Michael

Thanks for the tags, @victoria foxton! I can't wait to watch these and join the conversation.

It's even harder to watch these crappy corporate stories (Days is at least as bad as Y&R, but I'd say worse in that one regard) when we have stuff like Succession and The Dropout available elsewhere. It makes these goofy "CEO wars" with no detail or nuance seem even more cartoonish.

Interesting idea in theory, and certainly not impossible. I do see two potential issues: 1) It's confusing to cast, say, a Black woman as Alexis and then see her with any of Alexis's three very clearly white daughters. Obviously Black people have white children, and vice-versa, but it could create an entirely different context for those relationships. 2) A Black Monica Quartermaine would be a Black woman who became a doctor in the 1970s, which is a very different backstory than a white woman who had the privilege of being white, especially in the "old days" but even up until now. Not that soaps even write this context for 95% of their BIPOC characters, though they're getting better at it, but I do think it adds a layer to the characters that would be neither intended nor properly explored. I do think it's an idea worthy of some exploring, though!

My mental timeline is probably mixed up, but it felt like it stayed "decent" until fall 2014, for the most part. Abigail and EJ's affair wasn't really a great story, but it had a lot of great moments. Same with Sami, Kate, and Gabi "killing" Nick. In retrospect, there was a lot of stuff that I liked pieces of but had other elements dragging it down. JJ/Eve was juicy, but Paige was so insipid -- and it definitely felt like a retcon that Paige was Eve's daughter, probably as a means of breathing some life into that story, because they'd had Paige and Theresa cross paths without even a hint that they knew each other. Didn't they say that Eve, Paige, and Ben all recognized each other from Florida at one point, too? That got dropped. I think we knew that Kate was paying Jordan from the outset, because she hired a physical therapist for Rafe and then was pissed it was a female Jordan instead of a man, right? I don't know why anyone thought building a triangle off a pairing like Rafe/Kate made any sense, but they sort of cobbled together an interesting umbrella story by roping in Abigail, Chad, Ben, and Clyde as things went along. The big thing, of course, that was hanging over that era was Daniel. It truly felt like he had to be part of everything. Even when Kristen returned in disgrace after her rape of Eric was exposed, they made it about Daniel. What was with that weird scene of Daniel and Kristen starting to hook up, only to be caught by Brady? Awful.

I know you and I have gone back and forth a lot on this period elsewhere, but I find it so interesting to discuss. The intro of the Jordan storyline (and all its weird shifts) felt like the time when the TomSell era, which had been so strong from late 2012-fall 2013, started to fall apart. Something was up with the resolution of Sami's murder trial for shooting Bernardi -- that thing with the nurse was so random and unsatisfying. And I always wanted them to do more with Marge Bernardi. They could've involved Lucas with her, for instance. Stefano's involvement during that period felt like it changed over and over -- probably when Joe's health improved, they did more with him, and then they had to pull back when it waned. And I don't think they knew how they wanted to position Clyde, either. Setting up that he had raped Jordan and then trying to make him a viable love interest for Kate was insane. That whole Jordan/Rafe story was SO limp and without a real throughline, too. Just sloppy. I love the idea of Bernardi's son returning and being paired with either of Sami's daughters. At one point, I thought Charlie might turn out to be the child of Alan Harris, targeting Allie as vengeance for what Sami did to his father. This would be a similar vibe.

In my mind, she had, but I'm realizing she just set Jessica's gross DID backstory in motion, huh? I had conflated that with Mitch having been around. They've softened and un-softened him so much over the years that I have whiplash. He's never quite been the supervillain Stefano is, and I think there's a way to play him as this unscrupulous businessman without Maggie constantly having to give him a pass on stuff like putting hits on people and harming their own family members.

Griffith's tone worked (for me) for the first few months. It was perfect for the serial killer story, but the balance of the show was immediately off. The entire thing was the Necktie Killer and Hope/Aiden, with random interludes of stuff like Daniel and Nicole blowing the budget by dancing to John Legend's "All of Me" in the Pub. But yeah, the darkness worked, and then it was the entire show and so oppressive and miserable. I thought he'd turn Y&R into a bloodbath, and instead he turned it into... uh... whatever this boring-ass mess is. Mascolo came back pretty strong in 2007, but they were having all those weird contract issues in '07-'08 where they'd have to bench vets for months at a time, so he was there, then he was in a coma, then he was back, blah blah. Didn't Higley love Mitch Lawrence? You'd think she would've leaned into writing Stefano at least more like that than the riveting tale of a supervillain with diabetes.

I love Maggie Horton and absolutely believe Suzanne Rogers has a place on this show. I loathe Maggie Kiriakis. But I'm glad she continues to have a presence (and a job), and it's an easy course correction -- they had her with the Hortons more since Suzanne returned from leave, and she was great there. I know they're now in a tough spot tossing her into scenes as Victor's mouthpiece for Titan, likely because JA can't film, but it just underscores how much of being with Victor is not who Maggie is -- which would be interesting if they addressed it instead of ignored it! The scenes of Hope killing Stefano were very, very strong in isolation. But like so much of Days (and especially Griffith's Days), it was all predicated on some flimsily established premise that she thought Stefano was responsible for Bo's death, even as we were seeing that Deimos had something to do with it. I don't think it helped that we could all see how feeble Joe Mascolo was. That wasn't the show's fault, per se, but it affected how the scenes read. The bigger problem was the fallout and the cover-up, as mentioned upthread. There was probably a way to pin it on that disgusting André without Hope and Rafe coming off so hypocritical and awful, but that would've required nuanced writing, which was in short supply. I think we were all just so tired of the nonstop darkness by that point, too. We went from watching Will Horton be strangled onscreen to Bo dying of a brain tumor to Eric killing Daniel in a DUI to Hope shooting Stefano to Ciara's rape in like three months. (And yeah, I agree that the rape was THE THING that should have sealed Griffith's fate. It was disgusting, distasteful, and worst of all, pointless!) Hope felt like a random choice to kill Stefano, too. I guess Marlena got to do it with the 1985 shooting *and* injecting his IV in 2008, so she got her shot. Lol. Roman as an idea is interesting!

I think they have chemistry, too. I found it interesting initially to have Hope completely lose her [!@#$%^&*] after the trauma of Bo's death/Aiden's betrayal. The story of her being the one to shoot Stefano dead was interesting, but the execution was so, so bad (and such an obvious way to push her and Rafe inorganically) -- so instead of playing into the interesting darkness that KA has, it played up that awful, brittle side of her that Hope has yet to return from.

It was dumb! He couldn't have... been scared and run out of the building and been trapped under a tree or something? I dunno. It was so ridiculous. Yeah, I canNOT remember why they were in the safehouse. I'm sure it was dumb! That was pretty shortly after John and Hope returned from Alamainia, which was a whole other ball of nothing. But I don't think those threads were connected.

I liked the beginning, too. There just wasn't much to it after that. And I have no doubt Corday was sticking his hands in the pot pretty early on. It just felt to me like the appearance of a sophisticated story without the actual storytelling. Something definitely shifted around January of MarDar's run, too. A lot of those initial "stories" wrapped up quickly, and we moved into other phases. But their first month or two definitely felt like a Days I wanted to watch, and then I almost felt guilty admitting I was bored as hell by the time the Pub got shot up and everyone thought Johnny was dead and it turned out he had just been... under a table for days?

I think you're right that it was Stefano-related. That pension story was terrible. I can see how it SOUNDED good, which was my thing with MarDar. John and Marlena return! Stefano has a plot against them but it isn't some crazy sci-fi thing! Carrie and Austin are pitted against each other professionally, which pushes Carrie toward Rafe and reignites the Carrie/Sami tension! The basic ideas sound good, but it was pedestrian as hell in execution.

That resolution was embarrassing, even for Days. I believe they were in a safehouse, though -- they wanted everyone to think they were dead (I cannot remember why), so they got stashed in some safehouse and spent the whole time canoodling and [!@#$%^&*]. So for a while, they were just hanging around doing nothing. It was only toward the end, when the bomb became known, that the situation was dire. I'm not sure MarDar's stories were as interfered with as is rumored. It was, as stated above, all setup. They came in with that story of Stefano framing John for stealing employee pensions or something, and it went on for MONTHS and then just ended with, like, Stefano telling the truth and it was over between commercial breaks. Every single thing they wrote wound up like that. It's tough for me to believe there was absolute brilliance planned and then it all wound up so flat and pointless -- we all know Corday gets nervous, but I'd kill to see what these "incredible stories" were supposed to be. We were still operating within the parameters of American daytime drama in 2011-12, after all. I really liked the start of their tenure, and I do think they helped restore the core of the show after the messiness of Higley's final year or so, but it was a sloppy, sloppy show with poor balance and weird callbacks to the past that meant nothing.

That story meandered for like the entirety of the McPherson/Thomas run. I've never been able to tell what was planned and what was, "Oh sh*t, we have to wrap up all these different threads really fast." Ian didn't appear to have much to do with the DiMeras for the bulk of his time, aside from bedding Kate because, well, she's Kate, and he was involved with some power struggle at Titan (maybe as a way to mess with Brady, who was with Ian's ex, Madison?). At the same time, they'd also set up this whole secret truce between Alice and Stefano where she was keeping the secret that EJ wasn't his son or something. Brynn Thayer played the back of Susan's head one day on a phone call and told Hope about this. Then, that spring, there was a Who Killed Stefano? story, which started out pretty fun and epic. I think EJ wound up the main suspect but it turned out -- VERY RANDOMLY and quickly -- that Ian had framed him, and they tossed in some flashback of Santo DiMera to explain that Ian thought Santo was his father and he was the rightful heir to the DiMera fortune, and something something EJ was really Stefano's son and Ian had just kidnapped Stefano and it was over very fast, and then Joe was back on as Stefano, but not in Salem and always seated, for a good year afterward. I do think the intention was to build up Ian as the new big bad, but none of this felt unified.

Okay, I actually gasped.

McPherson and Thomas completely axed the hospital, which I always found to be such a weird move. We occasionally saw some weird hospital room set -- I know Bo had some health crisis while Hope was in "Alamainia" (smh) with John -- but we didn't see that main nurses' station area for a whole year. Melanie, who was a nurse, started doing Botox at the spa, and Kayla was working behind the bar at the Pub. Maxine didn't appear for the entire year. We got the main hospital set back, like, the first week of Tomlin and Whitesell's return, as well as Melanie greeting Maxine. (Also, hi!) McPherson & Thomas's stint really should have worked. I don't know what level of interference there was, but there were no stories being told. It was just a lot of setup. Everyone was getting new, random job offers, many of which went nowhere. It felt to me like a lot of well intentioned and poorly executed fan service. And I wound up liking a lot of what McPherson did with the AMC reboot a year later! Justin/Adrienne seemed to get the big supercouple push, though I've always regarded them as a secondary supercouple, and then Jack/Jennifer were there, so that era kind of stretched itself into 1990-91. But you're right -- by the time Tanner and Molly were being pushed as the Next Big Thing (or a Thing at all!), things had really nosedived. This was also an era where, for the first time in over a decade, Days was telling love stories with characters who had a lot of onscreen history, often in a second or third "big love" -- you had Marlena returning and being torn between Roman and John, Bo moving on after Hope's death with Carly, and even Kayla and Shane turning to one another. Totally different sort of storytelling than they'd done in the 80s.

Dario! (I knew what you meant, lol.) I knew there was another quick exit that I couldn't figure out. McPherson & Taylor brought Jack back, though. He arrived as their run began. In retrospect, and not having seen Anna's intro, it's tough for me to imagine Roman having been with Anna at all!

Thanks! I've been seeing buzz about it on boards and Twitter but couldn't find anything substantial. Ha! "Stephanie returns, played by a man, since Susan Flannery didn't give a [!@#$%^&*] about appearing feminine for the last decade of her run" or some sh*t. I do wonder if it involves Phoebe...

Chappell/Carly left in September 2011, I'm pretty sure. The big reboot with the launch of Horton Town Square was late September, like the week of the 25th or so, and they spent the weeks leading up to that ushering out a lot of people. Carly went into rehab at some point during the summer, and she left for Europe with Nicholas (played briefly by Cody Longo) -- this was right around the time that Tamara Braun's Taylor improbably left for Dubai or something with Vivian and her forgotten pimp son, Quinn (who then returned a few months later), and they put a quick stop to Chloe's prostitution storyline and shored up her character as best they could before quickly sending her packing, too. It was one of those very clear transition periods. I think Chloe was the only departing character who overlapped with the "reboot" at all -- I remember her final scenes being in the Town Square with Brady and Nicole. Then John, Marlena, Carrie, Austin, and Jack all showed up during the HTS opening. Ha! I think John is a P.I. now, technically, which suits him more than the ISA stuff. I'm shocked Ron hasn't tried to be clever and pull some Chris Kositchek redux with JT...

I've come to kinda-sorta like JT's Roman as the mumbling barkeep who's always like, "What da hell are these morons up to now?" And he does decently in Dad Mode with Ali Sweeney and Christie Clark and Greg Vaughan. This just... isn't the Roman Brady of 1982 or 1992. The further away from RealRoman the portrayal gets, the more it works for me, which ain't right but it's okay (to bastardize Whitney's words). I'm trying to think of another once-iconic daytime character who lasted decades but just sort of became this third-tier dude hanging around.

I always kinda wondered about that. Carly was GONE the week before the DHs waltzed back into that Town Square.

Absolutely chilling. They half-assedly threw JT's Roman at a lot of women. In addition to Billie, he had that bizarre one-night fling with AZ's Nicole in 2006 (after which she vanished for two years), and they even teased him with Bonnie when she'd mellowed out a bit once Sheffer took over.

I could 100% see Wayne Northrup's Roman and Lisa Rinna's Billie having been a cool pairing circa the late 90s. Love that idea. Josh Taylor and Krista Allen dressed up as cowboys on an ISA mission, however...

Carly and Billie didn't overlap in that era. Carly went out with the big "reboot" that McPherson & Thomas ushered in, and Billie came back the following spring (2012). I think they were more excited to get Lisa Rinna and to be using the Countess Wilhelmina name than anything -- there was never much plan for her.

Do we have ANY hints what this "twist" might be? I'm intrigued even though I find the show unwatchable.