te.

To be fair, they kind of killed Cassie's character by having her related to virtually every eligable male in Salem.

Shows can have "dark" elements without exactly being dark overall - see Desperate Housewives (which was a lot darker when it was pitched).

Add that live ratings has been dropping drastically for the past five or so years for tv overall. The one thing soaps have on shows like The Talk is that I assume people are more likely to stream them. I've long assumed that DAYS is only kept on the air because it does well on the NBC app/now Peacock.

Oh, it's the recast Theo.

Except he claims he didn't send it her way as he didn't tag her. Either way... we all have bad days. I'm not sure MM getting nasty over one bad tweet represents her overall behavior.

I don't mind Charlie being killed off (kind of tired of them trying to redeem bad people, hi Ben), but the set up could've been much stronger if they wanted a murder mystery. It's like they just remembered that MM only had a day left on his contract and they ended up having to set it up within an episode. As other people have said, they could've expanded it into a custody fight and have him piss off even more characters.

Just a script at this point.

I'm guessing Sami's going to be limited in her appearances and they're going to fill it out with Dan Wells. Either that or he's a re-cast Eric.

To be fair, they only initially signed her for six months since they had no idea how long Melissa was going to be gone from the show. We still have no idea if Reeves is going to be back or not for that matter or if they're going to recast again or give Cady another contract (if she even wants it?).

I think Laurie's home life is pretty much dropped towards the end thankfully. I would've liked to have seen at least a full season of Paper Dolls since it's obvious they tried to course correct a bit towards the end, but of course it was already too late at that point and they aired the series finale December 25th (!). I thought the biggest issue was that it was like we were coming in on season 3 of a show rather than season 1. All successful prime time soaps of the 80s and 90s seemed to have a slow start.

Yeah, you can tell with even having the same opening credits where they credit the guest stars of the episode like Hotel had. 1x02 is also available on YouToob either way:

I re-watched the entirety of Paper Dolls recently and I still think the biggest issue is that it comes off as three shows in one - you have Racine and the agency, the teen scene/Laurie's home life and then of course the Harpers. They probably could've dropped at least one of those elements and had a more coherent show. Incidentally, I found an episode of Glitter (1x05) - it was apparently more like Love Boat and Hotel than Dynasty, but some might be interested in it. Starred Katherine Wentworth:

Honestly, considering Chuck Pratt was on board and created the show I'm not too surprised at the lack of planning ahead. Whenever he's too involved with a show I always assume there just isn't a huge story projection. I can certainly get that networks can interfere and you'll have to be somewhat flexible, but you have to at least know the end point for characters when you're writing it, otherwise you'll end up with a mess.

To be fair, it does seem like the interview was done in (broken) English (I assume the interviewer was French?), translated to another language (French probably), THEN translated back to English.

In the second season she did earn $40k per episode, up from $25k in season one and "nearly double" of what other cast members got: https://ew.com/article/1993/08/06/heather-locklears-pay-increase/ By the end of Melrose she was picking up somewhere between $100-125k per episode (some sources say that a significant increase happened as early as season 3 or 4). It's worth to remember with Melrose Place's long seasons and large ensemble that's a lot to pay an individual actor. I heard Luke got around $90k per episode when he returned to Beverly Hills 90210 in season 9.

Pamela Sue Martin (Fallon #1). Honestly, I'd probably do the same thing even if I was determined to leave. Why not really? Worst thing that can happen is that they'll agree to it and you'll end up turning them down anyway. After all, Victoria Principal was actually actively negotiating with the Dallas producers to return for season 11 and allegedly turned down an offer that would make her the highest paid actress on television.

The rumour was that Laura Leighton was trying to get parity with Heather Locklear, so I either think that she knowingly made a demand she wasn't going to get anyway or Spelling had his goons plant that story in the rags, lord knows the man could be some old school spiteful when he felt people "betrayed" him. PSM got stories "she's over" stories in the press when she turned down to do the Colby's and of course he pretty much tried everything to destroy Central Park West and pretty much gloated when it failed.

Age, I guess, in combination of Deidre and Drake just being comfortable at this point playing off each other that they might just not allow themselves to have chemistry with other actors.

SMG is already tied to two pilots (Sometimes I Lie and Other People's Houses), so it would rough to attach herself to another project, even if it's only in the pilot stage.

There's a door in the cage, which I assume is the bathroom - I guess if you're going through the trouble you might as well build a bathroom too. But yeah, I always wonder whenever they have these "people looked in a cage/tied up for months" plotlines where they do their bathroom needs. Search Party adressed this sort of in their latest season lol.

ATWT ended ten years ago, so of course it didn't hit the lows Days did. Ratings are down across the board, so there's no telling where ATWT would be if it was still airing today.

The Marlena clones on DAYS that seemingly amounted to nothing. Since the possession storyline ran longer than they expected (probably due to the popularity of it and helping the show fight the OJ pre-emptions) I assume it was originally meant as a follow up storyline to it and then just dropped.

We knew her contract was temporary, but I really hoped that they'd make it permanent. She really rejuvenated the role after an awkward first few eps.

I mean, the season 6 "production" finale is just bizarre in the sense that you have all these departures and no one suffers a grisly Melrose Place death. It's a bit too nice, but I guess they didn't want to splash the budget once they knew that the season 7 premiere was going to air the week after either way. There's also a two and a half months gap in the master date between As Bad As It Gets (6x32) and Buena Sera Mr Campbell (6x33-6x34). I always heard that the show got pulled from production but never found concrete evidence until I saw the discrepancy between the master dates. I wonder what the original plan for the finale was before they fired most of the cast lol.

I think the biggest issue with daytime soaps is that we are so used to "coming back from the dead" stories that we'd have known the minute Kimberly died off screen that she wasn't really dead. See Ciara on DAYS. The reason we were shocked was because no one really expected Melrose to pull such a twist at that point.