bongobong

Just based on ratings, RH shed about a quarter of its audience the week of the switch. Conversely, Loving never came close to reaching the ratings of RH's last season in the 1230 slot. At least in households anyways, maybe the demos were more competitive. Wasn't Loving considered to be creatively weak in this era as well? Though to be fair, they introduced Trisha & Ava around this time, probably the show's most popular characters.

Chef's kiss to Electra telling RJ to hang tight after his beatdown so she could shriek at Will about the Hope For The Future Diamond for 5th time. Probably the best Hope & Liam scenes since their re-coupling last year.

But at what cost? AMC and OLTL were money machines in the mid 80s, to say nothing about them funneling viewers into GH. It's an interesting thought though. Maybe having AMC at 1230et could have slowed Y&R's growth, but IMO the more likely scenario is AMC would be dinged a bit, and OLTL more by having a weaker lead-in. Loving doing Capitalish numbers probably wouldn't compensate for weakening the 2 big shows. I guess AW across the dial would have benefited at the 230 mark facing Capital & Loving. I suspect by 85/86 ABC regretted switching Loving & Ryan's Hope's timeslots since it owned the latter. By the law of averages, Loving doing well in NYC/Chicago/Philly and other big market ABC-owned stations meant that it was doing even worse than its national rating in smaller markets. Hence the steady drip of stations dropping it. Ironically, until its last months Generations had a higher clearance rate than both Loving and B&B. I guess NBC was so powerful in every daypart but daytime that they had the leverage to force affiliates to air it.

Good demos for BTG, it's having its best run in W18-49 since last summer. I'm curious to see in the next update if Sheila's mini-return helped B&B with its demo slump.

I like Brooke but she absolutely brought this on herself. Katie forgave her ages ago, but those old resentments resurfaced because of Brooke's hubris. She's been belittling Katie for months, in addition to slapping her and pretending to believe Eric was an innocent party in all of this - even though she's known him for 40 years and knows he's an egotistical flake. So I get why this led to Katie wanting to twist the knife. Ironically, out of all the FC regular characters, Brooke is the least impacted professionally by Logan's launch. Aside from Dylan & RJ I guess. Her lingerie line & menswear are the only ones not overlapping with Logan. Unless she's already counting on having half of Ridge's shares the next time they divorce.

Machiavelli would be proud. Sony demoted him before the crossover aired then made him sit through BTG's parade of EP credits for a week. I assume Sony wanted a change more than CBS, since Y&R is pantsing the other soaps in the W25-54 demo, and only doing worse than B&B in W18-49 YOY retention.

Hope better drop the endless guilt faces and stiffen up when she finds out that FC promoted Zende to be lead designer of her line without consulting her. Deke is way too earnest to be Deacon's son. I couldn't believe he didn't at least roll his eyes when Brooke told him she wasn't mad at him for getting another job after her company fired him.

I've seen a chunk of the Rauch/Evans era on YT, and as out there as the storylines could get, there was a strong internal logic to it. I believed that Viki still loved and cared for Tina, no matter how frustrating, selfish, and destructive she was acting. Unlike the 5 or 6 other characters retconned to be related to Viki, she knew Tina since she was a baby so her affinity towards her was deep and durable. Whereas with Todd, I couldn't buy that she'd bring him into the fold and be so forgiving of his misdeeds.

I agree, Morgan Fairchild was antithetical to how were trying to market the show at the time: modern & multicultural. At the time she was too perceived as an 80's diva. If The City launched in '93 or '94 that could have been brilliant. But by the second half of '95 ABCD was in terrible shape in the W18-49 demo. Y&R & Days were consistently beating AMC in that demo when for (at least) 2 years before that AMC won handily save for a week or two here or there. No way would ABC weaken AMC when there was still hope for a rebound. The Mia Farrow suggestion by you both is fascinating. She had cachet and is a quintessential New Yorker. Pam Grier might have been game at that point in her career as well, but since Jackie Brown is one of my favorite movies I'm glad it never happened! The whole City experiment seemed to be thrown together very quickly. I believe they announced in June that Fairchild would be joining the show still titled LOVNYC. I don't think it's a coincidence that the revamp got the greenlight in the period between Central Park West getting massive buzz in the press and it debuting to a thud.

It was pretty much over by the time they they recast. One of Norcross' last scenes was meeting Macy. I couldn't stand Karen at first but really enjoyed her once she left Thorne's orbit. I thought her romance with Connor and her uneasy friendships with Brooke, Macy & Sally were all great. Sadly, Spectra as a viable second main setting kind of falls apart after she leaves. Speaking of Thorne, casting Eric's offspring, aside from Ronn Moss, was a major black mark on Bill Bell's tenure on the show: -Clayton Norcross looked like a Forrester but was a very limited actor -Terri Ann Linn was the worst actor in B&B history who somehow made it 3 years. To be fair, the writing was all over the place for Kristin: we were supposed to believe she was a kind soul who also encouraged Clarke to abandon his son; who did nothing but stupid things in front of other characters who commented how smart she was... -Jeff Trachta was a decent actor, but he couldn't generate any heat with any of his love interests -Colleen Dion was the best bunch but she really struggled in confrontation scenes To Brad Bell's credit, he knocked it out of the park with his first crack at Thorne (Windsor Harmon), Rick (Jacob Young) & adult Bridget (Jennifer Finnegan). His subsequent tries with that trio though weren't nearly as successful.

Brooke claiming she's tried everything to make amends with Katie was too funny. "I slapped her, called her a homely introvert and accused her of elder abuse but she's still upset!" Steffy better be laying a trap for Hope... Great to see Sheila finally reappear. Taylor's lucky that locking a door wasn't a prerequisite to passing med school. I finally figured out who Deke reminds me of with the facial hair and new wardrobe choices:

Interesting, I was unaware that the mid-2010s gay blogosphere had such a hate-on for the show. Now I'm curious if the Brady character was an avatar for one (or all) of them similar to how Patti D'Arbanville's whacked lady mobster in season 5 of the Sopranos was styled to look like NY Post critic Linda Stasi who complained that season 4 wasn't violent enough. Life's too short for hate watching, so I stopped after the pilot for the latest QAF reboot. I'm only basing this off of one episode but I thought its box-checking approach to diversity made it less organically diverse. Like it was set in New Orleans with a Black majority population, but there was only one Black guy, and his family was white. Yet there was room for non-binary regulars of both biological sexes. The original UK version was the best of the 3 by a wide margin.

I doubt it's intentional but, but at the moment Katie & Bill split both the Stephanie & Sally functions from the early years of the show. Katie is like Stephanie for the reasons you've laid out. Plus, as mentioned by others she's Brooke's best sparing partner, capable of going for the jugular. But she's also like Sally as she came from humble beginnings, and craves external validation from the queen bee. Bill is more outwardly like Sally as he is main Forrester antagonist who anchors the secondary setting, is flashy, and has bawdy sense of humor. Like Stephanie he runs on pure ego, has fraught relationships with his offspring because of his controlling nature, and counts tangling with psychopaths as one of his favorite hobbies.

This is very smart. It's a more enticing hook to get people to watch than Victor leaving to give a speech at a fundraiser. Being spoiled might be annoying for daily Y&R/BTG viewers but this isn't really for them, it's to entice occasional, lapsed or never BTG viewers to tune in. @Errol 's hypothesis about why Y&R aired a rerun on Memorial Day was 100% correct. Victor's teaser was synced to get viewers to watch BTG the day of the action, if not in perfect chronological order.