Seeing how good Jeff Kober has been this season on The Pitt just makes me that much more angry about his role at GH as Cyrus. They styled and presented him poorly throughout onscreen, to the point that both in terms of physicality and in story Cyrus came off like a doddering old man quoting Bible verses or weeping for pity because he ran over Dad in the driveway, all the while vaguely terrorizing people like a Scooby-Doo villain or a hokey carnival barker.
Most of this is because this era's creative team fundamentally does not do well writing supervillains and especially mob-related villains. It is not their wheelhouse and never has been. They got a tremendous actor in Kober from China Beach, The First Power, etc. but did not know how to execute, whereas most of Guza's campiest criminals still had a sense of menace and lethality to them. This team and FV fall in love with unique character actors and are generally content to have them merely gesture towards villainy and then tread water for months or years, making both the villain and the lead characters look impotent and weak for not dealing with each other. Cyrus meanders around town whining about his mom and begging for Laura's love for months, then has silly connections to Roger Howarth, then he's maybe reformed maybe not and quoting scripture and so on. It's the same floundering, ambivalent approach with Sidwell today, though Carlo Rota is far too irreverent to project real menace in general and also does not do well with high dramatics.
If they'd leaned into letting Kober off the leash as in his classic roles, or gave him have the solemnity and soul he has had on The Pitt this season he could have been something really special - and scary. But they fell in love with having him around, with making him Laura's brother, and he came off far more toothless and past it on GH than he actually is. I have to apologize to Kober, who I've always liked a lot in other things. He's still got it but GH couldn't write it. This has been your pointless late night thought.
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Vee ·
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