Faulkner

American Descendants of Slaves

All credit to @Forever8 for digging up. Some of the replies are also great and insightful.

@Forever8 posted this in the B&B thread, but I figured this would also be an appropriate discussion here. Patrick Mulcahey spilling all the tea about race and representation during his long history in daytime.

This guy

From Cambodia 🇰🇭

Wow, that’s disgusting. It always a shame how many poor decisions have been made on soaps because they didn’t understand their audience or underestimated their connections to characters. We certainly saw it most prominently with Maureen Bauer, but I always wonder how many black/brown/Asian characters have been let go because producers thought they weren’t broadly embraced enough. Funny how Petronia said that about Rauch given what he did to OLTL shortly thereafter. I suppose he did have some black presence in Llanview, and perhaps some black actors at the time felt some gratitude for any representation beyond a mere token. Did you or any DAYS watchers remember Dr. Marcus Hunter (played by the late Richard Biggs)? I wasn’t watching at the time (late ‘80s/early ‘90s), but I saw he had a couple of interracial flirtations/relationships, and I wonder how they were received.

Sonja Tremont Morgan has a lot of nerve.

For me, I wanted her to pull a Kenya. Nope, you guys are not gonna get your moment! I have fallen in love with Wise Earth Mother Luann. Elyse kind of reminds me of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

What I just didn’t like about Aaron is him demanding them to change the subject. Yes, they were totally @ssholes, and yes, I totally agreed with him. It just didn’t sit well with me. That was Denise’s place to say that. I’m glad Denise had the presence of mind to finally walk away and wish she’d done it sooner.

Rewatching the first Newport episode of NYC and not a tear was coming out of Leah’s eyes when she was crying inconsolably. #fake

Exactly. She’s a day player at her own wedding. There’s much more Viki than Carla. (And ugh, those iris transitions are cheeesy.)

Just found this: the 1979 wedding of Carla and Jack Scott on OLTL, with Lillian Hayman singing.

I’m of two minds about Aaron. I get what he was doing defending Denise (and he’s a co-parent to her kids, so he’s involved in the matter), but a man getting involved in his wife’s battles, *especially* when Denise had it under complete control, was not a great look. Denise even seemed annoyed with his interjections at a certain point. But yes, these women can’t let things go. It becomes one-note after a while. They intend to keep picking at a wound until they get the spectacular meltdown they were waiting for. Ooh, she’s crazy. Tina Fey couldn’t create a greater set of mean girls.

Matt Bomer (ex-Ben, GL) talks about how being gay affected his career (and being cast as Superman) in a THR Pride Month celebrity coming-out oral history piece that includes interviews with Neil Patrick Harris, Rupert Everett, Wanda Sykes, Richard Chamberlain, and others: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/how-i-came-hollywood-a-decade-by-decade-oral-history-1296888

Good question about how much airtime they got. I suppose that Another World fansite might have their episode counts. A bit of Morgan Freeman as Roy with Petronia Palsy’s Quinn and David Canary’s Steve. Again, it’s an abomination that no soap gave PP the role she deserved, because Vivian Grant, as great as she was in the role, wasn’t it: You’ve probably already seen in this in the AW cancelled soap thread: Jackée as Lily with Thomasina at 12:04:

From Ghana 🇬🇭

That was a beautifully done story. As an aside, seeing David Lee Russek as Sean on the classic episode of Y&R reminded me he played the dirty white cop who raped Toni (Rhonda Ross Kendrick) on AW in the mid-‘90s. I wonder how that story would be received today, as she had mistakenly accused the innocent Nick Hudson of the rape. Totally. Yet Paul Rauch managed to erase all that rich history in a moment. (As great as AMC handled Angie/Jesse in the ‘80s, the other flagship ABC soaps OLTL and GH did a pitiful job in that decade.) I remember OLTL brought back Ed and Carla’s grandson for a brief run in the 2000s, but that’s as much as their legacy extended. Agnes Nixon’s continued involvement with AMC helped maintain its diversity.

I know people thought RC’s JJ/Theo shooting story on DAYS was so great, even though he wrote it from the white cop’s perspective. But ohhhh he had Eli name-check Black Lives Matter. The bar has been lowered. At least it got James Reynolds an Emmy.

It’s sad but I mentioned a while back that Jesse is the only black character whose death has been allowed to reverberate and matter through a soap’s history, due to his friendship with Tad (flashbacks, dream sequences) and Angie’s return on Loving and The City with the Jesse doppelgänger. I still can’t think of another. Of course, he came back alive, which is notable in its own way. Neil on Y&R has already been forgotten (a reflection of his diminished role on the show prior to his passing), and he was played by a beloved award-winning actor whose untimely real-life death made international headlines. I fall on Bell spectrum in terms of the Bell/Nixon divide. I’m just more drawn to his aesthetic. But Agnes’s handling of American diversity was just infinitely better. There’s just no comparison, and that’s even taking into account Bell’s great stuff with Neil and Dru in the ‘90s.

From Colombia 🇨🇴

ITA. I remember people excoriating the writing (because Higley), but Evangeline’s prominence was unprecedented for a black character of any gender in daytime. If she’d been white, she’d have had a whole family built around her.

What do people think of Evangeline on OLTL with the benefit of hindsight? We all remember the ugliness of the Jovan/Jolie fan wars, and I believe this caused a lot of anger: It’s just weird how much Evangeline dominated OLTL in the mid-2000s (alongside Jessica/Natalie/Blair), and how easily she was simply dismissed and forgotten. And it was so clear the show considered John/Natalie endgame, as they valued Natalie more as a character.