Y&R: Week of April 27, 2009

[Khan]

Less than that, it was why you should never, under any circumstances, consume anything bought from the Farmer's Market.

No one will ever convince me there was a genuine reason for the chipmunk. Not when they had Clint, Terrible Tom, or even "Mirror Kevin" at their disposal. Maria rolled the bones on this one, and she lost.

[brimike]

Who's trying to convince you? I didn't like it either!

[Khan]

Skip.

(Like you don't skip all my posts already, right?)

[MarkH]

But this is a peculiar misstep, which makes it fascinating to contemplate.

These have proven themselves to be sensible, intuitive, smart people in the writer's room. (And here I'll be castigated for uncritical fawning, but there you have it).

This is a show that finds its humor in snippy dialogue and the occasional goofy character. But the chipmunk...is not Y&R. And the chipmunk detracted from seeing the genuine internal war Kevin is fighting. The chipmunk was Kevin's horror object--the think that kept him in psychic paralysis.

Even a CLOWN would have been more evocative of horror than a chipmunk with an animated character's voice.

Again, I'm not harping. This story is over.

But analytically, I'm trying to understand how they went down this very un-Y&R road. Was it meant to leaven the serious drama? Was it an in-joke?

We'll never know, but I'd pay for Nelson or someone to get Ms. Arena Bell on record about it.

[DRW50]

Maybe they were inspired by Roxy's talking beaver on OLTL.

[Khan]

By her what?

Oh, you meant....

Nevermind.

[brimike]

I really think it's something as simple as "a miss". A gamble was taken, and it failed. Fortunately, it wasn't for very long, and didn't suck up too much time. But I don't think there was anything so conspiratorial or in-joking backstage. Roscoe Born always seems to come with his own set of issues on every show he works at, so who knows if the same baggage was at Y&R or not. And I suspect the Head Chipmunk was not always the plan. They probably were just looking for a way to dramatize the inner struggle once Kevin was rescued, and the option MAB picked wasn't very well-liked. It wouldn't be the first time it happened (Victor and Sabrina's insta-romance, Ana singing every other episode for her first month). Sometimes it works, and sometimes it don't, and as fans, all we can ask for is for the times when it flops miserably to be as short-lived as possible.

[Khan]

Fine...but a chipmunk?! How do we go from "We need something to dramatize the struggle brewing inside Kevin's psyche," to, "Let's use the chipmunk!"? I'm sorry, but I just can't make the connection; and I'm sure, too, the other writers on staff couldn't either.

If MAB took a gamble on this, with the off-chance that the audience wouldn't object to it at all, then she must live inside a pretty pink bubble where everything's puppies and rainbows.

[brimike]

LOL! Or maybe she just had one bad idea?

[Khan]

Or one funny mushroom.

[Khan]

You saw what I wrote about the denouement earlier today, right? To wit:

[Alistair Cooke]"...And so, our brave and noble Kevin defeated the Evil Chipmunk of the CBS Television City Forest, and lived to f**k up and serve coffee another day."[/Alistair Cooke]

Here we had a serious, psychological breakthrough for a mentally disturbed character, and I treated it like it was "The Wind in the [!@#$%^&*] Willows"! That's not how one is supposed to react to the story!

ETA: I thought this would merge with my previous post, but, ah, screw it.

[MarkH]

Yes, there was definitely a "classic movie ending" feel to the F-B story today. I wrote elsewhere that it felt very much like the end of the Wizard of Oz.

[JackPeyton]

But i do think it was enough to turn people off.

But then again some soap fans actually look for a reason to tune out.

[DRW50]

I wonder if they originally planned for Roscoe to be in more episodes and something happened, resulting in the squirrel. I only wonder because there have been years of rumors that his OLTL character, Mitch Laurence, is Rex's father, and now, when they are supposed to be revealing who the dad is, the story has been more and more stretched out, and they take great pains to never show the face or mention the name of the Rex dad in the hospital bed. Maybe Roscoe wasn't available for the rest of the Y&R run or for the future OLTL run.

[dm.]

After watching all of those episodes, I need to say that the chipmunk didn't bother me that much. There wasn't really too much of it and I concentrated on other stuff, so it was tolerable.