Faulkner

Maybe Julian’s next victim is lined up? Nelle is a major villainess on GH played by Chloe Lanier (potentially problematic actress), and Ira Madison III is a podcaster and presence on Woke Twitter who also happens to be a major soap fan.

Oh [!@#$%^&*]. Didn’t Chloe get into trouble running her mouth recently?

Yeah. She needs to reboot this show and quickly. It couldn’t come at a better time, as everyone has said things have become stale on this show. Had she seen the writing on the wall 1-2 seasons ago, she might have avoided this.

That’s really funny and nails SF’s effect. Which is why it got to be too much at times. But she could rein it in and be chilling, like when calmly tried to convince Brooke to commit suicide. Which was awful and cruel beyond words, and something she should not have been able to come back from.

I was trying to find some scenes from the Wards on GH. Michele Val Jean really pushed the envelope with their dialogue, allowing them to use language that black people often only use with each other (making fun of the racism and privilege of the Quartermaines, for example). As played by Joseph C. Phillips of Cosby Show fame, Justus was such a prideful character, like an upright Sidney Poitier figure who suffered no fools and was unconcerned with being liked, and only Labine and team understood that. There was really no black man like him on daytime before him or since. Guza had to punish him for his insolence, he was recast with talented actors who didn’t quite capture his essence, and he was killed off.

Interesting considering how many long-running No. 1s we’ve had recently. Meanwhile “Don’t Start Now” keeps hanging around.

Stassi has been dropped by her PR firm: More on the story: https://pagesix.com/2020/06/08/stassi-schroeder-and-kristen-doute-apologize-for-past-actions/

Talk about having a bad year... My God, this poor woman.

Oh yes. Vail Bloom had that too!

From Serra, Brazil 🇧🇷

I’m obsessed with Scarlett Johansson’s voice obviously, but I love a woman with a sexy, throaty rasp, and Juliet had that. In another era, she would have developed into a great villainess.

Yes, I was going to ask about this. Frame rate change? Oof. This “film” effect makes this sumptuous show look like a cheap foreign ‘70s drama on PBS. Make it stop.

Did KMK get an opportunity for a scene like that in any of her daytime roles?

Yeah, B&B was not a community soap, usually focusing on the Forresters and another family (the Logans, Spectras, Spencers), but I agree. An employee of Forrester Creations could easily have been gay. Before Rome Flynn left, they toyed with a story of Zende Forrester presenting his sketches to Steffy and Thomas, only to be met with condescending rejection. It could have been an interesting story of Zende being the black outsider in the Forrester family, possibly with him absconding to Spectra. But they dropped the story.

Yep, let’s see: Kristoff St. John (1992) Monti Sharp (1993) Kevin Mambo (1996-97) Bryton James (2007) Rome Flynn (2018) Kyler Pettis (2019) Only the Y&R actors stuck around their show (with KSJ winning again as Supporting in 2008 - not that it helped his story prospects). Monti Sharp’s subsequent daytime roles were lackluster. Let’s not talk about the only black female winners being Debbi Morgan (in a tie for Supporting with Nancy Lee Grahn in 1989), Christel Khalil (Younger, 2012), and Vernee Watson (Supporting in 2019, for what—correct me if I’m wrong—isn’t even a contract role).

I’d been watching some Carla/Ed clips from the ‘80s, long after their heyday. Even throwaway clips show their chemistry. Al Freeman, Jr. just has this laidback Humphrey Bogart energy with his deep voice, and Ellen Holly has this classic Hollywood elegance and sparkle. Horrible that they were so carelessly discarded. (Their scenes start at 3:12 and 5:52 in the first two videos.) A clip with them and Phylicia Rashad:

Re: LML’s Y&R: Ji Min, mentioned earlier, was quite groundbreaking in a way. An Asian man allowed to be sexy and powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with the Alphas of Genoa City. (Y&R certainly eroticized Philip Moon’s Keemo back in the mid-‘90s, but ultimately made him a pathetic joke with the whole Mary Jo Mason story.) The writing for Ji Min was mostly AWFUL, though, and most people didn’t even notice when he was killed off.

From Los Angeles 🇺🇸

I didn’t watch much of S8. So Derrick Barry is part of a throuple?! He’s definitely the least attractive of the trio. Ongina. Oof. I expect more from an OG queen. India Ferrah did turn it. Her weather report back in S3 was one of my favorite Drag Race trainwrecks.

Global K-pop sensation BTS and their Korean record label have donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter. https://variety.com/2020/music/news/bts-big-hit-1-million-black-lives-matter-donation-1234627049/

I’m curious if that was the intention, and it died when Sussman departed. Or if it was pitched and nixed, as Patrick Mulcahey suggested a lot of these things are. Soaps have largely resisted acknowledging a growing U.S. beyond white and black/Latinx. Karen in Middle America ain’t ready for that (admittedly my mother sees Asian people of all cultural identities as “foreigners” due to lack of exposure), and a South Asian family would be a political statement and not a story in their minds. Plus they might have to justify it from a market perspective. Are South Asian viewers numerous enough for them to see as an untapped market (and that’s not taking into account the variety of South Asian identities)? To be fair, shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Doctor, which have been praised for their inclusiveness, should have had far more Asian representation (primarily SE Asian and South Asian) than they’ve had over the years. It’s sad that I’ve seen more South Asian actors get roles as terrorists on Homeland than elsewhere on American TV.

From Bangkok 🇹🇭