te.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that people are wild about the sets themselves, but more the fact that we have a lot of them, they're somewhat distinct from each other and none of them really looks cramped. I do think they probably did stretch the budget with doing so many sets that some of them are probably a bit more on the basic side, but then again that can be fixed as the show goes along. If I'm going to guess - she knows Naomi because Naomi's husband is a cop and Ashley's long term boyfriend is a firefighter. Naomi is also the one in the family who chooses to live outside "the gates", so it makes sense she'd have more blue collar friends. There also seemed to be some common ground with Ashley's mom knowing Nicole's Majordomo (?) Mona.

Our Family Honour always sounded mega-soapy from the description alone, so it'll be interesting to watch this later. It debuted in the season when soaps seemingly started to falter after a five year dominance, so it looks like it's an example of something coming onto the scene way too late. ETA: Mark of Cain was the 9th episode out of 13. The ratings are interesting - it had a random spike in late December with the 12th episode, presumably because Falcon Crest was off for the week: https://tvtango.com/series/our_family_honor/episodes

Chuck Pratt interview: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-still-the-place-191057736/episode/secrets-of-melrose-place-with-chuck-269342030/ Funny he and Chip Hayes have entirely different memories of the show's odds in season one, with Hayes claiming it had a 22 episode order from the get-go and Chuck saying definitively not. I'd probably trust Hayes more on this though since he was a producer.

I'm already pretending I'm in the opening credits - either Lauren Buglioli or Trisha Mann-Grant. I won't settle for anything else but being the town gossip OR the Silkpress Sheila!

Did You Give The World Some Love Today, Baby?

I love how Marlena is giving horrible advice. Are we sure she's not possessed by the Devil again as a last hurrah from Ron?

This was how Swedish soaps used to run - a fall season and a winter/spring season. Break for summer / Christmas, cliffhangers for each run. That was great.

I think it's worth to remember that Vanessa was meant to be black from the casting calls - I guess they landed on Lauren Buglioli eventually and thank god for them being colour-blind, because she's hilarious as the town gossip. But yeah, all the other white actors are a bit white bread with a bland American cheese (which is the worst cheese in existence) at the moment. It's a race to get out of the bottom as the Spice Girls once sang...

Come on SWEDEN:

Eh. As a non-black person, I feel a good soap is a good soap. And having pointless scenes with Ashley talking about how amazing it is to be a Nice Nurse Who Loves Nursing didn't exactly enhance my experience. Although, scratch that. It did make me like Dani's trainwreck of a life more and Silkpress Sheila's manipulations (sorry, Martin and Smitty, you get none) - so maybe it did work. Oh Val Jean, you clever you...

Yup, plus her scenes with Chad and Doug 3 are really good.

Eh, I feel there's a time to go meta and your introduction week isn't it. I mean, I'm sure Val Jean has more story and intent for Derek / Ashley, but it does feel like that was more a The Powers That Be pushing for the white couple to be featured a bit more in the premiere to show off. But we might end up pretending that it was intentionally meta so that's good enough lol 🤩

TBF, I don't think you can really compare these shows against each other, mostly because producing a soap in 2025 is entirely different from doing so in 1997 or 1988. Budget, demands and what "the suits" want is completely different. "Beyond the Gates" had to deal with an entirely new to soap crew as an example. Plus I feel like some of the weaknesses were probably network mandated - ie giving Ashley / Derek a story despite them not having a logical place yet because they want to make sure the audience know there's a white couple in there too.

Yes, and of course I get it. There's inevitably a lot of bad faith discussions about it ("woke", "DEI", what-not), but that of course isn't my point. I think that if you've been walking in an absolute desert for 25 years and the best source of water have been muddy puddles, of course getting a fresh drink of water is going to be the tastiest thing you've ever had. Is it though? I don't know, but for me the dust usually needs to settle before I give a fair judgement of it. Add that I wouldn't want to sell this as - "the best first week in soap history" - to anyone who've never watched soaps. Then again, the first thing I'd remind them is that daytime soaps are marathons, not a sprint.

I think that a huge part of the Martin / Smitty situation is that they're - or rather Martin - is trying to push themselves into a heteronormative box of being "Respectable Gays". It's an interesting storyline in itself and it ties into why Smitty is a "homemaker". I'm not sure if they'd ever go there in the current climate, but relationships not being a one-size-fits all would be an interesting route to go down but again, I doubt that would happen. But at one point I'd like them to at least adress that gay relationships aren't necessarily just something where one takes on the traditional "man" role and the other takes on the "woman" role.

Erm, I guess I like any Julie scenes at the moment so there's that.

Ooh, that makes sense. I tried looking over the BTG fan wiki, but yeah. A lot of names floating around.

I think they might've meant Caroline, who is Hayley's best friend at the office and maid of honor? https://beyondthegates.fandom.com/wiki/Caroline_Lee

I think the big issue with doing a proper rural based soap is that the popularity of those Taylor Sheridan shows are as much based on plots as showing off the landscape and just small town life. I'd feel like in order to do a successful rural/small town soap you'd need to at the very least build a small town set a la Peyton Place and maybe even do location shots (not Peapack style). It would be a huge commitment that I'm not sure a network would want to do. Weirdly enough, setting soaps in a more urban area is probably cost effective because we end up not expecting as much from the sets to represent that.

I'm going to be nice and say that I thought it started to come together a bit for her in her and Naomi's phone call because she came across as human having an actual conversation. I'm just not sure how much you can do when every scene you have is clunky variants of "I'm a nurse", "I'm a newly examined nurse", "nursing has been my dream my whole life", "screw it, here's confidential patient information", etc. I half expected her to yell out that she loves kittens at one point!

To be honest, I thought one of the biggest issues this week were Ashley's scenes - not necessarily because of Jen Jacob, but because a lot of them ended up saying nothing else but that she's a Nice Nurse Who Loves Nursing (when she's not breaking HIPPA) and it ended up breaking the flow. They felt clunky and I get the feeling they wanted to get her character in this week, but had no place for her in the story yet. It started to come together at the end of the week, but a lot of that felt like they could show, not tell with her character. I could've done without the majority of her scenes and had her come in more subtly, maybe in connection with Laura's accident. I think that time could've gone to smooth out the exposition scenes.

I think when you look at where she started the week and where she ended up, it makes perfect sense - as I've said previously, she's been the archetypical Woman on the Verge all week, even taking shots at her dressing room table. So I don't think she's meant to be like this all the time (see how she handled the fashion shoot), it's just that we've dropped in at a very stressful time for the poor dear. Her behavior makes sense if you're viewing it from the perspective that she's having a complete and utter meltdown, culminating in her having a shoot out at the wedding.

I agree that people are being a bit hyperbolic when they say that it's "one of the greatest first weeks ever"; I guess people are still a bit high on the "new soap smell" after mostly having cancellations for the past quarter of the decade. It was a nice opening week, but there are definitively things to work out. Technically, I probably prefer Dark Shadows and Sunset Beach (I love the 90s prime time soap gloss, ngl) at least. But in all honesty, most soaps opening weeks just aren't available to watch anywhere, so we have little to compare it to. Most of the soaps that launched since 1980 were short-lived on top of that (with B&B being the only survivor).

Add that he's such a key part - the whole thing about Anita and Vernon having to protect him from Bill is obviously going to be a big storyline... or at least is meant to be. Chelsea is kind of just there for now - as a character, she's given more grace to grow into the part as they can always hand over too meaty material for others to carry. LOL, that just made me think about how people use "narcissist" as the latest buzzword. Maybe Bill is, but Hayley clearly isn't being written as one.

Derek is probably worse, but he's so marginal to the story that they can always end up underwriting him and then write the character out once his usefulness is done. Martin is more concerning because he's really a centerpiece character and needs to improve fast. As a character, Martin is clearly in this for the long haul. And yeah, I'm not putting him and Smitty's lack of chemistry on Manning - he's not giving him anything to work with unfortunately and there's only so much you can do if your scene partner is flat. I'm hoping once the Bill / Hayley wedding drama dies down that Dani calms down a bit. They've clearly played her as a Woman on the Verge all week in order to lead up to the cliffhanger, but they need to tone her down a bit after all this otherwise it'd be inexplicable that she's not in the nuthouse.