Khan

As much as I love Douglas Marland, I think he was asking a lot from GL fans by having Carrie, a relative newcomer, mixed up in so much story. In the time she was on the show, Carrie managed to kill off Diane and Joe, fall in love with and marry Ross, develop DID, sleep with Josh and tank Justin and Jackie's relationship (and if Marland had had his way, Carrie also would've murdered Jackie and then have her alters confess to it at the trial). And that's just what I can recall from off the top of my head. Again, placing Carrie/Jane Elliot in the center of so much action was a HUGE ask. I think we needed at least two years just to get to know Carrie before plunging her into so much drama.

Did CBSD do anything to up their game? Or did the ABC soaps just sort of peter out? In a way, it's fitting for CBS to be the home these days for shows like "NCIS" and "Tracker," to name but two. They're sort of carrying on the tradition created by "Magnum, P.I.," "Simon & Simon" and, to a lesser extent, the original "Equalizer." Again: CBS might be very conservative in terms of their programming, but theirs is a meat-and-potatoes approach that serves their core demographics rather well.

IIRC, Forrest Compton also played the minister at one of Blair's weddings? And in honor of his being there, the OLTL crew played the EON theme at the studio. Or so it said in one of those soap mags. Personally, I wouldn't have minded him on AMC as a Paul Martin recast - perhaps, with a stepchild or two he had acquired while away from Pine Valley. I also thought he would've been good on SFT as a new romantic interest for Jo, newly divorced from Martin.

This story won't be worth a damn if they don't show Doug and Julie dancing to "The Look of Love," or Doug singing "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" to little Hope.

Nevertheless, I can just imagine Dena's one-sentence pitch for that story: "Hope is whacked out on Ambien." I think the only story of Megan McTavish's that I remember liking even a little bit was when she had Marian hook up with Stuart - but even THAT was questionable material, as didn't Marian sleep with Stuart the first time thinking he was Adam? Oh, the things you could get away with, pre-#MeToo, lol.

Look, I will always love Michael E. Knight. AFAIC, he's the funniest actor ever to work in daytime; and his work as "Tad the Cad" in that triangle with Liza (Marcy Walker) and Marian (Jennifer Bassey) will always remain a gold standard for the genre. But I cannot and will not support keeping him on GH in any capacity. He (and Rena Sofer) deserves much better than that.

TBH, watching Genie Francis play Ceara on AMC always was jarring. For one - and this is true of every other role she's had on daytime - she never seemed able to shake off the aura of being Laura Spencer. For another, she was playing a type of character (the scheming vixen) that really didn't suit her, or play to her strengths as an actor. The incest storyline and romance with Jeremy seemed like a good opportunity to reset Ceara as someone more within GF's acting wheelhouse; yet, if you go back and watch the scenes where Ceara confronted her abusive father, played by Stephen Joyce - that is, if those scenes are still available online - you can see that GF was let down by some directors who allowed her to make questionable acting choices (to put it mildly, lol). To this day, I believe it was her performance in those scenes, as well as ABC's belief that she was worth more to them as Laura than she was as another character, that sealed her fate, as I don't recall AMC doing much with Ceara after that storyline (her wedding to Jeremy in that ultra-matronly Geoffrey Beene gown notwithstanding).

My initial thought upon reading the news: "Well, Christmas came early for @Vee!" But seriously. I didn't like watching Chad Duell at the start, and I definitely didn't like watching him as he grew less and less enchanted with playing Michael either. If they recast Michael and bring him back down the road, fine; but, for the moment, I'm not sorry to see him go.

I agree. And I don't believe their drama shows that weren't soaps did much better. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: "Murder, She Wrote" literally kept CBS going through some very dark times for the network. Yet, despite everything that went wrong for the network during that period, it's also an era I remain very nostalgic for. ABC was mostly junk, IMO, before "Moonlighting" and "thirtysomething"; and NBC was where you could find the shows that were so groundbreaking or so out-of-the-ordinary that they verged on being bizarre; but CBS in the '80's was home for solid, meat-and-potatoes television that didn't insult your intelligence too much or made you think you were strung out on acid, lol.

His work on SANTA BARBARA (as the family friend who molested Sydney Penny's B.J. as a child) wasn't any better. I don't remember liking Nicholas Walker as Matt Kingston/Max Holden. I've always been loyal to James DePaiva, who knew how to make Max rakish but never to the point of making him smarmy. Similarly, what I loved about Andrea Evans' Tina was that she never was an out-and-out villainess. She LOOKED vixenish with the tight dresses and big hair, but she really was a nice, if needy, young woman who made foolish choices. (Like I've said in the past: yes, she could lie with the best of them, but she never lied to be malicious. She really believed in her heart that she was doing the best thing for everyone concerned). Karen Witter and Krista Tesreau's Tinas, on the other hand, just came across to me as total bimbos and not really worth my interest.

Just the other day, I was watching some stuff with OLTL's Viki and her many, aggravating alters on YT; and I happened to come across scenes between Erika Slezak (as Viki - or, rather, as "Jean Randolph" pretending to be Viki) and EON's Forrest Compton (ex-Mike Karr), and I thought it was a shame how Compton, like Val Dufour and so many other soap stars from the '60's and '70's, never got another opportunity at a long-term role after their soaps were cancelled or their previous characters were written out/killed off.

Bob Eubanks won't stop 'til he's asked everyone about the strangest place where they made whoopie.

Frankly, I just never believed that Viki was the type to fall for a younger man. And I don't know, maybe that was the point: that, after a lifetime of relationships with men who were more her age (and who, on one level or another, reminded her of her father), she had discovered happiness again with someone so unexpected. But, again, I just never believed she could fall for a guy with whom she had not that much in common.

LOL!!

I agree!! People want to act like this is akin to killing off Maureen Bauer, and I'm just not here for that. GH was fine without KM and Sam before, it will be fine without KM and Sam again.

I always figured they replaced Marguerite Ray, because she looked TOO matronly, if that makes any sense.

Nope. Even her most successful work at GL was due more to Robert Calhoun and Nancy Curlee's influences than to anything she could have come up with on her own. JFP always had a very dark, nasty and brutal vision for her shows; and no amount of dreary musical montages or "special episodes" was gonna cover that up either.

Yeah, the past 20+ years of DAYS is like a jumble in my mind - and can you really blame me for that? - so I'm not sure who did what and when, lol.

LOL!!

I wonder if that was because he was afraid of repeating the Douglas Cummings storyline with Frannie. She was supposed to be this intelligent, level-headed young woman; yet, she kept falling for dirtbags and psychos. On the one hand, that could be fascinating to explore, but on the other hand, it might make the girl look like a moron. For sure, however, I definitely think the story was supposed to end originally with Frannie pushing Darryl to his death out of that ski lift thing that they went on location to shoot in. Weren't Paula Cwikly and Peter Brash responsible for retconning Rex and Cassie as Roman and Kate's children? If so, I'd say they were well-regarded, at least by DAYS fans.

Seriously, Y&R, just kill her off.

I've no doubt Debbi (and Darnell) will pop up one day on BTG in a recurring role.

LOL!! Was it? Because, from where I'm sitting, I think Niki Smith did us all a tremendous favor by pushing Derwood out that window.

Fantastic news!! "Original recipe" L&O is like "Murder, She Wrote": it's a show that holds up so well even after all these years.

If there's one thing Okies don't do, it's beat around the bush. If we're not sure about something, we'll let you know. Beverlee McKinsey was getting a rare opportunity (not to mention, a lot more money) to spin her popular character off to her own show, but she made it clear: she didn't think it was gonna work. And she was right.