James E Reilly interview 1999

[JackPeyton]

YES!

What Kay was just painfully bad? I know none of them were steller, but one was just.. OMFG WTF is this bad

[DRW50]

Jesse Metcalfe was awful too.

I also used to laugh at Grace and her twin who was exactly the same as her in every single way, even though they had never met. Dana Sparks is not a bad actress, but that whole character was ridiculous.

[JackPeyton]

At least Jesse had a body

In soaps i need actors to be able to act, somewhat at least, or be hot.

i dont understand who bad actors who are not pretty get cast.

[EricMontreal22]

I couldn't believe Jesse got a primetime show and a movie (flop one, but...) from his incredibly awful acting on Passions. But he did show, liek some other soap actors have (Brandon Routh? lol) that some non talents can manage to be at least a bit more watchable when doing primetime and movies where they handle a lot less dialogue per take, get more retakes, etc...

[Chris B]

Yeah, James Franco showed just how much all those extra takes helped. It's unfortunate that Passions debuted on NBC during such a low period for the network. I think the best place for a soap like that would've been CBS. I could see CBS pouring money into the network and they would've put more talented people in place. JER had a good idea and interesting characters, but the show needed better writing overall. Better scripts, better pacing and they needed to follow through. Casting was also horrendous which did the show in and the tone was completely off. Had they taken on the Peyton Place vibe it would've been brilliant. Peyton Place characters always acknowledged how wild the things that happened were. It affected them for a long time. If you think about it, Mia Farrow had one story the two years she was around, it just kept evolving.

JER picked up some good habits from Bill Bell and that inspiration seemed to be the one he mainly relied on. Unfortunately, something went wrong. He went too far and never recovered. I'm surprised he didn't pick up tighter pacing when he was at GL.

[JackPeyton]

James Franco showed us how redic bad GH is by the way he blatantly mocked the show via his performance. There were times where you could tell he was trying not to LOL. I loved it. The worst part was he was still better than over half the cast.

JER is his own worst enemy. He didnt know how to take network notes and make them work and it caused the show to be in shambles. Much like Hogan in that way, IMHO.

[DRW50]

Aside from the casting, I thought the Ethan/Teresa/Gwen triangle, while certainly getting a passionate response from a lot of fans, was also a very offputting storyline. And the Princess Diana stuff. I never got why they did that.

[JackPeyton]

I agree.

The Diana stuff was just a tacky ploy for news coverage.

I will say this, as bad as the cast of passions were they had some amazing talent - Ben Masters, Juliet Mills, James Hyde, Tracey Ross. They also found some talent (or actors who developed talent) in younger ones, there were just so few & far between and the bad actors outnumbered them.

[quartermainefan]

More than one actor from Passions has had one level of successs. The original Ethan, didn't he go on to star in SCRUBS? And Green Arrow from Smallville was another alumni. But this sort of makes sense. All three guys have something in common (hired for their looks) and just like Justin Bruening from AMC getting a shot at Knight Rider, a good looking guy will always get a shot faster than a more talented guy who doesn't look like these guys. As it turns out, I think the guy who plays Green Arrow is sort of decent for the type of role and show he is in.

[EricMontreal22]

Both those actors were better than Jesse though (the Green Arrow--if you mean the guy who played Fox-- guy was one of the few younger actors hired for his looks who fans started to like his acting--at least decently).

When Passions clearly was only going to be played for camp, I coulda been behind that. I loved some of Sunset Beach cuz of the campiness. But the writing just made it unberable to watch for me--it literally would give me a headache how every scene tended to have the same circular dialogue, how SLOOOOW the plotting was (yes Bell is slow and JER's 90s DAYS was slow but they still had constant development, not just endless repitition till a new random plot twist is thrown in)

[dm.]

There were three... first that Taylor Anne Mountz, then a temporary replacement Gina Marie Kay, followed by Deanna Wright, and last played by Heidi Mueller.

As far as I remember, they said Gina Marie Kay was the worst one... but she was there for very brief time.

[Aaron]

Passions had ENORMOUS potential.

If you just look at the bare bones of the show, it had classic soap opera written all over it. Four multi-racial families from four different economic strata, with deeply interconnected backstories and a picturesque setting. Equal parts established soap actors and new faces.

It SHOULD have been golden.

Alas, it was JER's obsession with bad camp that killed my hope for the show. I LOVE camp. When it's balanced and played against realistic human drama, it can be delightful. Carlivati's OLTL has been a good example of this from time to time, as was early B&B. What JER did wasn't camp, per se, it was more soap opera satire.

There's a place for that, too, but making the show an hour long beat the hell out of that concept. As others have stated, we saw day after day after day after day of repetitious dialogue, fake-out scenes that dragged on WAY too long, and paper thin characters acting out paper thin plots.

Passions was definitely a fun show to watch every now and then, but to try and watch it every day or even for a few weeks at a time could test your patience to the max. And not in the way I am sure NBC was hoping it would.

It still boggles my mind that it lasted as long as it did.

[Mitch]

I HATE camp on soaps and I still liked Passions, the problem was it tried to be two shows in one, an over the top spoof of soaps filled with mostly good actors(Mills, the Timmy actor, the really gay acting older rich guy) and a "straight" soap opera(well nothing on Passions was really straight) filled with really bad actors and dialogue. But the purposely "bad," part of the show was clever, witty and even though it was supposed to be dealing with "supernatural," scenes, kinda sunny and good hearted..the straight soap part was boring and repetitive and depressing and kind of mean spirited. ( I think that was really Reilly...his gay side coming out in the fun part of the show and his repressed, selfloathing side on the soap part...) But boy was the funny part of the show actually funny and hit its mark on spoofing soaps and political correctness...(my fave parts were win Tabitha would have a pop up come up of Juliet Mills saying "Tabitha was awfully naughty for driving a motocycle without a helmet, kids dont do this at home") like Tabitha getting Santa drunk on Christmas Eve so he would screw her.

However, a gothic soap played straight and set in New England,with overtones of supernatural stuff would have been better and lasted longer...and where the hell did they get that themes song from, it totally did not fit the show.

[DRW50]

One of my problems with Passions is a lot of stories just felt dragged out for the sake of dragging them out, not because of any real purpose. Like Sheridan/Luis. Or TC's shed. Remember that? In Reilly's first DAYS run, stories that were dragged out often had BIG payoffs. With Passions, stories just seemed to stall in order to fill up time, and there was no real ending.

I was also very confused and put off by the laundry list of rapes in the last few years of the show. Why did this happen? Wasn't Fancy raped like two or three times in a few months? And then some of the most out of left field stories would not quite work because the actors were too wooden to make them work, like the down low story with Chad.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

I don't think Passions ever became what JER wanted it to be in the long term. The first year or so, though wacky, tried a bit harder to be more realistic and traditional. Then JER started to get lost and the show became one big outrageous mess, it was like it got lost in its own hype.

I wonder if JER was happy with how things turned out. Did he envision a different show from what Passions ultimately became? That's what I'm thinking.