Faulkner

Brad

Nathan from France 🇫🇷

I see FAA is putting on a clinic with young Alcaraz.

B&B needs to shore up Carter’s character with more backstory and perhaps the introduction of some more family. He’s so bland and I have no idea who he is or what drives him other than a terminal neediness for female companionship. He’s not fleshed out at all. He’s a hot body and that’s it.

And totally eff it up most of the time. Or use it for stuff nobody asked for (like the whole Austin debacle).

I totally agree. So much of popular culture (from music to cinema to literature and newspapers) is dying due to the fracturing of the old monoculture, and I’m certainly grieving it to an extent. Streaming has been a godsend for TV in many ways but most stuff serves a niche these days, which has its pros and cons. Everything is preaching to the choir nowadays. The stuff that breaks through to find a huge audience feels less interesting to me than it did in the past. Very calculated and algorithm-determined. One of the great things about Spotify is that you can dig into all kinds of old music. There’s so much that I’ve never listened to that I can discover. It may not be new music, but it’s new to me. I wish we had something similar for the soaps. I don’t need new soap content when I could dig deeper into the old stuff, which often holds up way better than I thought it would. (Certainly, the stuff from the ‘70s and early ‘80s was in many ways more progressive than what GH, Y&R, B&B, and DAYS are putting out today, even accounting for the LGBT inclusiveness that didn’t exist then.) Give me ‘70s DAYS before any new soap. Let’s make some effort to preserve this history, which most people alive haven’t seen. But that’s also a tough ask. Classic soap is a niche, and I’m not sure the ROI is there for it.

One of the reasons I can’t be bothered with these shows. They are so frustrating to watch when they ignore history that would enrich stories, sometimes history we’ve just seen play out. I get that B&B was trying to wipe the slate clean with KA’s Taylor and memory-hole some of the unhinged stuff HT played in her later years. But still they haven’t respected the complexity of Taylor as a character or her relationships with Ridge, Brooke, and her kids. B&B is written for kindergartners and has been for years, though.

Victor from Taiwan 🇹🇼 Somebody protect this country and its beautiful men from China…

😂

Marcos is giving your boy a run for his money in the booty department.

Hehe. Gotta say, Dimitrov vs. Giron is a lot of pretty for one court:

😂

Anderson Cooper is by far the most favorably viewed cable news anchor, according to a Variety study. What’s semi-surprising (at least to news junkies and the terminally online) is how many people polled hadn’t heard of the anchors listed. (43 percent hadn’t heard of Rachel Maddow for example. 61 percent hadn’t heard of Jake Tapper, and 49 percent don’t know who Laura Ingraham is. How I envy those lucky souls.) https://variety.com/vip/survey-theres-a-clear-mvp-among-cable-news-anchors-and-its-not-even-close-1235415771/

A few outlets jumped the gun on this, but the news is now confirmed:

Gilang from Indonesia 🇮🇩

Sergio Fernandez from Spain 🇪🇸

John from Canada 🇨🇦

These shows had a good run for 70+ years on television, and nothing lasts forever. In the same way roots music begat rock and pop, the influence of soap operas on serialized TV is undeniable, and I’d love to see more effort placed on preserving that rich history for future generations. YouTube has been a great resource in that respect, even though the video quality is often sh!tty and there are huge gaps in what’s available. But I’m resigned to the genre being pretty much zombified. The four remaining U.S. daytime shows aren’t inspired at all beyond the energy of a few talented actors operating far below their potential due to lack of rehearsals and tepid writing. They don’t offer a lot of incentive to give up five hours a week that could be spent doing other things, unless you’re *really* invested, which obviously most people on this board are. They still pull in an OK audience, but it’s hard to compare the volume that daytime has to produce to how a primetime series operates. There’s a reason why these soaps all look like crap. I dunno: I can’t be arsed in coming up with ways to save the remaining soaps or resurrect old ones when there’s so much other content that scratches some of the itch soaps used to scratch. (That includes watching what’s available on YouTube.)

Scott Blokker 🇺🇸

Melissa Villaseñor says leaving SNL was her choice to protect her mental health; says she was struggling with panic attacks last season. She added: “When I’m in a big group of a lot of amazing people, and everyone’s speaking over everyone else, I think I tend to get small. I get nervous, like, where do I fit? What am I supposed to do? That’s how I was in high school, too. And so I think that’s what caused it. And I was like, I think I’m okay. I feel like there’s nothing else that I feel like, oh, I need to be sharing this, I want to do this on the show. I think I’m ready. There was just something telling me, I think I could part ways.“ https://deadline.com/2022/10/melissa-villasenor-leaving-snl-mental-health-de-1235155547/