OLTL: Week of August 11, 2008

[Khan]

Brace yourself, brimike, b/c that splash is about to turn into a downpour.

[MichaelGL]

I like yesterday. What a nice surprise it was to see the Todd/Starr scenes, which I enjoyed.

Bo/Matthew was good.

1968 was...um... entertaining, but why couldn't they both have gone home?

[margie619]

I think the way Blair is acting totally ridiculous. Who is this person? She is acting like a teenager with her first crush. She never acted like that, even when she was a teenager.

Marty and Todd is getting old, they need to move this story along.

Also end this 1968 storyline. I was hoping it would end yesterday. It better end this week.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I cringed as well when I saw that only Bo had come back to the present and the 1968 saga will continue. I am disliking this time travel stuff more and more each day. The tone of this story is completely out of place, not that I think the show seems to have decided upon what the tone of it should be.

Most of it is goofy and campy, but they have mixed in several "serious issues" without exploring them in any depth. I can't believe how easy it was for Bo to pretend to be Asa and send Maria packing, knowing that a) Asa did that because he didn't want his son involved with a Latina woman and Asa doing so may have contributed to Maria's mental illness, but at very least it made Bo's loved ones vulnerable to Maria's actions. Yes, he made an off-handed remark about how Jessica and Natalie would never be born if Clint found out Maria was pregnant with Cord and stayed with her, etc., but I think a character we're supposed to like should have been more conflicted about this. Meanwhile, they keep prattling off statistics about how many people died in Vietnam, but aside from trying to keep Rex from being drafted, it has not crossed their minds to intervene to change history in some way? They probably couldn't do anything - who would believe that they're from the future even if they did warn somebody how long the war would go on/that it was all for naught/etc - but in well-done time travel literature, the characters grapple with moral dilemmas like that.

I also have to say I am finding a number of the supporting characters who have been brought on/had their roles expanded for this story extremely grating. Delfina is just atrocious IMO - I've never seen any of the actress's stage work, apparently she's very talented, but I can only assume she's one of those stage actors who isn't as familiar with acting on TV and needs to tone it down a bit. Plus the cartoonish characterizations she has to work with do not help. I would have much rather seen Roxy trying to find Rex to make up for lying to him about Charlie/being a generally bad mother than this silly psychic character - her scenes the other day with Charlie and John McBain of all characters were more fun than anything Delfina has done all summer.

And I find RSW's wife extremely grating in both of her roles. While she fits in more in the 1968 scenes, where most of the performances have very broad strokes, she sticks out like a sore thumb in scenes with HBS and JvD, who have won Emmys playing subtle, nuanced material. And I am left scratching my head as to why Nora, who has got to be approaching 60, is jealous of this Dallas person and letting it show; or why Clint does not find Dallas's sudden presence in his and Nora's life to be inappropriate; or for that matter why Clint and Nora are together in the first place, but that is another story. And in the 1968 story, she does not remind me of Patricia Elliot's Renee at all, never mind the ridiculousness of someone that age playing Renee 40 years ago.

Noel/Rosa and the diner owner are ok in small doses, but they should not be this central when so many characters with a rich history in Llanview should have more to do. Maybe I would have more fondness for them if I'd seen last summer's Paris story, and I truly wish that I had rediscovered OLTL sooner into Ron C's stint, which I am still a fan of overall, in time for that, but alas, I didn't.

Someone posted - either here or on another board - that this 1968 story would have been much better if it had taken place in *Llanview* in 1968, and suggested the Carla Grey storyline in particular as a part of OLTL's history that could have been revisited in that way. The more I watch this, the more I like that idea, and the more I keep thinking about how that could have played out. There is virtually no surviving footage of that story that anyone has been able to dig up, but I bet that actual scripts from some of the key episodes still exist. Recreating some of those classic, groundbreaking scenes would have been a much more fitting way to pay tribute to OLTL's history than this.

The one problem, of course, is that there are no present-day characters whose portrayers would be appropriate to play any of the main roles in that story, because there are virtually no people of color in the cast. But that in and of itself is unacceptable, and the hardest thing for me to defend about the show right now. I am such a fan of so much that Ron has done, and I can blame Brian Frons and the network's micromanagement for much of what I do not care for. But it's hard to blame ABC for this huge problem at OLTL when AMC, which is at a creative lowpoint otherwise, has been doing such a better job in this area lately, from what I have seen and read. I want to believe it's not Ron's fault. Maybe I am seeing what I want to see, but at its best, his team's work has been so full of humanity that I can't believe it was written by people who would willfully refuse to open their minds enough to relate to the experiences of people who look a bit differently than they do and incorporate the lives of people of color into this show. If there is in fact another force getting in the way of anyone non-white being showcased on OLTL these days, then pushing for more diversity simply has to be a top priority when it comes to choosing their battles with ABC.

But back to the time travel, recreating the Carla Gray story would have been a way of beginning to make up for the recent lack of diversity on this show that once set the standard for it, and also to signal a renewed commitment to doing a better job in that regard. It also would have been a unique way to establish new cast members of color who could have been brought on to play present-day characters in advance of the 1968 story and by then given dual roles playing beloved characters like Carla and Sadie and Ed and the chance to play what were some of the best written scenes in the history of daytime drama. I would have kept the story much shorter - a few weeks, maximum - without a convoluted pseudo sci-fi adventure to get the present-day characters home. They would have just woke up back in 2008 as mysteriously as they went back in time in the first place, leaving it open to interpretation as to whether or not it was all a dream. There could have even been a glimpse of Viki back then - perhaps the time travelers could have run into Nikki Smith, played by Bree Williamson I guess, as a nod to the current DID story. At the conclusion of the story, Larry Wolek could then have made an appearance as the doctor treating the time traveler(s) for whatever injury may or may not have actually sent them back in time, and updated the younger characters (and the audience) about the rest of the story of what became of Carla and her family. Something like that would have paid tribute to two very different parts of OLTL's history, and been a better way to honor the 40th anniversary than this turned out to be.