Faulkner

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.

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.

Yeah. Embarrassing how cheap the show looks now, but that’s a reflection of the budget, of course. (“We updated our look” is such a crock of sh!t, but I suppose what else could they say from a PR perspective?) The show looked so lush and sumptuous around the turn of the century, in a very modern way.

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.

Again, from makeup to lighting, everyone looked so gorgeous and glamorous in this era.

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.