Faulkner

The ATL mayor has tested positive:

From Palm Bay, Florida 🇺🇸

Oh that breaks my heart.

From Palestine 🇵🇸

From Houston 🇺🇸

I just started watching expecting the confessionals to be bad, and while they aren’t up to the usual standard, they don’t bother me. Leah’s sound is actually great. Dorinda’s daughter Hannah reminds me of sooo many of my friends in NYC. In the past, I always felt like she had more moments of humor and kindness. And I didn’t mind Sonja and Luann getting taken down a peg with their delusions of grandeur. But her bullying of Tinsley felt particularly egregious because it was so over-the-top and stupid. Tinsley didn’t kill her unborn child or something. The level of RAGE and degradation focused at Tinsley, someone who typically doesn’t start sh!t, was SO disproportionate. I’m in a minority, but Dorinda this season is the only place where Bethenny’s absence is felt. Bethenny really knew how to deal with her. Or at least she provided a check to her and wasn’t intimidated by her. (The only person who’ll stand up to Dorinda is Ramona, and that’s not a great situation for obvious reasons.) Avery walking in is HYSTERICAL! ”Don’t fück with my seafood tower!” I missed these ladies.

Such a good point about the changes from Ellen to Mari Morrow to Sandra P. Grant. Each actress got darker in skin tone as she fell deeper into drugs. And lo and behold, when she was rehabilitated, they hired another light-skinned actress. This happened over the course of 10-20 years and several writing/producing regimes, but this trajectory was not lost on perceptive viewers. And to speak further on the loss of specificity, Rachel lost all her political convictions after Bethea departed. A lot of that was due to Linda Gottlieb’s departure and OLTL’s shift away from social issues. Rachel seemed created very much out of that early ‘90s-era black and feminist consciousness.

That would have been wonderful!

What happened with Rachel saddens me. EB’s Rachel was such a composed, intelligent, principled woman, and then, after the first recast, they stripped all that away and made her a stereotypical drug addict and criminal. An addiction story could have still worked for her, but I was uncomfortable with how they handled her stories (but that’s more about OLTL’s mid-‘90s decline than anything else). I thought Daphnée Duplaix’s version did a lot to rehabilitate the character, and while I probably wouldn’t want to have seen her with Todd, I didn’t want to see her shunted off to the corner with overacting Terrell Tilford.

Totally. If soaps actually invested in their black characters and family, and truly treated them as equal to the white characters, we wouldn’t have to discuss either/or. We’d have strong black/black relationships, strong interracial relationships, the whole spectrum. But daytime has always catered to its racist white audience’s expectations. Even a character as radical as Evangeline was ultimately hindered by this. And they couldn’t raise her up without diminishing a black male character (R.J.). False choices abound. I agree. I always chalked it up to DF being dismissed as just a chiseled physique vs. “true actors” like ME/TSJ, laughable in hindsight, but how many bland white dudes got way more opportunities to shine (even if they didn’t last) with far less charisma and presence?

Same thing at AMC in the ‘90s with the Santos family: you had Mateo and Hayley, Maria and Edmund, and Anita and Bobby. And since Latinos were sort of “acceptably ethnic,” they could also be paired with black characters in ways white characters could not: à la Julia and Noah, later seen with Cristian bouncing between the Buchanan and Williamson sisters on OLTL. I always go back to the fact that A Martinez, a brown-skinned Latino/Native man, spent the greater part of the 1980s plastered on soap magazine covers snuggled up against the blindingly blond, fair-skinned Marcy Walker. Phil Morris would have never been afforded the same opportunity. Sad he mentions that “be less specific” is the most common note. Specificity is what drives good writing; it creates flesh-and-blood characters who are recognizable as human beings, which ultimately expresses the universal. It’s disheartening to turn on a soap and hear dialogue that could be said by anyone.

Yeah, I saw that about Yvie. In spite of her return as a “lip sync assassin” during this season of All-Stars, she seems over the show. Shea’s Flavor Flav was genius. Always a risk to play a cisgender man. During the celeb Drag Race, I liked that Jermaine Fowler played a cis male celebrity—Kevin Hart—but in female drag.

From Brazil 🇧🇷

Jones County is not far from where my family is in Mississippi. (Parker Posey grew up there.) Agreed on the disgust.

Oof. Trite, lazy racist stereotypes intended as comedy. These people are clueless.

What is Steve Burton alleged to have said? I missed this...

That’s comparable to the list of bootleg Brendas that followed in the wake of Vanessa Marcil’s departures on GH.

Ha. Just an old saying meaning “stacked” or “strapping.” I guess it’s a reference to old outhouses. Definitely not helped by that mess of a character.

Gawd, Keith Hamilton Cobb was hot. Tall and built like a brick sh!thouse. That yellow hair on Heather Tom. I can’t get over that. At least she was a more formidable Phyllis opponent than AH.