-gut cop. For me, an ideal storyline would be to have WN's Roman in a love triangle with LR's Billie and LK's Kate. It'd be a very interesting tale about how mothers and daughters are often in competition with each other. And even though Kate would be, for me, the more appropriate choice for Roman, in terms of age and everything else, I'd still have her ultimately step aside and allow him and Billie to be together, thereby putting her daughter's happiness ahead of her own. Actually, Tom Reilly, the ATWT associate writer who came up with Hal/Emily, put them together because he saw them, the cop and the reporter, as a "His Girl Friday" kind of screwball pairing. (I know that's not how they ended up, lol.) Ironically, though, I could see JT's Chris hooking up with KA's Billie. But, hell, he also hooked up with Shannon Tweed, for Chrissakes, lol.

It does...kind of. I mean, you could call him "Charlie," for short, but the LeClair? It sounds like "eclair" to me, lol. He COULD take his mother's maiden name, North, but I feel like that would be wrong, since I like Robert Clary/LeClair.

And then it all ends with Brooke and all the men getting together for a gang bang.

I really would love to know the thinking that went into CBS' rebuilding their Friday night lineup around two sitcoms from another network that were already past their primes.

No, she's definitely no Charity Rahmer. DHogestyn is capable of delivering better performances as well, but I think he and Dee suffer from the same issues that plague most soap actors today: OTT writing and little (or no) direction. Nothing will EVER save bad writing, but if you give a director more time to work with his/her actors, they can at least help them modulate their performances - here's a hint: the more OTT the writing, the smaller your performances should be - and find the emotional throughline in every scene. Yes. Yes. In retrospect? Yes. YAAAAAAAAAS. (But that's because I thought DHogestyn had better chemistry with Genie Francis.) DHall made WN's return a condition of HER return, so unless they had chosen to bring him back as Roman's long-lost twin brother, I feel like the Tale of Two Romans was inevitable and unavoidable. But, you're right, @carolineg, we could have done a MUCH better job writing it than the show did, lol.

Me neither, @Nixor!

Agree. I know from my years of watching that DHall is capable of a lot more than what we've seen since the mid-'90's. But I also know that the writing after her initial return has done neither Dee nor Marlena any favors. The Dr. Marlena Evans Black of 2022 is in no way the same Dr. Marlena Evans Brady who took on the Salem Strangler and Stefano DiMera in the '80's.