Y&R: Old Articles

[FrenchBug82]

I'd add that even without the retcon I find the soap trope of having a character not discuss important parts of their lives with the person they are supposedly madly in love with pretty unappealing.
How am I supposed to root for Cricket and Paul if he is not comfortable discussing that he has a sister just because she has a mental illness? What does it say about Paul and what does it say about how much he trusts and feels comfortable with that woman he wants to marry?
I would literally dump a guy who I have dated for a significant period of time and who never mentioned he had a sister!

Not good writing IMHO. I agree "He doesn't like to talk about her" would have been a fair compromise.
 

As terrible as contemporary writers have been, I often think on how differently "legendary" soap writers would be remembered if there had been Internet and its dynamic back then.

Edited May 3, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[Paul Raven]

So, we have the

'Patty just vanished and had mental health issues'

plus 'Carl just vanished and has been missing for years'

as well as 'Eve did not go crazy and try to murder Victor'

Any other missteps from the past?

 

The thing is, they were written for no reason.

Carl had been offscreen for sometime but Mary's role had diminished also so as a viewer it was possible to accept that Carl and Mary's lives were continuing offscreen.

Why not bring Carl back and show some friction in their marriage. It would be believable that Carl might have crossed paths with Ruth and become attracted to a woman less rigid and judgmental than Mary.

Chris spots them in an out of town locale and the story takes off from there.

Way more believable and relatable than the tired old amnesia story.

 

Why not play the Patty story as happened onscreen? She simply left town for a fresh start.

That would leave the story open to all possibilities.

Patty could return with plans to get revenge on Jack, or still vulnerable to his advances.

Make a fresh play for Danny etc

[asafi]

I wonder why nothing came out of Patti suddenly mentioned in 1996.. why didn't TPTB bring her back then? strange. 

 

and the whole Nikki forgetting in 1993 the havoc Eve caused in the 80's??? ridiciulus and insulting to loyal fans of the show 

[Chris B]

The Eve retcon was huge IMO and the most bizarre of them all. Eve was central to so many key Victor/Nikki moments and at the time Cole was introduced, it wasn't that long ago. It's odd that they took one element of the story, of course Cole potentially being Victor's son, but nothing else. Eve had such rich history with Victor and Nikki and it was all wasted. You can even keep her on her death bed, but imagine how much more interesting it would've been to see her show some regret over her past actions.

[DRW50]

 

Weren't there claims that they didn't bring Patty back because the actress had weight issues or something.

[Paul Raven]

SOD ran a blind item around that time that a;luded to a show planning to bring back a popular character only to find that the actress was now considerably larger.

It seemed to be referring to Lilibet Stern, but when this was mentioned here in the past, other posters claimed there has been other stories published around that time that she was working in nursing and had not gained weight.

Edited May 3, 2021 by Paul Raven

[FrenchBug82]

Yeah. Fair enough.
Because we were talking at the same time as Cricket not knowing about Patty, my instinct was to lump the two types of "not remembering" retcons but I agree that the Eve one was considerably more problematic.

[Planet Soap]

I found Christine not knowing about Jack & Patty strange too. It's similar to Brad explaining Sheila's misdeeds to Michael in 2005 despite Michael having been on the show in the early 90s. It really speaks to the old show's charachters isolation, its habit of not mentioning past storylines and randomly disregarding characters and history. 

Edited May 3, 2021 by ironlion

[asafi]

 

Did Micheal ever interacted with Sheila during the 90's? I don't think so.. so it's reasonable to assume he didn't know about her actions. no? 

[YRfan23]

Michael DID interact with Sheila briefly in February 1992 when Cricket introduced them, when Sheila had stopped by inviting her and Danny over for dinner.

 

the Michael/Sheila bit doesn’t bother me that much because I honestly think he was way too preoccupied with Cricket to even remember Sheila was once her sister-in-law.

[DramatistDreamer]

I would like to believe that if the Brooks family had remained on the canvas, there would've been a newspaper and Michael would have read all about Sheila's exploits and misdeeds in the morning or evening edition.

[FrenchBug82]

It is a problem when writers don't remember well and end up picking a character that should have known but it is mostly a lazy way for the writers to re-introduce a past character to the part of the audience that wasn't watching then by having someone simply ask "Who dat" and being explained

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[SoapDope]

I don't know what Bell was thinking by obliterating the past. I guess he felt by the 90's the show had picked up way more viewers along the way than what was watching 1973-1983 and they would have no knowledge of Patty/Cricket and Nikki/Eve interaction and could retcon to suit his current storyline. He sometimes would throw stuff out there that would surprise me. One day when Nikki and Brad were planning to wed, Jack walks in talking to Ashley and Jack blurts out Nikki Reed Foster Bancroft Newman Abbott soon to be Carlton......it had been years since they even mentioned Nikki's early marriages pre-Victor. For years he wrote it as Victor was her first husband. Even a viewer wrote in to Soap Digest asking about Foster & Bancroft. 

 

Even in the mid 80's he was giving old Brooks sister storylines to Ashley.

[YRfan23]

Maybe this is me getting worried we are making him out not to be as great of a writer as he really was, but can someone confirm if Agnes Nixon or even Irna Phillips had annoying quirks in their writing too that would make the fans crazy?.did Agnes ever retcon older stories for her newer audience?

[Broderick]

 

I'm no authority on Agnes Nixon or Irna Phillips, but Bill Bell had a habit of dropping characters without much explanation and then, out of necessity later on, "back-pedaling" to explain where they'd been.   He ALWAYS did that.  Sometimes his "back-pedaling" was logical, and other times it wasn't, but normally you could visualize his thought process.   In the mid-1980's, he dropped Julianna McCarthy (Liz Brooks) to recurring, as Liz wasn't receiving much storyline material and was interacting solely with her daughter Jill.   Eventually she just vanished without a trace.  About a year later, he needed Liz to reappear for Jill's shooting, and you could see that he was mentally thinking, "Ok, where has Liz been?  I can say she's still in Genoa City, or I can say that she reconciled with Stuart Brooks, or I can say that she's living with Snapper and Chris in London.  That's it!  I'll pretend she's in London, so that she can pick-up Phillip III from boarding school and escort him back to Genoa City!"  That made pretty good sense.  The situation with Carl Williams disappearing made far less sense, and Carl's absence was pretty glaring, since Mary was still appearing on the show.   I'd been wondering how it would ultimately be explained.  What we eventually got (the Norfolk storyline) was disappointing and didn't make much sense to longtime viewers, but some folks seemed to enjoy it.  With Patty Williams, Bill Bell seemed VERY FOND of Lilibet Stern and very UNIMPRESSED with Andrea Evans.  Bell seemed to take the position later that Andrea Evans had never played the role.  (All of Cricket's interaction with Patty involved Andrea Evans, rather than Lilibet Stern, so that was just swept under the rug, as Andrea Evans had made such an unfortunate and forgettable Patty.)