Michael

Yeah, I could be over-stating it, but I just found a quote where he said he didn't get "a fair chance to show [his] ability" and was critical of "the collaborative process" at Days and then immediately said he wasn't talking sh*t and just being honest. It felt like a lot of that around the time of his exit. I'm sure some of it was trying to save face, too.

He made some comments in the media about how he was better than the show, etc. Then I think tried to beg his way back into the job later. Nathan would be very recastable. As mentioned above, he was engaged to Stephanie, Maggie's his grandma, Sarah's his aunt, Holly is his cousin, he had a little rivalry with Philip, plus he has the Horton ties *and* a dad who was never identified. Mostly he could be a useful relatively blank slate.

Thank you, @JAS0N47! This is awesome. Appreciate all your hard work and responsiveness.

Thanks for the clarity! Would be so cool if you happened to have any more detail on the Mike/Linda stuff.

I think Margaret Mason was the original Linda. And yes, that Mike event gets a lot of chatter online -- I'd be curious to see how it really played at the time. Elaine Princi took over as Linda in the 80s, I believe.

Wasn't Phyllis the Anderson wife, at least originally? They had her get with Neil and lose a child with him, I think. Some of the stuff with Linda/Bob sounds pretty delicious and soapy, at least from my reading. That mid-80s return of Linda as a madame always struck me as insane.

Sounds pretty accurate to me. They were a solid B-family who kind of ran their course. In some ways, folding Melissa so fully into the Hortons *was* the way of bringing the Anderson clan forward into the 80s era. The Brooke/Stephanie character, Bob's other daughter, always reads to me like she could've been the real standout, but they killed her off that second time. And it doesn't sound like she had a ton to do after she came back as "Stephanie" with the new face.

The directors don't really direct performances anymore, though. They handle blocking and guide camera moves and make sure coverage is handled. There's no time to direct performances.

Didn't the whole thing with Amanda Howard and the brain tumor (which was Neil's intro, no?) ALSO happen in that short period?

These are good ones! They definitely seem forgotten rather than purposely kept to reveal later.

Based on what Julie just did with the Horton house post-fire... maybe it's okay if she stays away from the decorating. 🫢

The other thing JER did that drove me nuts was that a night would go on for so long that someone would go to bed, and later that same night, they'd be out for a fancy dinner.

It's Salem o'clock. Semi-related: I wish we had more episodes clearly set at night. Nighttime and darkness are so dramatic. It's always high noon on Days in recent years. I was thinking the same thing about this serum and that bit from the promo. That could actually be sort of interesting and reality-adjacent.

Jennifer had one on Days in 1998. It was right before she and Jack left the show. It was some kind of setup to get Peter to confess his crimes or something.

That loft lived on into JER 2.0. It was where Belle and Philip lived when they were married, and Shawn and Mimi had an apartment across the hall (which later was redone into Sami & Rafe's place and then into the Ciara/Claire/Tripp apartment). I'm guessing the last time we saw the loft was maybe 2006-07?

I loved Friday's episode even though it had some real logic holes. They were obviously writing around Drake's illness, so it's understandable, but why did Andrew have to fly to Salem to tell Marlena about John if John was able to call her 15 minutes later? And why didn't Johnny react at all to seeing Andrew at the townhouse given that he was with Paul, who'd just told all of them that Andrew wasn't in town? I love when they let Marlena be dismissive and bitchy to Kristen, though.

I like the general shape of this, but if there's one thing I need Days (and all soaps) to stop doing, it's putting people into romances with their rapists. So a big no to Chad/Gwen as an actual pairing.

Yes, they took over Basic Black. We spent months on them hiring Gabi and Paul as models, talking about their plans, etc., and then it all just went nowhere and dovetailed into the weird Nicole/Deimos/Kate pseudo-triangle. There was a Basic Black fashion show on New Year's Eve the night Eric killed Daniel in the car accident.

The Rafe double was under Higley/Whitesell in the first part of 2011. It was dumb, but I thought it was some of Galen's best work lol. I agree that the whole Sept 2011-Aug 2012 felt like fan fiction. A lot of it reads well on paper, but the execution was so devoid of anything interesting. People were just wandering around, getting job offers (Hope and Abigail were approached about being Basic Black models, and we spent several episodes on that and it went nowhere), and they introduced that spa that Maggie bought and it all added up to nothing except Melanie started doing Botox there (which wasn't a story), and they dumped University Hospital for the entire year basically. It was all just kind of ideas of "this could be a good setup for something" except they forgot to write the actual stories that resulted from those setups. It was respectful of history, so that's something, but so much of it just felt like random ideas. In retrospect, I should've known we were in trouble the instant they tried to convince us that Austin, a character whose ability to count was always questionable, was a forensic accountant. As for the 50th anniversary reset in fall 2015, the thing that often doesn't get talked about was how weird the balance was. There were like two A-stories -- the Necktie Killer, which was part of the Chad/Abigail/Ben story and was pretty solid, albeit way too dark, and then the Hope/Aiden stuff. Other people were airing like once every two weeks, or just being threaded into episodes with no story. It was the strangest distribution of story I've ever seen on this show.

This was probably written and filmed before the Cybertruck was a glimmer in Elon's stupid eye, though! 😄

Yeah, they went to New York together. It was heavily implied that it might develop into more.

Groan.

Yeah, I was mistaken -- I caught more on the second watch and there's definitely shots of stuff that are post-Ron (the Drake stuff, I think). But the bulk of this seems to be Ron's material. Ron was the one who originally brought in Sami for whatever story this is, though. We definitely have like six months of Ron material left. They didn't throw out months of written/shot episodes. But this has a focus to it that's promising.

Actually maybe this goes into the spring because Sami is there -- but Ron was the one who brought her in, apparently. I just find it hard to believe they're showing stuff that won't air for six months right now.

Yes. This only covers the next 2 months or so. His material airs until like May, maybe into June. They didn't go back and scrap months of stuff.