SFK

Was Dee Evans named after you-know-who or was that just a coincidence?

It certainly helps that these guys are all solid performers that the show is lucky to have. This is the factor that probably keeps me watching when the writing is less than stellar. Conversely, when an annoying character is paired with a performer who is lacking (imo), the overall effect is unbearable.

@Donna L. Bridges Eric Kane died offscreen several years after Albert Stratton last played him in 1990 or so. I think the Iris scene you describe is one that @Mona Kane Croft may be referring to. I cannot remember if I actually saw an old recording or just read about it but Mac pleads with Iris to pull herself together and says something about her being barely clothed.

Thank you @Mona Kane Croft I don't know much of anything about Gerald really. I am merely drawing on the connection that Gerald and Eric were the absent fathers of their respective shows' star characters. I would really like to see more of her run. Had it not been for SoapNet, she would have remained a mystery to me save for YouTube uploads of the original broadcast. Thanks to Eddie D.'s thorough records, I was able to have the VCR ready for her return:

Who looks like Hillary Clinton. I am in the middle of season two when Dynasty is not quite *Dynasty* yet. It is nice to find myself watching in the moment with only minimal mental flashes to the show's future. I wonder how many first run viewers forgot about the utterly camp Alexis and Adriana the fortune teller scene with its major foreshadowing.

I don't recall, somebody help me here?

This video has been sitting in my Watch Later folder for months, forgive me if it has already been shared: Somerset was before my time. There was a poster here or on WoST who had the opportunity to read its bible. He said that Pammy was explicitly written to be a Rachel clone, presumably, to capitalize on Rachel's popularity. I do not know to what extent that came to be. I found what Robin Strasser said about the arrival of Gerald Davis to be interesting. She favored the actor more than she did Constance Ford, and she thought it was kind of compelling for the audience to finally see this man who gave Rachel her darker physical features and penchant for unscrupulous behavior. While I did not see any of Gerald Davis, I did see some of Eric Kane as a child (and more recently on YouTube). I feel like there were significant missed opportunities with these father/daughter relationships on each show in their later years. I did not care for AMC killing Eric offscreen and the revelations thereafter.

Revisiting the Iris/Mac/Sylvie backstory, I am reminded of a couple of plots from B&B. Li and Jack raised their adopted son, Finn, who unbeknownst to Li was Jack's biological son all along. Even more disturbing, Ridge had a romantic dalliance with Bridget, who he raised as a daughter and later accepted as a sister. Let us thank Kay Chancellor's dear God in heaven that Lemay never took Iris' Electra complex to the forbidden once it was revealed that MacDaddy was not biologically related.

As a kid, I was intrigued by the Noelle/Silver, Goldie, Dr. Lazarre, Erica, Jeremy story on AMC.

I've been watching soaps for forty years, I can tolerate flawed human beings who make one awful decision after another (some of my favorite characters). My issue with Leo is the trying too hard to be clever dialogue. If I want to roll my eyes at a gay man's failed witticisms, I'll go to a drag show. I'd like to see a gay heavy written like Xander for instance.

I think you need a strong, spunky have-not to make it work. It's okay to have a Claudia in the family, but Matthew and Lindsay were drips. That's why I liked Walter and I think he would have worked as a surrogate patriarch had the show stuck with the Blaisdels. His fire and craftiness worked well up against the Carrington/Colby set. You need your have-not to be a Cliff Barnes or a Richard Channing, even a Dex Dexter with his robust energy. And your Lindsay needs to be more Lucy Ewing.

I don't want to veer too far off topic, but our conversation leads me the question: Is family (blood, legal, or found) essential to a soap? I loved teen dramas like Degrassi and Fifteen which certainly satisfied my soapy leanings. There were a few instances of characters who were siblings and plot points that involved unseen relatives, but the platonic and romantic relationships are what carried these shows.

See, I never got the impression that Dex was killed, just badly injured.

@Broderick I'm currently watching season 2, and I agree that I find Steven's fluid sexuality very believable whether his bi-ness was network mandated or not.

I have zero interest in another baby swap storyline, I'm bored already.

@j swift Thank you for that info re: Deborah and Lennox, missed that! As for East Coast scheduling, in D.C. and New York at least, The View aired at 11am after The City's cancellation. Loving/The City aired at 12:30 after the news and before All My Children at 1pm.

ITA, and I disagreed with Lemay's criticism, particularly of the found family concept. I do think he was right in that the show could have used a little more generational representation. Say, a Myrtle Fargate-like grandma figure in the building. I'm specifically thinking of the older Latina woman Jesse and Jenny befriended during their summer in New York whose name I'm frustratingly forgetting at the moment. I don't know if the actress was still around at the time, but that would have been a lovely throwback to have her in the mix, she could have been Bernardo's abuela. I seem to remember talk of ABC toying with the idea of airing same day repeats late at night. I may be confusing/combining memories with 13 Bourbon Street on FOX. At any rate, I would have loved that given the fact that I was always missing the show because of school and inconsistent VCR taping.

Not Holly about to light up in the DiMera living room. So is that it for DVL for now? Add me to the chorus, not feeling an ounce of the forced sympathy for Leo. For me, it was shades of Knots Landing... the doctor gaslighting Val about the twins. I was certain Nicole was about to say, "I heard (him) cry." I could hardly believed that I burned through three episodes this morning. I had to go back and make sure I hadn't skipped an episode.

Looking back on this idea, it feels akin to any number of teen shows we've seen on the CW or streaming in the last 15 years. Loving as source material is hardly a big draw, the connection might resonate with the show's loyal audience (aging, international even) but it's really no different than any other potentially good film or series inspired by another obscure, widely forgotten one. While Corinth got more than a passing mention on GH, a development on TC that was omitted from the revisit was that Deborah Brewster won the lottery and bought the Alden mansion. While this irked me at the time because GH's writer was always pulling sloppy stunts, to be fair, I don't remember more being said on TC about Deborah moving in and living happily ever after or anything. I suppose it could be easily established that the sale fell through or whatever.

Speaking of forgiveness, don't get me started on that season one rape...

Under what rock has Gabi been for the past 30+ years to not know that prying a knife out of a victim's back is a bad idea? The knife in her hand didn't even make for good TV. Blood on her hands would have been just as effective.

Yeah, I thought for sure Xiao Xing was on the way. Then again, I wasn't spoiled and didn't know Li's fate.

Nell: 🎶Yeah yeah!🎶

On the subject of smirks, BF smirked a doozy of one the other day which looked like he was stifling a laugh and about to cry all at the same time. It gave me pause because it reminded me of the Scared Straight documentary when one of the young men got chewed out by a prisoner for laughing when in fact it was a habitual nervous twitch.

Has DOOL made any sort of statement about their penchant for bringing back so many (yes, even three is "so many") actors in new roles? I'm all for actors staying booked and blessed, but there is no shortage of strong out of work actors out there who are deserving of these casting opportunities. One might argue that there's something nice and familiar about the idea of a DOOL rep company with the same actors popping in and out and in again when a role needs to be filled. For me, something that made a show like All My Children so special was the mosaic of inimitable characters who were so strongly identified with the actors who played them. I think the canvas, the memories, the emotions all get muddy when you keep playing the same actors in different roles. Particularly when the new characterizations aren't strongly deliniated. We just get different hair or a pair of glasses in a new set of circumstances. Perhaps the identical twin soap trope isn't a fair comparison to what we're seeing on DOOL (the same faces and bodies in new roles with no real desire for much difference in execution). But when I look back on what a David Canary or a Kate Collins did, each giving their show an unforgettable new set of thumbprints, I'm just bored and unimpressed with these unnecessary casting changes on DOOL.