Ryan's Hope Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

I think John Blazo could have been up for playing material that showed Pat growing (the third Pat was hideous and I wish I could forget him), but he never had any real chance.

I feel the problems with Pat were based on using him as a device for Delia's schemes. It made his character seem empty. If they had actually paired him with Delia in a real relationship, not him pitying her/lusting after her and then her scheming against him non-stop, it would have paid dividends. I think they should have driven Pat from the Ryan family and into stories on his own with Delia, with the Ryans on the outside looking in. Then that would have been about himself as much as Delia.

The other problem I had with Pat is that Pat/Faith was a fantasy relationship. They were together briefly and he dumped her for clinginess. IMO the relationship should have ended there - with Pat regretting his actions and Faith regretting hers, and they both move on with their lives. I have never understood why they were written as being star-crossed lovers.

The Pat/Nancy story was so plot-driven. Would it have worked better with Malcolm? I'm not sure. I just think it was a non-starter. Pat became an afterthought to the family, aside from Maeve worrying. I am still annoyed, years and years on, at how they didn't play up more of Pat/Siobhan, as I thought Felder and Blazo had a great rapport.

I didn't know Marguerite was back in the early 80's either - I had remembered her showing up again with a different actress in the late 70's but not for long. I saw a promo of Jill/Seneca a while back so knew they were together but didn't know it had gone that far. Too bad it didn't last. I thought they had great chemistry and I wish the show had let them move forward as a couple...especially since Frank was such an unstable character in terms of casting.

I would like to see this Faith and Bronski. It seems random as hell, like every single Faith pairing under KMG.

That's a good point about Delia. I'm a little disappointed that she still seemed to have no character growth when Ilene returned, but I wasn't too surprised, as she seemed very one-dimensional when I saw some of her 1983 episodes. At least this confirms that Delia still had the Crystal Palace when Ilene was around. I've never been sure of that. I did have to laugh when Delia suddenly forgave Joe when she realized she could use him. That's classic Delia. I wonder how Ilene and Roscoe were. Randall and Roscoe had serious chemistry, for obvious reasons.

Is it me or even with Hollis Kirkland are Kim and Rae STILL playing out the same storyline they played out for a year to two years beforehand? Zzzzzzzz...

Do you think Maureen Garrett might have worked as a Siobhan recast? I never understood why she came in as Barry's sister right when they had fired Richard Backus! I was biased against the character very quickly because a) she was paired with Roger and I wasn't a big fan of his when he was in self-righteous noble honorary Ryan mode and b ) she was essentially brought in under the "Delia is so stupid/pathetic" banner, and that always annoys me. I got more than a little satisfaction out of that synopsis where Roger told Delia she'd been right about EJ. It does sound like EJ left with a whimper, while they kept trying to figure out how to keep Ox around. Odd.

Thanks so much for reading all those and commenting on them! I know they were just kind of dumped onto the thread. I felt like if not now, never, so I just went ahead. It helped me a little with that year and I'm glad it did the same for you.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I think some critical bridge between Pat's first fling with Faith and their later relationship got lost in translation amidst the Faith recast(s). I'm not sure what would have happened originally, but I think it would have made more sense. I suspect that when the cast finally stabilized for a little while, the other pieces in the story were working - Delia/Roger, Frank/Jill (well, after 2-3 recasts), Seneca/Jill - and also MG's Pat and CH's Faith were both very likable on their own even if they didn't light the screen on fire together, so the writers kind of picked up the original thread as if whatever was supposed to happen to make us buy Pat and Faith as a couple had happened. Or maybe they genuinely forgot - it must have been hell launching a new daily show with so many cast changes, and doing such an amazing job overall.

Pat certainly had more chemistry with Delia than he did with any of the Faiths, and him having genuine feelings for Delia would have been interesting. I kind of remember thinking (a decade ago) thet deep down he did. But she was at her most damaged at that time, and their marriage turned very ugly, and I think it's natural that any good between them would get lost after that. And, in the end, I loved Roger and Delia together so I wasn't too broken up about what might have been with her and Pat.

One of the very first YouTube episodes from 1983 that Freeflyur posted has a scene of Faith reacting to his death, but that's it. When I first saw it, I think my main reaction was that it didn't sound like his death was nearly as weird as how some of Faith's other love interests died.

I wouldn't say one-dimensional, so much as she regressed a lot. But, I could see how losing every emblem of having moved beyond the Ryans would do that. The St. Patrick's Day scenes where she framed Little John for shoplifting to get attention were painful to watch, but to me this having sex in the bushes of a public restaurant (with someone named Ox) sounds much more silly and completely removed from what Delia's character was about.

I think whatever plans Labine and Mayer had for Delia when they returned in 1983 got lost in the tug-of-war with the network, in which it sounds like Ilene was a specific target for ABC. I think she was off-screen for something like 4 or 6 weeks that summer, even before Labine and Mayer were forced out and she was too not long afterward. From what I've seen on YouTube, it seems like when she did show up sporadically she was just inserted as a plot device in what was happening with other characters. Not the best material she was given to work with, but she did have a few very fascinating moments. I thought the scene where Delia met Charlotte Greer was extremely psychologically riveting:

http://www.youtube.c...yer_profilepage

The 1987-89 Delia stories were much more about her and gave her more of a chance to grow and mature (though it was surreal that the most obvious impetus for that maturity was that she was playing a grandmother - not to mention a mother to a son who looked like he was about 30).

YES! Although she may have run into the same problem with the network as Sarah Felder - not being "glamorous" enough, etc. At least her track record as a star of another (higher rated) soap would have preceded her, I guess. Then again, she certainly could have played more glamorous if that's what they wanted - when she returned to GL a few years later, Holly was one of the most elegant female characters on the show.

That timing was weird. Both Barry and EJ were kind of an awkward fit for the show, because their only connection to the Ryans was through their father, but Johnny didn't like him very much and he hadn't been apart of their lives until now. And after reading these synopses, you can see why Johnny would hate his brother! The stuff about EJ's childhood in here sounds really dark, and yet it was glossed over. The Ryans' only reaction to it was trying to minimize EJ's "shame" (over being abused?) instead of how Johnny was affected by the fact that he had a brother who was such a monster. In any event, had Barry and EJ's time overlapped, at least their relationship with each other might have helped add some other layers to the characters that their tenuous ties to the Ryans did not.

I think that's what the thread is here for! Thank you again for posting these.

Edited July 6, 2011 by DeliaIrisFan

[DRW50]

As much as I go around retroactively condemning these decisions, I can definitely see why they went with Pat/Faith again under Hicks and Groome. Hicks was very popular, and charismatic, and kooky, and unique. I just wonder if they considered what would happen when she left. Why not reunite Pat/Faith and then kill Faith off when Hicks decided to leave? Then since Groome was also leaving, he could just leave mourning Faith. Or just have Pat and Faith leave town together. Why recast both?

They eventually realized that the "nice" version of Faith was not suited for KMG, so she became a cold, needy, self-righteous shrew. OK. Yet this also went nowhere. What especially annoyed me was that Jill never got to seriously respond to Faith's vicious attacks. Jill was never much of a fighter, but beyond this, I think the show was still trying to say Faith was a sympathetic character. Why, I never knew, because only a fool gets together with a man her sister has been with for a decade, and then expects this relationship to end happily.

You're right that Delia had become so regressed by the time Ilene returned. She was just a plot device for all of 1981 and the last months of 1980. It was such a waste, as Randall Edwards did a great job when they let Delia mature. For me, Delia trying to win Frank back is always the worst sign of the show having no idea what to do with her character. I never believed she would want him back and even as a symbol of her insecurities, it didn't work, because he had treated her so horribly.

Since they no longer had any purpose for Delia, why not write her out for a few years (starting around 1981) and make Faith the show's screwed-up schemer? Why not have Jill REALLY lay into her, with the #1 attack being that Faith killed their father (which she technically didn't, but then the truth didn't matter to Faith anyway), and this drives Faith over the edge and she uses her money to become a big menace, sort of what Rae was before Kimberly showed up?

I never understood why they got rid of Barry or why they felt they couldn't write story for him. While he wasn't closely tied to the Ryans, he did have strong bonds with Jill, Faith, and the Crystal Palace group. He could have gone anywhere. It made no sense to me. I wonder if this was ABC meddling again.

[DRW50]

[DeliaIrisFan]

This feels blasphemous even to suggest, but I've wondered what might have been if any of the attempts to make Ryan's Hope more like GH, etc. in the '80s had been successful? At least from a commercial standpoint. So many soaps strayed from their roots and it paid off, at least initially. RH actually took place in NY, and some of the larger than life plots that soaps desperately tried to shoehorn into sleepy Midwestern communities in the mid-'80s would have fit in more readily on RH, in some ways. But nothing ever took off.

The 1982 synopses got me thinking along these lines. The Kirlands (who really didn't last that long) weren't so different - at least on paper - from the Spauldings on GL, the Buchanans on OLTL, and of course the Quartermaines on GH. If anything, the biggest difference was that most of those shows went to an hour around the time that the new, wealthy families came on-board. The RH 1982 synopses just seem so off-kilter, because these new characters were sharing only a half hour timeslot with the eponymous core family. I wonder if there was ever talk of taking RH to an hour (I know Claire Labine was opposed, but I mean while she was away from the show). Would it have had to change its name to reflect a broader canvas?

The Pat Falken Smith era in the mid-'80s is in some ways even more sacrilegiously intriguing. The material itself was awful, IMO. It was enough I could do when some of those episodes turned up on YouTube to watch enough episodes to see how Faith, etc. were written out. And yet, it's ironic that one of PFK's biggest contributions to daytime that still lives on to this day is the introduction of the Bradys on DOOL: a working-class, Irish Catholic family that later owned a bar (I know that part came much later and wasn't her doing, but still). She was at RH about a year before the timeslot change completely removed RH from the competition for healthy ratings. Actually, I think RH was comparable to DOOL itself ratings-wise around 1983 or so, when the NBC lineup had taken such a hit. And of course it was GH and not RH that was initially on the chopping block in the late '70s, because RH had higher ratings. Could the GH/DOOL formula that failed when it was foisted on RH have been successful there, with a few tweaks? What would have happened if PFK had successfully grafted a really overwrought supercouple onto the show, with a bona fide tie to the core family - the kind that could make the show # 1 in the ratings the week of their weding? I guess they tried that with Siobhan and that much-criticized Joe recast. And Yasmine Bleeth and Grant Show were along those lines, but ratings-wise, the bottom had already dropped out by that point, and it was enough of a stretch to start aging the grandchildren even in the late '80s, let alone earlier. Beyond Siobhan, the other Ryan siblings were a bit mature by the time PFK came along...

The other interesting historical what-if is that James Reilly was on PFK's writing team at one point. If RH had continued in that vein, I wonder how close we came to seeing Maeve and Father McShane helping Dakota - who turned out to have been a priest in his mysterious past - perform an exorcism on Jill, after her torrid affair with Dakota on the bar at Ryan's made her vulnerable to Satanic possession and the Max character returned to make her his Queen of the Night?

I'm not saying I would have wanted to see any of this happen, or that RH buying time so as to have a similar outcome to any soap on the air now would have justified it. The most I can think of is that there might have been a few amazing years in the early '90s or so, if Claire Labine had come back after the supercouple fad ended and had integrated the best of that era with her own material, as she did with GH. Even if RH had managed to survive into the 90s/21st century, which would have been a big if, for the most part, I think it was better off going out with its dignity. Plus, I got to see it at its best on SoapNet, and none of the shows that made the transition into the present era have ever made their tape vaults available, for whatever reason. I'm just thinking out loud. Early RH had some similarities to early OLTL and GH (the working class ethnic family and medical aspects, respectively) and both of those shows took such drastic turns in the '80s, etc. It's probably a mixed blessing that RH never established a successful identity apart from its creators' vision, but in some ways I really think that may have been more a result of chance than anything else.

Edited July 11, 2011 by DeliaIrisFan

[DRW50]

I think 1981 was the real killer for RH. The show was, at best, uneven, and was at times almost unwatchable. This was at a time when the ABC lineup was going great guns and RH didn't have the pieces which would have made it more compatible. RH's Erica/Heather/Tiffany/Dorian type character, Delia, was given awful material that constantly reminded viewers of what a joke she was. If Kimberly was supposed to take her place, that didn't work either, because Kimberly spent the entire year having bad things happen to her or wailing all the time.

They put in a lot of mob stuff to ape GH, but this usually amounted to various old men and a petulant Joe. They never knew how to position Joe. On GH, it was all about Luke's struggles, Luke's break for freedom. It was entirely from his point of view. On RH that wasn't possible, because of Jack's strong presence. So you had a story where Joe basically destroyed Jack's life, and then, in no time at all, the focus switched to what a victim Joe was.

The other problem was the show's leading ladies in general. By 1981 there was no real pop. Many of them were just unpleasant, stupid, or beaten down and stuck in changing times. It makes the writing and casting choice for Siobhan even more bewildering to me. When people could go across ABC Daytime and see so many vibrant young heroines, who is going to want to see cold-in-nose Ann Gillespie whining about Joe for months on end?

By the time they tried to remake the show with the Kirklands, most of this felt dated, because the other ABC soaps had already gone through their big rich family phases, and were slumping.

ABC either should have backed off entirely or gone all in, and fired Labine and Mayer in 1980.

[DRW50]

Ryan's Hope 1984 promo.

[DeliaIrisFan]

That's true, by 1982, characters like the Kirklands would have been old hat. I hadn't thought of 1981 as particularly bad, mostly because I don't think of RH in that year being a cohesive show... There was the beginning of the year, which just seemed like Labine and Mayer at their most burnt out (either from battling the network or just 7 years of writing the show in and of itself) and resorting to things like the Frank and Faith pairing, along with stuff like Kim and Joe thrown in to satisfy someone's agenda, but some bright spots like Jack and Rose. Then there was the writer strike, which was just horribly mindless garbage (petite Kim realizing she was pregnant for the first time when she went into labor, about three months after the kid would have had to have been conceived). And then the end of the year actually showed promise, with Kim leaving and the intro of Maureen Garrett and the soap within a soap plot, and even the Egyptian artifact story - which could have been an interesting infusion of new blood that took advantage of the NYC setting with that completely fictitious museum - but that all amounted to nothing. I don't think of those periods as being the same era, but you're right, not a great year for the show at any point, and that was when it had the best chance to capitalize on ABC daytime's higher ratings across the board.

And then there was this, which is what really did RH in: the timeslot change. And my god, who had the brilliant idea that Jacqueline Dubujak and some himbo with a ludicrous soap opera cliche name would make those people whose affiliates were still going to be airing RH in its new timeslot tune in?

Edited July 13, 2011 by DeliaIrisFan

[safe]

Carl, the SOD recaps are great. Thank you!

John Sanderford (Frank #5) thought Frank becoming a grandfather was “insane”.

Future of 'Ryan's Hope' in doubt?/John Sanderford

August 22, 1987

[dc11786]

I unapologetically love 1980-1981. I loved Rae and Roger trying to destroy Kim, while Kim tended to get the upperhand. This wasn’t the kind of stuff the Ryans could do to one another. Siobhan and Mary or Pat and Frank could have a row but they could never blackmail one another with elaborate schemes like Rae’s Chinese lunch where she got Kimberly to confess her scheme on one side of the partition, while Jill and Roger were listening on the other side. Then, Kim and Seneca’s wedding day rolls around and Jill announces to Seneca Kim isn’t carrying his child after spending most of the episode wondering whether or not she was going to blab or let Seneca be happy. I enjoyed this over some of the previous stuff like Delia and the stockbroker, the Poppy Lincoln storyline, and some of the other fiascos from the late 1980s.

Also, Labine & Mayer were foolish to eliminate Kim so quickly. ABC’s ratings swelled the week Luke and Laura saved the world; “Ryan’s Hope” had their highest ratings ever. What was happening this week? Kim gave birth on the houseboat. There’s a reason Labine & Mayer were out and Kelli Maroney was brought back. She was important to the public image of “Ryan’s Hope.” I don’t think a Kim / Pat / Amanda triangle was a bad idea, but it would have needed to be nurtured over time.

I thought Faith / Frank was a great game changer, but the departure of Daniel Hugh Kelly never allowed the story to play out completely. Frank was an *ss. He kept promising Faith, a recovering alcoholic, that he didn’t love Jill and that he wanted to be with her. When he and Jill finally reconnected, I felt like I was finally allowed to hate Frank Ryan for the selfish, womanizing, entitled Ryan son he was. I *loved* Faith ripping into Maeve about how she had molded him into the man he was. It was nice to see the Ryans ripped a new one by one of their inner circle.

Also, how could you not love little John (Delia, Jr.) plotting to reunite Jill and his father to dismay of his mother. I love when Little John told Delia he wanted Faith and Frank to break up so he could be with Jill. Then, Little John runs off because he remembers Frank and Jill found him the last time Delia lost him in the park. When they don’t catch on soon enough, he gets huffy and calls the bar wondering why no one has found him yet.

The only real problem spot, for me, was Joe / Siobhan’s eternal love. When Joe ‘died,’ Siobhan told Jack while they were in Witness Protection that she never really loved Joe. If Joe was going to return, I think Siobhan should have stayed with him out of loyalty, while not so secretly harboring feelings for her late sister’s husband, Jack. Jack and Siobhan may never have gotten together, but, if Joe was going to stay around, he should have been made a complete outsider since he was never going to be a part of the inner circle. If they didn’t want to continue the mob stories, I would love to have seen Joe weasel his way into Woodard Publications. That orbit could have used an additional player with ties to the Ryans.

I felt the stories were less rigid in 1980-1981. The overall plot may not have overwhelmed me, but the beats were absolutely beautiful. I think Amy Morris was a wonderful short term character and I thought Kay deLancey was great when she believed Maeve Ryan was Anna Pavel and proved to Anna / Maeve what a good mother she was to Michael’s baby / Ryan. Helen Gallagher was great during those scenes.

Years ago, someone posted the weekly summaries for 1982 and I didn’t think they were bad as the Kirkland’s Hope label implied. If Mary Ryan Munisteri had continued, 1983 might have been a rough year as her final months were Kirkland heavy once Catsy arrived. I still think they should have been kept around. Kirk had history with Rae and Leigh became a major player. There were stories they could have done. Catsy could have fueled a Kirk / Rae / Roger story for at least a little while. Overall, I would like to see what Labine & Mayer could have done with them if they kept them around.

[DRW50]

I also enjoyed the scenes where Roger and Rae exposed Kim. I loved when Jill went after her and realized she was just like Rae.

The problem with Kim was the awful "acting" stories they gave her, the pairing with Seneca, which was disturbing (if they wanted to focus on her daddy issues, I think they could have chosen a younger man - they could have kept Pat around instead of writing him out for two years), and they kept trying and trying to make her sympathetic, when Kelli Maroney was not a sympathetic actress. Every time Kim hurt Rae or anyone else, you got a boatload of reminders that Rae had "abandoned" her, that anything Kimberly did was excused because she was just a child, and blah blah blah. I remember when Kim ran off with the baby and Maeve sided with her and blasted Seneca. Maeve was always close to Seneca, even when he lied to her and her family about baby Edmund's paternity. It was just forced. The scenes where Kim began bonding with her baby were moving, but then we were back to more yelling over Arley's custody.

I thought it was a misuse of Rae to focus so much on shaming her and having her obsess over Kimberly and the baby. I thought it was a waste that if they were going to do this they never brought Rae's mother in.

I think Maroney was probably unlikely to stay around that long anyway - didn't she leave again in late 1982?

Faith was another failure of ill-defined characterization. She wasn't sympathetic, IMO. KMG was a cold, plastic-smile type of actress, and her Faith was an ice cube. She also never, ever had to answer to anyone, for anything. I can't tell you how much I loathed the scenes where she staggered over to Ryan's and almost killed Little John while trying to treat him. Did anyone blame her for any of this? Only Delia. Which meant viewers were supposed to feel sorry for her. A little boy almost died and all the focus was on poor Faith.

When she was stupid enough to fall for her sister's fiance, the focus was again on how she suffered. I had no idea why, as no one had hurt her. She'd hurt herself. And as good as the isolated scenes of her confronting Maeve were, most of the time she excused Frank. She told Jill, more than once, that she knew Jill had manipulated Frank and it wasn't Frank's fault. There was month after month of Faith verbally abusing Jill, intruding into Jill's personal life, all while playing victim, and the show even rewrote very important history to claim that Mrs. Coleridge had loved Jill and neglected Faith, when it had been just the opposite.

No sympathetic character would say the vile things Faith said to Jill, yet over and over the show tried to sell Faith as a heroine. They threw various men at her, they had Roger hovering over her, they had humiliating stories for Delia over and over, and all it really ever amounted to was that same old frozen smile.

This cropped up quite a few times in the early 80's. I thought EJ was a bit smug and silly, yet they had Delia there to behave like a brat, and that was supposed to be enough to make EJ likeable. Roger was a hypocritical ass, yet Delia was a brat, so that was supposed to make Roger likeable. Joe had destroyed the lives of about a half-dozen people, but they had Alexei and Orson come in and they were supposed to be worse.

It's the type of writing that has done a lot of damage to soaps in recent years.

Edited July 13, 2011 by CarlD2

[safe]

Nancy Addison and the Frank/Seneca/baby storyline

This is from Ryan's Bar Online. At the old Soapnet forum there were some other quotes (which are now gone)from Nancy Addison about how her objection made them wrap the story sooner by having her tell Frank earlier than planned because Nancy took her displeasure with the direction of this storyline to the writers to complain that Jill would not do that.

I get the feeling that Nancy saw Jill as a woman of great personal integrity. I've never read how Nancy felt about the Ken George Jones affair and I can't help but wonder if she diasgreed with the writers about it, too. Not about the affair itself – but if she possibly felt that Jill would have ended the engagement to Frank first or asked Frank for some kind of break/breathing room.

Is Nancy Addison Carrying Her Independence Too Far?

Edited July 14, 2011 by safe

[DRW50]

She was right - Jill was many things but she wouldn't lie to Frank. She was devoted to him, often to her own detriment.

[dc11786]

I agree with some of your points Carl. Maroney didn’t make Kim a sympathetic character. There wasn’t a natural warmth there that worked. She worked for me as a schemer and I liked watching her suffer and making Rae suffer because Rae would always give it right back to her. I probably white washed a lot of the Kim praise because I thought the Rae-Kim conflict was enjoyable.

The age gap between Maroney and Gabriel was rough. I thought the dynamic was icky, but I was willing to overlook that to watch all the drama play out because I knew Seneca and Kim weren’t meant to be end game. Eventually, one or the other would have to concede to defeat.

If they were going to focus on the Arley custody situation, Seneca should have married Rae in order to try and raise Arley. That would have been a wonderfully volatile marriage.

Not to be argumentative, but to understand where you are coming from. Carl, what do you think Rae should have been involved with if it wasn’t her daughter?

I thought Labine & Mayer dumped Kim again when they returned in 1983. Maroney later went to OLTL so I don’t think she was against continuing in daytime.

I agree Faith was a poorly defined character which is why I enjoyed sloppy Faith from 1980-1981. I thought KMG was dull with Tom, but I thought she was good during the alcohol storyline. I remember Faith coming over and giving Little John the penicillin which he was allergic to. I thought Faith owned up to her mistakes, while still being embraced by the Ryans. I’ll talk about the treatment of Delia later.

I don’t agree with Faith was stupid to fall for Frank. Frank was charming, and lured her on. Jill had cheated on Frank with Ken and Frank was insistent he was over Jill. Given the timing, maybe Faith should have been more suspicious, but Frank kept guaranteeing her he was over Jill. Every time Faith questioned Frank he promised her he was over Jill. Faith didn’t love Frank blindly, but he kept telling her over and over again that he was over Jill. What reason did she have to not trust the word of the man she loved?

Ugh. Yes. I do remember Faith’s backtracking, at times, saying Frank was a victim in this all.

I remember Faith’s accusations that Judith Coleridge loved Jill more than Faith, which certainly clashes with Jill’s early monologue to Ed about how Judith hated Jill because she was the baby Ed brought home for Judith to raise. I didn’t see it as a rewrite but rather another interpretation of the past. I think siblings often think their siblings are the ones that are more loved. I don’t remember Jill agreeing with Faith’s assessment.

For me, Faith worked as a trainwreck and I enjoyed KMG’s performance in the role. I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

After the break up, I thought they were trying to make Faith a bitch to justify the break up, but I just loved someone saying the things I wanted to say to some of the characters.

I liked EJ and never felt the smugness in regards to Delia. Nicolette Goulet’s Mary was smug and so was Catherine Hicks’ Faith.

Joe shouldn’t have come back. Joe / Siobhan’s true love was as sacrilegious as Faith / Pat’s true love.

I get your point regarding the type of writing and the connection between the past and present is valid, but I don’t agree with every single example you’ve given. However, it is an interesting point that I will give more thought to.

[DRW50]

I don't think EJ was too smug towards Delia, at least not at first (at first it was poor EJ manipulated by Delia), it was the other stuff with EJ early on. All the kooky reporter stuff. I remember scenes where she was so desperate to get a scoop on Barbara Wilde that she went into the OR and pretended to be a nurse. I thought this was crazy, since, as Seneca pointed out to her, she could have killed Barbara. I was annoyed that the soap-within-a-soap story, which I found fascinating, was quickly turned into some type of false accusations against Roger, with EJ saving the day. I thought throwing EJ in with Roger was a bad idea. I would have rather seen her with someone like Wes Leonard, or Jack.

I didn't really find EJ overly smug towards Delia until they had her get more involved with Roger. Roger was always headshrinking Delia and trying to control her. Then when she tried to get him to sign over some investment he wanted to give to Faith, it was all about how Roger had been manipulated. Why should I feel sorry for someone who had manipulated as often as Roger had and who had never really suffered for it? Not only did he get Delia back by taking her money, the show had the final kick where the investment Delia thought was worthless and signed away turned out to be a huge success, and all that money went to Faith. So this was months of degrading Delia for some purpose I never quite understood. I guess it was supposed to show Roger finally getting over his feelings for Delia because of how she'd wronged him, but I never understood why he would need this reminder, or why I was supposed to love that the ending was Faith and Roger getting even richer. The story basically just turned Roger into a wannabe Ryan, only without some of their warmth or heart that would alleviate the rampant self-righteousness.

Frank had been with Jill for almost a decade, off and on, and he had always kept her in his life, always gone back to her. I suppose Faith may have felt this time might be different, because she wasn't scheming like Delia or Rae, but I think she was deluding herself to imagine Frank would ever move on from Jill.

I didn't have a problem believing Faith would rewrite history this way. What bothered me was I don't remember Jill or Roger ever saying to her or to each other that her view was wrong. This led me to believe the show wanted us to think that this was true to their history. Just as no one ever saying that Bob spent most of his life loving Mary and only loved Faith for a few months before she got with Frank made me think they wanted us to believe that this was some longstanding part of history.

I think Faith did work as a trainwreck and I thought KMG's performances as a trainwreck were very dynamic - there was one I especially remember where she was going to drink and then threw the glass down in a rage - but I could never convince myself that she was supposed to be this way. I thought they kept straddling a line in how she was written, with Roger coddling her, and Jill never really fighting back against her, and her being given romantic stories in the midst of all this (with the cop, and then with Gordon Thomson). If I knew she was supposed to be a mess and if people had really stood up to her, I would have been much more drawn in by her character.

I would have shown more of her in business and at her paper. I would have kept her in the Frank story longer, if possible. IMO a story with Kim throwing herself at Frank and helping to put the final nails in Rae's relationship with Frank would have made more sense than the story with Seneca. I would have brought her mother in for a while. I would have tried an All About Eve type story; perhaps this girl could have been the daughter she wanted, with Kimberly on the outside.

Mostly I just wish there had been less material about Rae and Kim, Rae losing things to Kim, Rae obsessing over Kim and then over the baby. I always think of those scenes where she was at the police station and kept seeing "MAMA HELP ME" in flashbacks. It was like an SNL parody.