Ryan's Hope Discussion Thread

[Sapounopera]

Episode 1226 and I am shocked.

Lots of FF. 

The show has three stories. The mob, the gorilla and a teenager having sex with her grandfather.

It honestly feels as though someone is sabotaging the show. I check the credits everytime to see if the Labines are gone. Nope.

The new opening would be ok, if it featured the bar well. The remixed music theme reminds me of a Love Boat type of show. 

 

[dc11786]

I first watched during the SoapNet reruns and found 1979 hard to watch at times. Edmund's death was brutal as was Jill's addiction to painkillers. The mob stuff could be incredibly tension filled with scenes like Anna Pavel interrupting the dinner to accuse Tiso of doing something to her husband while the Ryans look on in horror. The Poppy/ Terry the Tumor story wasn't my favorite. I felt the show was pretty dark by the time Mary dies as I feel like the lightest story was Roger complaining that Delia didn't refill the ice trays. 

Was that Roger and Seneca scene with the two of them drinking wine by the fire? I remember thinking that they were about to kiss. Maybe this was when the show was considering revealing that Seneca was gay?

Kim as Jack's daughter is interesting, but let's go even farther and disrupt another couple as well. It probably would have been a stretch of the timeline, but let's make Jill her mother since we know that Jack and Jill had a previously relationship. In her grief over losing Edmund (and possibly strung out), Jill confesses to Faith that she had a child years earlier that she gave away when she was an undergraduate. She refuses to name the father. Meanwhile, Wes Leonard is doing a story on young people on the verge of aging out of the foster system and interview Kim for the profile. Rae is struck by the article because she is reminded of her only lonely existence in Kansas. She doesn't think much more of it until Kim decidesto show up at Rae's penthouse and rage at the wage she was presented in the article. Kim, wowed by Rae's wealthy lifestyle, seems Rae as an easy mark and worms her way into Rae's life so that Rae will play Mommy Warbucks. 

Kim soon finds herself living the good life while Rae searches out information about her biological parents while Kim plots to have Rae and Seneca marry and adopt her. When Kim gets in trouble in school and tries to get out of it by using Rae's name and power, Rae decides she needs to teach Kim the value of hard work and asks Maeve and Johnny if Kim can be a dishwasher at the bar. Kim's clearly mortified, but also finds the Ryan family warmth very appealing, while still prefer the financial security that comes from being Rae's ward. 

Rae's lawyer tracks down Kim's original birth certificate days before the adoption and is mortified to learn that Kim is Jill's daughter. Separately, Jill has also been working to find her child, which she is keeping a secret from Frank. Frank begins to suspect that Jill is carrying on behind his back with the investigator until he realizes it is much older Matt Pearce. Frank is able to figure out that Matt is investigating an adoption case and suspects that Jill is looking into her own past, and decides to drop it. 

Jill and Matt reach a dead end when they cannot locate the birth record, which Rae has had misfiled, leading to Jill confessing the truth to Frank. When Frank wonders who the father is, Jill remains mum. Pampered Kim and stoic Jill have some run ins at the bar and Kim finds Jill haughty and Jill finds Kim very confrontational. It's at Ryan's Bar that she also meets Jack, who she finds witty and charming. Jack and Mary even offer to let Kim babysit Ryan while they have an evening out. 

Once the adoption is finalized Kim feels safe for the first time in a long time. Roger begins to wonder why Rae has "dropped" her investigation into Kim's parents and decides to take a look in her safe and discovers Jill's her mother. Rae begs Roger to keep quiet, but Roger refuses even when Rae tries to blackmail him over his involvement in Tom's death. At Frank and Jill's rehearsal dinner, Roger tells Jill that Kim is her daughter leading to a grand confrontation between Jill and Rae and the startling revelation on the part of Jack that he needs to have answered. Privately, Jack asks Jill if he is Kim's father. Jill tearfully confirms it in only the way that Nancy Addison Altman could leading to the next round of chaos. 

I remember really enjoying 1980 into 1981 during its first run on SoapNet, but the first few months may have been clunky. I don't want to spoil too much, but I remember really liking Faith's story (I think I was in the minority) as well as Delia's post-Albert story (there is a dinner party to die for at one point that may be one of Labine and Mayer's more underrated moments) and Jack's new romantic pairing,  but finding Jill's story a bit of a trudge to get through even though it has a delightfully campy ending. Have you gotten to Kim and the Brownies yet? That was another fun time in my opinion. I also think the direction that Kim / Seneca go once they deemphasize the romantic aspect and focus on Kim's scheming is much more intriguing as well as Rae taking on a new business associate.

[Sapounopera]

Yes, that's the scene lol. Seneca and Roger were on a date out of the blue. The idea that Seneca is gay sounds crazy. Were they planning to write him out?

OMG the Brownies incident. Yes, I have watched those episodes, they were a lot of fun. 

Oh and DHK is a lot more relaxexd now that Frank is no longer involved in politics. He reminds me of Andrew Robinson and Malcom Groome.

Your Jack/Jill/Rae/Kim is amazing. A LOT better than what I am watching right now. Can't wait for things to get better, because at this point I really care for these people and that's the most important things for a soap opera.

 

[safe]

It was regarding Mary and Jack and killing Mary off

 

I was surprised to find I still had this 

As I told Paul,  it was about trying to keep Mary and Jack ---well only Jack--- upfront

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[j swift]

I bow to you for finding this quote, nice job!

Like I mentioned, I meant no disrespect for your recall of the events.  However, Labine's quote about plot flexibility for married couples turned out not to be true.  I would argue that she went on to find multiple ways to write for married couples in her future writing career.  But, as noted implicitly in the article, they just couldn't recover from the recasting of Mary. 

Certainly, Siobhan, Faith, Jill, and even Leigh, carried the torch for whatever feminist romantic heroine plots could have been written for Mary. 

[DRW50]

Thanks.

They enjoyed that Delia fantasy sequence more than I did.

I disagree that viewers would have been upset about Jack/Mary splitting up. They would have with Kate still in the part, but not after she left, and the show had laid over a year of groundwork for them splitting up. 

Killing Mary didn't hurt in the long run, as Kate was never going to return and Jack still had a place in story, but I still think the show missed a trick never pairing Jack and Siobhan.

[Sapounopera]

Pat Falken Smith brought her Stefano Dimera from Days to Ryan's Hope as Max Dubujack, right?

And he seems to be obsessed with Jillian...

In other news, Maggie is the new Kim these days.

Thank God Rae and Kim are gone.

The Proud & The Passionate and Merit Kara.. God... The show was really lost. 

The 1983 opening is the best one so far. The closing tune reminds me of 80s Another World and this is not a good thing. 

I am watching early 1984 episodes and the show feels like the last days of Falcon Crest for some reason. Or any 80s primetime soap for that matter. 

Joe #3 is horrible. I can no longer stand Jack and I adore Little John who acts like Baby Delia and I am loving it. 

They should have brought Kathleen's daughters as teenagers by now in order to breathe new life to the Ryans. 

Casting has become too generic. Many handsome men and none of them is charming.

And after first seeing this man as Robert Barr on Santa Barbara, all these decades later, I still believe that Roscoe Born was the hottest man ever on a soap.

 

 

[John]

Lauren O'Bryan was horrible as Katie. Julia Campbell who took over in Nov 1984 was better. 

[Sapounopera]

She just arrived in the episodes I am watching and she looks... older than what I expected to see. The show is trying to building a young crowd scene at Greenberg's and I hate it. Watching Scott Holmes acting like a nice, fun guy makes me uncomfortable for some reason lol.

[John]

Yeah backburning the bar was a bad idea. Thankfully the 1985 arrival of Co-HW's Millie Taggert and Tom King rectify this. 

[Sapounopera]

1985 and the new Ryan's Bar and kitchen ruined it for me. Why destroy the oldest and most iconic sets? Even the living room looks different, everything is brighter and more generic. I miss the green blankets.

This is officially the Maggie show. Frank and Roger have been acting like perverts around her. After that she got involved with Max. Maggie and Dave are BORING. 

The Bill Hyde actor makes Joey Tribianni look like Sir Laurence Oliver. 

Rick, Ryan and DJ just showed up. 

Robin Mattson is worse than I expected. She acted the same way as Gina on Santa Barbara, taking over from another actress and turning the character into another person overnight. Come to think about it, Linda Gibboney would have made a much better Delia.

[Sapounopera]

I just finished watching Ryan's Hope. The show's real problem was that it went through some very good story really fast in the beginning and that it was never able to move from the original key characters to someone new. This is usually a primetime soap problem, that's why I said that most of the 80s felt like the last seasons of Falcon Crest or Knots Landing. 

They moved from Eugene O'Neill to Gloria Monty and JER very quickly, I understand the Luke and Laura effect, but still, there was also All My Children in this world.

The show's obsession to focus on the mob, why? Not to mention with the sl*tty young blonde who drives men crazy. We had the Kim years and then the Maggie years. Should we be thankful that the Reenie Szabo prototype never took off?

The last episode made me sad. The GH madness was over, more sophisticated soaps were successful in the late 80s. 

There was still a lot of hope in the Ryans.

[John]

Ryan's Hope is one of the past that could get a new chapter but ABC owns it so that will not happen

[TheyStartedOnSoaps]

Love Story of Joe & Siobhan in 8 Mins | Over 25 Marg Helgenberger Ryan's Hope Promos

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[Chris 2]

The right time to do it was about 10 years ago. It could have focused on a widowed Frank and his kids: John, Mary, and maybe another one he and Jill had before she passed. You could have made them all in their 30s (maybe John is deaged a bit according to the original timeline). Delia is still around causing trouble, and Maeve turns up occasionally. Maybe Aunt Faith is still a part of their lives, too. I’m sure they could have gotten Geoff Pierson or Daniel Hugh Kelly to do it.