Faulkner

Re Y&R: Lily was on a bit before the hiatus but Devon has basically disappeared. That show has really gone all in on Adam, Chelsea, and Phyllis, with some Nick/Sharon/Newmans and Kyle/Summer thrown in. The Avants actually dominated B&B for a few weeks when Nicole was waffling over giving her surrogate child to her transgender sister Maya or keeping it for her own after learning she wouldn’t be able to have another child. It was a very soapy story, and I believe what Rome Flynn won his Emmy for. But after that, they were done, and we had that weak triangle with Zoey/Xander/Emma. GH had certainly pushed Curtis/Jordan/T.J. to the forefront, ironically around the time the original Jordan, Vinessa Antoine, gave an interview about how neglectful the show had been towards black characters during her tenure. But the Ashford story ultimately became about Sonny. DAYS is hot and cold on Eli and Lani. They gave them a big wedding and made Lani friends and co-conspirators with Kristen after the time jump. But unlike Gabi, who dominates DAYS year-round, Eli and Lani’s presence on the show is inconsistent. Abe is currently flirting with Kate, and we’ll see where that goes.

A street near me in Upper Manhattan is apparently a target tonight for looters. Almost all of the businesses have closed until further notice and boarded up.

Ha. Ok that’s hilarious. LMAO! JWS’s delivery is so odd there.

Ironically GH has the most prominent black contingent these days, with the Ashfords (Curtis, Jordan, and T.J., the latter of whom I believe is recurring) and Trina. I think they still show Aunt Stella, Felix, Trina’s mom, and Epiphany, all recurring. Parry Shen, who is Chinese-American, still recurs as Brad. Y&R has Lily, Devon, Nate, Amanda, and Elena. Lily is only one with a story, with Amanda sniffing around Billy. They also have the Rosaleses (Lola and Rey), Mal Young/Angelica McD leftovers who have been greatly diminished under Griffith/Morina. (Neither has been that well-received.) DAYS has Abe and Lani, Eli, and Gabi and Rafe. B&B pretty much only has Zoey, with Maya, Carter, and Justin popping up every blue moon.

That’s another point. A lot of Latham’s characters got axed when she left, but it seems that characters of color are almost always “last hired, first fired” when regimes change. And given that soaps have traditionally had a lot of EP/HW turnover, it’s hard for those characters to build any viewer traction. And they are viewed as interchangeable even when they have very different personalities. Meanwhile, we’ve had dozens of interchangeable dead-eyed white brunettes hogging the screen on GH for 20 years.

Devon’s treatment has been appalling from the jump. From his early afterschool special stories to the WTF out-of-nowhere banging of the woman he had up to then thought was his aunt, to his almost entirely offscreen relationship with Tatyana Ali’s Roxanne that went on for YEARS, to his muddled genealogy, to his chaste flirtations with various white characters (Abby, Chloe, Victoria), to the useless plot point of his billion-dollar inheritance, he’s been a disaster as a character. It’s a testament to Bryton and his popular pairing with Mishael Morgan that he’s viable at all.

From Lake Charles, Louisiana 🇺🇸

Kevin Mambo and Sharon Leal (and of course Taye Diggs) were all attractive and super talented. But they were ultimately shunted off to their little corner of the show, aside from a few friendships with other characters.

Oof. Gilly. Just so sad. In short, she almost commits incest with her own father. David just became more and more a bland forgettable character with each subsequent recast. At least the role gave Terrell Tilford the opportunity to meet his wife of 20 years, I guess? GH just never really had a sustained interest in black characters. Maybe they felt they didn’t fit into the James Bond/action adventure/fantasy world they’d devised in the ‘80s. Labine grounded the show, but as soon as she left, Keesha was persona non grata with Gangster Jason and Justus was completely and systematically destroyed with his betrayal of Luke and Laura. (And later just killed off like it was nothing, both a victim of GH’s neglect of black characters and the erasure of the Quartermaines.)

They’d haul the Avants out to sing at holidays with the Forresters on B&B. You wouldn’t see them for literally months before. A few soaps in the ‘90s tried to capture “an emerging demographic” with Latino families (the Vegas on OLTL, the Santoses on AMC, also the Santoses on GL). They didn’t have problems pairing them with white partners, and they could also feel comfortable pairing them with black partners (which we see with Gabi on DAYS now and saw with Antonio and Cristian on OLTL). Y&R also replaced Latino Diego Serrano with Greg Vaughan as Diego.

8 pm curfew in NYC tomorrow night. Wow.

I wish soaps were still viable. This moment could allow for so much diversity, but daytime is playing it safe to hold on to a dying audience. We briefly had the Voliens/Keemo on Y&R and the Chin family on AMC. Haley and Trask on DAYS were just a stunt. The problem is that these shows see themselves as essentially white and always have. They don’t want to give up too many spots to POCs, and they rarely allow the ones they do have to build a legacy.

Good point. In a lot of those cases, the “hood” sibling wound up eclipsing the “uppity” one, who was seen as either boring (Neil/Hank/Ben) or sanctimonious.

Disgusting.

I had posted this in the Y&R thread but it might be appropriate here: For a while, it seemed like almost every show with a black family did the goody-two-shoes striver with the “hood” sibling they were responsible for keeping in line. Y&R: Olivia/Dru, Neil/Malcolm OLTL: Hank/RJ GL: Gilly/David ATWT: Ben/Isaac I guess they could argue they were undoing an ugly stereotypical story? It certainly didn’t feel that way at the time.

Oh dear. I remember how pathetic both of them looked. (Not gonna deny D.J. Lockhart-Johnson was attractive but still...) Oh here’s the clip of Margo salivating over him: Saw you covered “Kong” in the Y&R thread...

Couldn’t he have just listened to Dan for once?

A full Spotify playlist of Drag Race lip sync songs: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0JOiknngUoGssGYWVH2pPT?si=1do5z-T4Tg6XVuFJVjbQng

Like a lot of Western culture, soaps have often had problematic relationships with race and depictions of people of color. We’ve spoken about this many times in different contexts on different soaps over the years, but what are the moments that leap to mind as particularly egregious? We talked a bit about Mamie as “mammy” in the classic Y&R thread. Recasting biracial Asian-American Mia Korf with white, Kentucky-born Kassie Wesley (later DePaiva) as Blair on OLTL, essentially erasing a key part of her history, ranks up there for me.

Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Ariana Grande debuts at No. 1. It’s Gaga’s 5th and Ariana’s 4th.

From Atlanta 🇺🇸