Khan

Apparently, we are, lol.

It's almost an understatement to say that Y&R is "stuck," but you're right. This show needs a shot in the arm in the worst way. It needs to take some huge risks. Maybe not the kind of risks that, say, JER took with DAYS back in the day. (I don't think anyone needs to see Nikki Newman possessed by the devil, lol). But TPTB need to recognize that they can't coast forever on nostalgia.

Is Kyle Brandt still in the biz? I'm kidding.

Nope. I just think she's a bad actress.

Except, it should have been easier for me to watch PASSIONS *because* it was all new characters, and it wasn't. If anything, it was harder, because it was clear from the start that JER didn't know how to write for characters that he didn't inherit.

Believe it or not, @carolineg, that (Sheridan's ties to Princess Diana) didn't bother me as much as it bothered others. Was it tacky? Yes. But it wasn't the worst thing I'd ever seen on a soap. I think what did ME in was one character (might have been Dana Sparks's) being visited by some bright light and told, in a childish voice, "Evil is coming!". When I saw that, I was like, "What in the DARK SHADOWS is THAT mess!?". It was just so unbelievably silly and amateurish to me. Throw in Theresa dumping food for the first time on Original Ethan's head and I was done. She can make me cry, too, but for different reasons.

As @Vee would say, stop.

Agree. If I was JER, I would have been mortified by how most soap fans responded to PASSIONS. If they didn't write it off immediately as trash and then change the channel, they misinterpreted it as deliberate parody and kept watching, but for all the wrong reasons. Either way, hardly anyone took it seriously, or treated it as the Second Coming of Soaps. That had to have wounded him.

I dunno, I've never been all that impressed by Lindsay Hartley. Or her many layers of mascara.

You know, given how popular Sami/AS was in the '90's, I wouldn't be surprised if Corday/Sony/NBC didn't at least consider spinning her off onto her own show. Especially after her schemes against Austin and Carrie were exposed. That would have been the perfect opportunity for her to leave Salem and start over in a new town as a single mom trying to change her ways. You could have even had her become the Carrie in a new triangle with a guy from a prominent family in town and another girl who schemes, like Sami did in Salem, to keep them apart.

If only we could say the same thing about Meg Ryan.

Nah, GH is a lost cause. Frank produces that show quickly and on budget. Until something occurs that forces him out of that EP chair, ABC's gonna see to it that he goes nowhere.

LOL!! Exactly. The grisly murders were awful enough. The big "PSYCH!" at the end just made things worse. I loved almost all the SSK victims for nostalgic reasons, but if I had been in JER's tight-fitting, Catholic shoes, I wouldn't have undone any of the murders. Not even Doug's or Alice's. The audience has to believe that what they're seeing on-screen is really happening. Otherwise, like you've said, @carolineg, they just can't invest themselves; and if you can't get your audience to invest in the stories you're telling, then what the hell are you doing telling them? But, you know, I don't believe it took much arm-twisting to convince JER to scrap his original plans for the SSK story, because I don't think he cared much at all about what happened to DAYS or even to PASSIONS by that point. He was likely too burnt out, too sick of network interference, and too overwhelmed by his personal issues to give much of a [!@#$%^&*] about how the writing looked.

Well, let's put it this way: I wouldn't say "no" to a story like Vincent/Valerie, because, as I've learned, you never shut off any creative avenues. (Except, of course, when those avenues lead to literal demonic possession. That's simply a bridge too far for me.). But you damn well better believe I'll do everything in my power to see that a story about an intersexed blackmailer who gets pregnant by their own father is told with the utmost class and sensitivity. And yes, I wrote that last sentence with the straightest of straight faces. All I can say is, compare the Salem Stalker to the "LOVING Murders," and I say THAT as someone who never liked that storyline OR the ones responsible for it.

Well, we can speculate about JER's inner demons, but unless and until we get the definitive account, either from him or from someone who knew him intimately, that's all it is: speculation.

Whereas I threw in the old towel by, oh, episode two, I think. Huh? Was that addressed to me, or to someone else?

That's what I've heard (and long suspected). He was gay, but because of his religious convictions, he never could fully express his sexuality in healthy ways. I get it, because I'm the same way. I'm torn all the time between being gay and being a Christian, even though I know that Christ is likely to forgive me (as if I needed to be forgiven for what God made me!) and to understand that "love is love." But I also like to think I see women as something more complex than either madonnas or whores, and that people don't automatically go to Hell for cheating.

You really have to wonder what sort of demons drove JER. Because, as morose as ATWT became during Doug Marland's final days, you never questioned whether Marland was an all-around well-adjusted individual.

True, but if I could go back in time and choose between wanting DAYS to end and wanting JER to come in and save it...? I think I'd choose differently this time, lol.

True. But that just shows to go you how much P&G's relationship with its' soaps had evolved -- or, rather, how it had DE-volved -- over the decades. I doubt P&G ever looked at their shows as anything more than tools to sell their product lines, but at least SFT, EON, TEXAS and others had men like Bob Short and Ed Trach in their corner. But ATWT and GL were basically on their own by the end, and it showed.

I'd vote for Shelley Curtis. When she produced DAYS in the '80's (w/ Al Rabin and Ken Corday), it was very Bell-like with its' emphasis on romance and emotion, it just moved quicker than Y&R and had more fantastic storylines.

Well, that's an unsettling thought, lol.

I was a teenager when JER's much-heralded first run began, and let me tell you: even then, I found it simplistic, juvenile, not at all what DAYS used to be or should have been, and an almost clarion-like call for help. I would say it screwed over Drake in the long run, too, because it's clear (to me, anyway) that Drake has struggled for years and years (and years) with how to portray someone that's more a concept (a romantic, brainwashed mercenary with a sketchy, elusive past) than an actual human being. Hence, the really bad acting that's emanated from him since then. Well, it's one thing to shake up an ailing show with a serial-killer storyline. DAYS had gone to that well many times before. But the ways JER was dispatching some characters...? It was sick, and it smacked of the guy delighting in sticking it to everyone -- Corday, Sony, NBC, the actors, the fans, everyone.

Same. I kept up with it through synopses and the occasional watch, but it was so, so hard to witness what Christopher Goutman had been allowed to do to the show by a sponsor that no longer cared. Still, even under THOSE conditions, I felt like ATWT still had life in it when it ended, and that all it needed was a new regime and for P&G to gaf again. ATWT didn't have to go away forever (which was more than I could say about GL).

Ah. Kind of like how GH snatched Denise Alexander away from DAYS before they really knew what to do with her. Of course, GH didn't resort to turning Lesley into a villainess the way DAYS did with Kristen. They just gave her a long-lost daughter. Especially when Drake wasn't exactly unpopular as Roman. As much as I love Deidre Hall, I really feel like she forced TPTB into an impossible situation with the "Tale of Two Romans" crap. Honestly, I would have been happier just to keep Drake as Roman.