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Pilot for Born in the USA (aka This Land), a proposed half hour soap for FOX in the 2007-08 season by Mal Young and was supposed to air a few nights per week if picked up, has leaked: Interesting that this made it all the way to pilot stage to be honest. I'm not sure how Fox would've scheduled a half hour soap in that season. Futon Critic development page: http://thefutoncritic.com/devwatch/born-in-the-usa/ @SteelCity lol don't know who else to @.

I think they are trying (and failing) to create an optical illusion that the set/room is bigger than it is - in all honesty, they would probably be better off with just building two normal corner walls and just work with the camera angles (though ideally they'd just give them more room to build their sets). And yes, let's not even talk about all those patterns that are going on. I assume they're trying to go for "homely"/"personal" feel but it looks more like eye vomit.

I agree - I get the impression that she is fully aware that she's playing roles and she has no real qualms about Teresa being a "bad person", because she can separate her work from herself. However, the audience she's currently pandering can not and expects you to basically live as a good Christian 24/7 and not accept "immoral" roles. So she has to make up how the characters she's playing are really decent people deep down who've been led wayward. Not that I feel bad for her or anything - she's clearly doing this so that she can keep those GAC paychecks coming in and not be cancelled by the crowd that complains about people being cancelled.

To be fair, someone like Victor dying quietly in his sleep just feels wrong for his character. I definitively want more drama than that for him, though a classic "plane crash, no body recovered" also feels wrong because it's a classic soap opera non-death and they can't (or rather shouldn't) recast Victor. I'm not sure how I would've done it though; I guess if they'll milk his body not being recovered for storyline purposes it could be ok. I doubt it, but we'll see.

Going by IMDB, it seems like most of (if not all?) this got VHS releases - each episode was 30 minutes and each "story" ran for 5 episodes. I assume the VHS releases got re-cut to be more like "movies" (but judging from the VHS release of the Hamptons I assume it'd be more like cutting out the opening and ending credits rather than more creative re-editing).

I guess we'll see how Janet affects what we're seeing on screen - or if it's just business as usual. We know that Ron didn't want to do the devil storyline (which was a demand from the higher ups), plus the inability for the show to retain the actors wasn't exactly his choice - by all accounts they killed off Abby because they couldn't get the actresses to commit to doing the show. That is if Ron comes back at all after the strike is over.

I just hope that this means that they can start retaining actors - especially younger ones - in the long-term, especially since they pretty much killed off Abby because none of the actresses wanted to commit to DAYS. At the time we thought it was budget reasons in addition to actors not wanting to be stuck on a sinking ship, but then Mansi signed with General Hospital...

To be fair, the other person they named might not have wanted to take in reigns after the Alarr mess, plus might not have the pull with not only the on-set cast/crew and but the other backstage people. Janet Spellman-Drucker seems like a good choice since she's been with the show for so long. I look forward to seeing what she can bring on air.

I agree - with DAYS having such a tight budget and slightly oddball production model, I don't see them bringing in someone from the outside unless they all of a sudden decides to up the budget in a significant way (which won't happen - the only reason it survives is because it produces so much content for Peacock at a cheap price). I also don't really see any experienced outside producers wanting to deal with DAYS's production model and pocket change budget.

The Empire Valley story really falls apart the moment Ben finds those satellite parts, because first of all it's just bad writing - had the truck not stopped Ben would've never found out (Something That Happens For The Sake of Happening writing), but we're also supposed to believe Ben would recognize that the satellite parts are too high-tech and something weird is going on.

Peter has more or less retired from acting and makes his living elsewhere...

Could be, could also be like a lot of bullies Alarr knows who to suck up for and who he can abuse on set. It wouldn't surprise me if he has cast members he's playing nice with, especially those with imagined clout. I doubt we'll ever know.

Yep, now that it's reached proper mainstream coverage beyond industry press I can't see how they can keep him. I get the feeling that the reason the PR team was fired wasn't as much for budget reason but that Alarr wanted to keep track of this story potentially leaking.

As much as people like to think that anything changed with MeToo and the likes, you can bet that any actor that goes publically and against the grain will be labeled "problematic" behind the scenes and even if Alarr goes there will still be people there that will be disgruntled by his firing in the upper echelons. I don't blame any actor for not speaking out no matter what "clout" they have as all of them have been fired at one point or another.

This is kind of blowing up as Daily Mail is now reporting on it - I just don't see how they can keep Alarr.

I mean, one of the actresses is blatantly Camila Banus, so that's hardly hard to guess considering she's more or less walked twice now. I wonder if this is why Kristian Alfonso also took the opportunity to leave abruptly post-covid.

I'm shocked that they, I don't know, just get rid of Alarr? Surely, his contract can't be that airtight? On the other hand, I'm not sure how many people would want to work with DAYS's ever decreasing budget, but really, wouldn't it be better to take a chance of an unknown at this point? Hell, in general an issue with daytime is that the same people just cycle through the shows again and again and again...

I think it's more down to the fact that Colgate were obviously the ones preserving the tapes before then and NBC just continued their practice of wiping the tapes for re-use once they bought it, probably not giving much thought that these episodes weren't being preserved by Colgate anymore, especially since it wasn't sold internationally and NBC weren't persuing that option at the time.

I think it's more that they saw Thursday as a dead-end slot where no new shows could succeed and they had two comedies to premiere late in the season (Bagdad Cafe and Sugar & Spice); obviously they weren't going to put those up against NBC's monster line-up and they probably had hoped that Dallas might have enough pulse left to improve the Friday 10PM slot. Falcon Crest was dead anyway so they just threw it under the bus.

I don't think we need Paul in the mix to be honest - as you said, as a character he's not that interesting to begin with and it's only CS that makes him good. Colton clearly is up for more than a recurring part, so it makes no sense to me why they won't put him on the canvas with Will and Sonny gone. Leo just isn't very rootable for a proper love triangle. I don't think anyone takes him seriously - the only time I could ever see him with a love interest is when he's finally being sent off somewhere and it would probably be some rich sugardaddy.

Yep, I've also wondered if the original treatment that Jacobs presented to CBS only initially had the Fairgate, Avery and Ward households and that he just tacked on the Ewings when CBS wanted to spin off Dallas. I think they early on tried to do slightly "youth" focused storylines with the Wards, but I think because they couldn't really fully separate Ewings / Wards by an age difference (the Wards being obviously in their 20s still) it just never quite worked out for them since Ewings just inherited the "young married couple" thing (despite Val and Gary being in their early to mid-30s but don't tell Joan Van Ark that).

I don't get why anyone would want to replace a shitty app with a possibly worse one.

Ditto. I don't expect much, but I will say that the breakdown writers often come to the rescue. Having spent co-vid watching Dark Shadows, Peyton Place and other bits of old soaps, I think people forget how consciously vague soaps often left things and it was up to the viewers interpretation what happened. Of course, a lot of that had to do with broadcast standards, but I wonder when the whole demand for that "we need to know every detail as to what happened and we need to know it now" started? I tend to see this sort of vagueness as soap tradition rather than laziness. But I also feel the same thing for leaving soap characters fate up in the air for a bit (like with Sarah, SaRenée crapa side) isn't a bad thing because soaps are designed to keep going so there's always time to solve plot threads in the future.

I wonder if they at that point wanted to involve Ray in the "who's the daddy?" storyline but ditched it?