All: Who was the best and worst writer on your soap?

[R Sinclair]

No, you're not. I just didn't want to start another uprising -- it's enough work fighting the cause of the Amanda L. Beall Hate Coalition, I don't have time skewering a shitty writer who hasn't been on my show in five years.

He was a breath of fresh air in the beginning 13 weeks (coming off of Passanante's solo barf fest), but then he soon got to the point where I hated all of his crap. I hated his vision and the execution of that vision.

[David V]

The exact same thing can be said for Bradley Bell, mind you- because he's really lost the plot in the past 5 years!

Seriously though, Reilly was a double-edged sword for Days. The good was the fact that ratings rose under him and Days got their best ratings of the decade during his first run. But the bad? I say as I've said for a long time now that Reilly's work (although he is not alone) has been extremely damaging to the credibility and well-being of Daytime, and only now with soaps in the sorry state they are in do people realise that.

It's been the case in Daytime in the past 30 years that some soaps sought to follow trends at the expense of originality and identity, hurting them in the end. But in the 90s when shock value and sensationalism promoted by Reilly's Days became a trend, it laid the foundations for all that we see today- storylines written as stupid as possible to grab attention of viewers, no long-term vision and just over-the-top plots to bring people in (and ratings taking a dive afterwards). It only created a viscious cycle and only alienated more and more fans, and hence the soaps' viewership base eroded. Soap writers used to aspire up to a standard, now they aspire down to such.

I always believed the reason Y&R stood above the rest for so many years was that it avoided such silliness, but under LML they've seemed to become just like all other soaps.