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LOL - what can I say?  

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The memories!!  If I remember correctly, the Jamaica storyline with Hayley/Mateo/Julia/Noah/Taylor was panned by the critics (right?), but as a 12 year old boy, I thought it was so fun, sexy and exciting!  

 

I also thought that episode of Laurel's assassination was perfectly executed by the directors.  So intense and shocking.  That was such a good era of AMC!  The only thing terrible from that time was Dixie's hair hahaha - I think that was her worst look of all time, but I still was here for the Tad/Dixie/Liza triangle.

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Right.  AMC (and then-HW Lorraine Broderick) was accused of copying DAYS, which JER had turned into an utter camp-fest by that point.  Agnes Nixon had always flirted with Gothic storylines on the show, but voodoo was just a bridge too far for many (myself included).

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I remember this one so well.  I wish the cast got up there, and not just the producers.  In fact, every year after this the whole cast and crew went up there. 

 

This was also the night that La Lucci lost to Slezak and everyone in attendance gave Susan a standing ovation.  Ahhhhhhhh. 

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I was under the impression the voodoo plotline was in part due to pressure from ABC to emulate DAYS. I could be wrong and that's fan supposition.

 

I remember liking the pre-crazy Taylor. The voodoo thing and then the ludicrous Disney fairy tale wedding for Noah and Julia (which Keith Hamilton Cobb rightly lambasted as a betrayal of his character) turned me off them even as a kid. You put it up against OLTL's gritty stories and characters at the time and AMC just came off corny as fùck a lot, but I understand the contrast in style and tone in the shows more now than I did as a child - today most of its flights of fancy or goofier moments are of a piece with the show's fabric and brand. It was a great show I loved regardless but it had a lot of peaks and valleys in that era. The 2000s still made its flaws look like high art.

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No, you're not wrong.  AMC was under a tremendous amount of pressure to emulate DAYS, due to the latter show (which aired opposite AMC in most major markets, IIRC) taking off in the ratings thanks to JER's outrageous stories.  That's what I meant before.  It just came out wrong.

 

I thought Noah and Julia's wedding was ridiculous, too.  But I chalked up my feelings to being lukewarm in general about those two.

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