Y&R: What was so bad about LML's writing?

[y&r_fan]

I'm just curious. I'm in Australia and we have episodes from last August at the moment (Phyllis is about to be sentenced). And so far, I can't fault LML. I like her faster pace and witty dialogue, and I don't see the "plot-driven"-ness that she was so heavily critiqued for. I realize most people didn't like the reliquary SL or the porn SL, but at least they were different, and not another "who's the daddy" SL or love triangle. Personally, I think LML is much more talented than Bradley Bell, the king of repetition.

So what didn't you like about LML?

[JackPeyton]

she could have been great, but Y&R has stayed at the top of the soaps for over 2 decades by not telling wrap speed storylines, stupid storylines, using char's no one cares about and stripping everything from those who we do love. it lml stripped everything from Y&R that made it Y&R and it became just another bad soap opera.

it was very plot driven. youc an tell she came up with a story then placed a char into it.

[ian]

The thing I hated most is how the characters would allude to stupid stuff that never really happened, like when Victoria and Adrian were in the building that collapsed and she was like "omg like this one time I ran away from home and my daddy the all powerful all mumbling victor newman like called this plane over and it like wrote me a letter in the sky like tee hee" little stories and that sort of thing... The dialogue was cheap cheap cheap too, that might have been her staff, but I attribute it to her.

The reliquary started interesting it was like Brad isn't who he says he is... omg then it just went to crap. It's a recipe for disaster when you make your EP and HW the same person because it's like Hitler at Munich.

[MarkH]

The scenario you describe is exactly when my love for LML turned south.

Phyllis sentenced. FIRST, the sentence was stupid. Her little threat of Brad would never have gone all the way to prison like this. SECOND, it only happened because Nikki forced Brad to turn Phyllis in. Nikki! In one fell swoop she humiliated her daughter (making Brad reveal his affair, and the fact that Phyl blackmailed him for it) AND her son (having his wife--and mother of child--arrested on her wedding date). Nikki would NEVER do those things. To make it worse, Nikki's motivation was her SENATE seat. Nikki would NEVER care about a senate seat (and hasn't shown an iota of interest in politics since then, etiher).

I liked the reliquary at the start...more correctly, I liked the Tivo moments where you had to freeze on a newspaper article Brad was looking for...and if you do that you are rewarded with deets of a murder in Parma OH...and you start wondering...the setup was just about the most fun I ever had on the show. But it DEVOLVED. Half the summer of 2006 was spent in a HOTEL room with Victoria trying to fabricate some kind of fake reliquary. And then Jana starts killing people for it. And then we show up in a crypt in Kutna Hora. And truly, honestly, the execution was so lame...not the underlying idea. And again, the KEY finding here was Brad's past, his judaism. These things could have been quite interesting. Instead, they were dropped by LML...and seldom mentioned again. To whit, on atonement day, Brad atoned to everyone...and then turned right around and started backstabbing again the very next day.

The porn story...'nuff said. It was really a 'watching Amber in her undies" story...again, the idea could have been something (although porn is hard to do on daytime)...but the executive was so dismal and horrible, you had to look away in pain.

This was the ongoing dilemma of LML. The ideas were often interesting and fresh and different. You could just HEAR her pitches, and they seemed promising. "Brad has a secret past..his family was killed...." or "Victor starts smelling lavender and experiences personality changes...it is really epilepsy" or "Daniel is a teenage who is married with responsibilities...he is not coping well...he turns to porn as a maladaptive coping mechanism". As an exec, even I would have been intrigued by these novel, engaging plots.

So, the stories would start. And I would be jazzed...because they introduced something I hadn't experienced on daytime in ages...SURPRISE. I was SURPRISED when Victor started behaving funny. I couldn't see it coming...but then I tracked it back (his penchant for head butts), and it made PERFECT sense. I was SURPRISED when Brad turned out to have a secret past, but then I remembereed his secretive diner meeting with his mother in the early 1980s. (Yeah, he should have been more furtive in the 20 years since...but I could forgive that).

These stories started GREAT. They were exciting and new. Couple that with the amazing new production values (all that MOVEMENT at Newman Enterprises)...the new rapid pace (which initially, I gotta say, I thanked the stars for....it was SO refreshing, SO exciting, SO new and different)...the witty repartee. Clever sets happened (like the elevator at NE...what a TERRIFIC KL-style way to trap people in close confines for quick scenes....). The dialogue was the best it had ever been.

But then...like all infatuations...reality set in. Hey...what happened to Victor's epilepsy? Hey, now that he is cured, why is he suddenly meaner than ever? Hey, what is Nikki's motivation for running for Senate? Hey--I'm confused--how does Clear Springs fit in with a Senate campaign? They seem to be the same thing...but that makes no sense.

And worse. Folks started asking me stuff like: "When did Nikki decide to run for senate? I missed that". And that was because it all happened in the span of a single episode. If you missed it, on some random Tuesday, you were mullocked.

Suddenly, I woke up one day, and I realized that while I still loved my show and its' characters, it was getting very hard to recognize. The music was different. The visual style was different. The characters were largely out of character. I couldn't remember throughlines (e.g., whatever happened to Daniel's porn addiction...it doesn't seem to matter any more). One day Kevin was trying to kill Jana (cool!) and the VERY NEXT DAY he was sappy-in-love with her. Eh?

But here is where it all REALLY became cemented for me.

12/26/2007. Maria Arena Bell and Josh Griffith started writing strike episodes. And IN THE SPAN OF A SINGLE EPISODE...certainly within 2-3 episodes...EVERYTHING STARTED MAKING SENSE AGAIN. Pacing returned. Flower shots returned. And I was shocked by how much this comforted me. It was like a friend had gone THROUGH their midlife crisis and was back to wearing sensible shoes. And I welcomed the return to comfort and familiarity.

Characters started behaving like themselves again. Nikki apologized for what she did to Phyllis. (That was resolved too quickly, but I can forgive that...since that was REPAIR dialog). Jill and Kay started bickering again.... Ashley was home and spoke in knowing terms about her brother.

So, to summarize: The LML vision was a joy for me in the early days. But as the show became unrecognizable (stylistically and character-wise), the follow through on delicious premises became more and more universally bad (so that EACH plot ended up getting the judgment of 'lame' from me), I started to become nostalgic...And, when that nostalgia was rewarded on 12/26/07, I was like a REVELATION. I was "home". My show was back. (Not totally...but it made sense and seemed like itself again).

That transformed my understanding of what soaps are. They are FUNDAMENTALLY nostalgia-based. They must always retain their identities if they want to remain 'comfort food' to their loyal viewers. That means that all soaps will eventually become stagnant...but that's okay. I've accepted that each soap must have a natural lifetime, and then should perish before its identity becomes too perverted.

[TC]

They lost me with Victoria's McGyver-ish ability to reproduce a phoney reliquary with a few household gadgets. If you're going to move in a more plot-driven direction, at least have the plot make sense.

[Ryan]

I agree totally with deedee, JP and Mark. It was very plot driven....but the one thing we can say about LML, even though creatively the show may have been down, the ratings only dipped slightly. The show was at a 4.3/4.4 (possibly) when Maria Arena Bell and Josh Griffith took over....the show is at a 3.4 now.

[rhythmchyc]

The reliquary story resolution sucked, sure, as did Phyllis turning into Sheila, Carmen Mesda's killer ish and Nick losing his memory. But the Clear Springs fiasco was the lowest of the low, particularly the collapse, the "victims" and Victoria's a coma etc. etc.

Nauseating, to say the least.

[GHJunkie4Life]

Compared to what we're getting now...absolutely NOTHING.

And I find it laughable how the ratings have gone lower and people are blaming it on LML fatigue or w/e disease you want to name it.

Heck if she was so bad you'd think viewers would have flocked back in droves the first day a post LML episode aired or week within at the very least.

Instead Y&R has become like AMC and Guiding Light...drop dead boring. Save for the few flashes of Phick, Amber/Daniel, Kevin/Jana (I'd love to see a triangle with the 2 of them plus Colleen), and the few hot steamy sexy scenes Y&R is completely out of wack.

[Dr. Jay S.W.]

The problem is there are 2 types of fans these days. Fans who want the show to make sense and for history to be used and for veteran characters to be used and then there are fans, who dont care who is used, as long as the show is "fun" with plenty of plots. It's a battle going on, because the plot liking, not really caring about history fans LOVE LML, but the ones who are more for sense and history, hate her. Plot liking fans may consider veteran characters boring, but veteran watches love vets. No one is ever going to be happy!!

[MarkH]

Ah...but see...the couples you mention...Y&R was _never_ really satisfying to the supercouple contingent. Throughout its history, Y&R never really had a Luke&Laura or Sonny&Brenda or Jenny&Greg. They came close a few times (and I happen to think Phick comes close).

Thus, I'm okay if Y&R has less of the hot young sex of other shows.

BUT, if it doesn't have that, it has to have the other things that drove it...the bitter rivalries, the business intrigues, the dysfunctional couples and families, the unrevealed secrets...

Right now, I think I might even have read this somewhere (Tom Casiello??), the "opera" has gone out of Y&R's "soap opera". The high emotion, the melodrama.

The CLOSEST I felt to high emotion last week was my abject pity for the devastated Gloria on Friday. But that only made me hate Jeff Bardwell and want the character to die :-).

We all agree, I think, on the boredom factor.

[PJA]

LML wasn't the best but I would take her any day over the writers we have now.

[MarkH]

Well, except you're one to point to a possible path:

Carlivati's OLTL is mining history and it is "fun".

Unfortunately, I don't see Carlivati's "fun" ever working on Y&R. I see stalwart fans of the bouquets and the soft music storming the studio if they ever have to endure days of Bitchy Bangs and Rex-and-the-stripping-pole and Mendoran diamonds :-)

LML who is a co-HW only...I'd agree. I always felt that...even as her era drew to a close.

[Becki]

She lost me when she decided that Nick and Phyllis had what it takes to be a viable couple. It's still ridiculous to me that these two are paired up when all I see is a dumbed down version of both characters. An affair between these two? Yeah I could've stayed behind that, but an actual marriage. It's laughable on it's best days and extremely sad and disgusting on it's worst.

I'm in the camp of you don't mess with history and she destroyed the history of this show with her horrible couples and rewriting of history.

I don't blame the current ratings on her however. Bell and Griffin can take full responsibility for those. They had a chance when they took over to begin righting the wrongs but they haven't...that's been their choice. And it has NOt worked.

[AddictedToSoaps]

Those stories may have been different, but they were not suited for Y&R.

[crc]

She lost this viewer right around the Phelia and Crazy Dru mess and I haven't came back to the show. And from the sounds of things, it's not any better without her. So sad.

My biggest gripe with her were all of the personality changes of just about every character. And I don't think I enjoyed one single story of hers. Well, I did like the Dru/Sharon relationship, but that was about it.