Loving/The City Discussion Thread

[Forever8]

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Eric Woodall (Matt Ford) popped in and they're talking about their days on Loving. 

[FrenchBug82]

I am glad there was talk of NR and LP but there were more questions I wish he had asked about Loving and The City (Michael Weatherly!)! 
But I love how glowingly Laura talks of her experience there. Made me happy

Oh and Eric is looking like a dish. Yum.

Edited July 22, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[Forever8]

I was the person who asked about Nada and Lisa. I figured Alan wouldn't ask too many questions to her about Loving we haven't heard about before.  

 

[dc11786]

I don't think the show really appreciated what they had in Clay and Gwyn. I know bickering divorced couples who love each other in a different way are a staple of soap opera, but it would have been nice to have a least a few weeks of them happy together before they would tear the band aid off. 

Parlato and Heinle shouldn't have worked as well together as they did. Parlato kept Clay from being completely creepy despite the fact that the age of his girlfriends seem to consistently decrease. 

Trisha and Jack were both dead to Trucker and Stacey. The guilt about betraying the loves of their lives is about the only energy the story would have had. I'm not personally advocating for a grand romance, but I do think that Stacey and Trucker heading a mixed match brood of kids in a working class surburban household would have made a semblance of sense. It just would have reduced the characters to tentpoles rather than active agents in the story.

I have complained about Tess for many years. Catherine Hickland is talented, but Tess was such a cluster of a character. Hickland managed to salavage the character when the writing wasn't there. I would argue the only time Tess worked was when Nixon was writing and she was mostly just manipulative and self destructive. Taggart and Guza's grifter was unlikeable. I don't remember much of Tess' story under Walsh/McCarthy, but Tess just seemed present. The final version of Tess under Brown and Essensten was terribly harsh and crass. It was really a turn off. 

With that said, she had great chemistry with everyone. I thought Tess and Cooper worked together in a twisted way. That was probably my favorite pairing for Hickland on "Loving." Though I think they could have done a nice marriage made in hell between Tess and Clay if Deborah hadn't shown up.

It was great seeing Woodall. I wish he had tried another show. He still has the same energy and vibe that he did when he was on "Loving" 30 years ago. It was a nice treat. I still think they should have tried to bring Matt back when they wrote out Casey. 

 

[Vee]

I get why people would be turned off by Tess. Looking at her today, comparing her to the much more hysterical neuroses of the later Lindsay on OLTL whose years of pain about her broken marriage and family always drove her mania - and I loved Lindsay for who she was - I still think the Tess character is sharper and more fun. But I understand that characters like her and values like hers coming to the fore helped change the show into what it became, and I understand that people's feelings on that change are complex.

[FrenchBug82]

I should clarify what I meant earlier. I thought Tess was interesting as a character; I just never liked any of the storylines or the pairings they tried for her.
It just didn't gel for me but at least I wanted it to which is what you want, really.

[Vee]

I liked her and Buck on Loving and TC. I think all the other pairings, which varied in quality of storytelling, still had chemistry. Either way, to each their own.

[FrenchBug82]

It was the one that made the most sense to me, I will agree with that.
I am not sure I saw chemistry as much as the combination of two REALLY good-looking actors with both had a very sexual aura. It is hot to watch but it wasn't quite the same, for me, as the kind of je-ne-sais-quoi that chemistry can/should be when selling a love story.

[DRW50]

The first time I saw Tess was when I got into Loving's last months. I did not really know anything about the show and just enjoyed seeing Catherine Hickland give such a whirlwind performance. I didn't realize how much she and other characters like Richard were a finger in the eye to most of what came before in terms of the atmosphere of the show. 

I do think B&E did a better job with her on Loving than they did in the early months of The City, where from the little I watched/read about, they seemed to make her go too far before having the cancer scare and the pairing with Buck. 

 

[Soaplovers]

I did think Tess vs Sydney had potential, but the show didn't focus on that..nor give much focus on her odd couple friendship with Jacob..with Angie barely tolerating her.

Tess seemed to fit more on The city then she did on Loving.

Her most challenging role was playing dual roles on Capitol...imho

[Kane]

Oh no, he definitely actively framed Trucker. He opened a Swiss bank account in his name and then transferred money into it to make it look like the mob? military dictatorship? that was running San Felipe had paid him off to sign off on the faulty airplane parts. Interestingly, this is one of the few (maybe the only) times when Clay did something like this in order to cover for someone other than himself. He had no idea what was going on in San Felipe until after the crash; it was Cabot who knew about it, but he couldn't afford to do anything to rectify the situation because AE had lost so much money earlier in the year because Amourelle put out a toxic face cream.

 

I think they would have gotten past any guilt via the knowledge that Trisha would have given the relationship her blessing because she loved them both and because if she had to chose someone to stand in her place as Christopher's mother, she would have chosen Stacey. Dinah Lee taking on that role, on the other hand, would have had her spinning in her grave if she was actually in it.

Personally, I would have gladly taken a Trucker/Stacey relationship if it had gotten her away from Buck. I liked Buck/Stacey well enough in their first go round, but once they broke up he went off and had all these other storylines while she was reduced to just... waiting around for him, month after month for the better part of a year, until he finally got himself together and they reconciled. And even then they broke up and got back together several more times before she died.

Funny that Trucker and Buck each ended up with the exact woman that Trisha and Stacey, respectively, would have been most annoyed to see him with.

 

I usually detest older man/younger woman pairings, but I loved Clay and Steffi together. I think it helps that the relationship makes a lot of psychological sense, given that Steffi's father had basically cut ties with her, leaving her desperate for a father figure, and Clay was still struggling to come to grips with having forever lost his opportunity to be a real father to Trisha.

[FrenchBug82]

No question would they have sold it that way and it would have worked in a mushy kind of way.
BUT not for me. I tend to cling to characters thoroughlines more than what the writing du jour tries to sell me and I could never have gone past it. Too incestuous to fit those particular two characters.
Which btw was my objection too to the Clay/Stacey storyline. I actually liked the gaslighting part, dark as it may have been, but I kept thinking "Stacey would never have gone near him in the first place"
Of course we will never know and it is a fun idea to consider but I object. lol
 

 

[DemetriKane]

I never been a big fan of hers, but excitement she has for her soap experience makes me a fun. You can help but cheer her on! I also love stories like hers when after a bad renegotiating meeting at the same time Jill was offering her role. 

[DRW50]

Sorry if this was already posted, but I was looking around on Archive and saw a channel that posted some Loving and The City episodes earlier this year. Most of them look familiar, but this one (June 28th, 1995) was new to me. Aside from some beautiful understated acting from Debbi Morgan, the episode doesn't have any real standout moments, but it's an important building block to Stacey's death. 

I will say that Gwyn being so eager to get Stacey to confide her problems in her feels like a big red flag, but I guess it's a moment easy to overlook if you were just watching at the time without being online or perusing magazine recaps. 

I also got a good laugh out of Tess leaving  big-ass font sized snippets of her threatening notes to Steffi on her monitor, in the middle of the workday. 

https://archive.org/details/dvd-video-recor-title-01-01

[FrenchBug82]

This was 1995. Online wasn't a thing.
I wonder if they could pull off a story like this now. Not just departures being leaked and stuff but fans putting together the kind of clues you mention.

I was genuinely shocked at some of the twists and turns at the time. And I had NO idea it was Gwyn until the very last moment.