I agree with a lot of this. I think @Darn said it made sense for Kelsey and I was horrified lol. But he may have been right! Megan could just be so crass.
She was the wrong messenger, but I think part of the reason Megan survived so long despite being such a toxic, odious person is not only because she dearly loved and understood certain fundamentals of AMC but also because as Eric notes she was a cynical and highly knowledgeable game player at the network. She goes through Q rating, audience scores, etc. and the audience response to certain male or female characters or archetypes with encyclopedic knowledge and focus, not just in what Eric notes here but in her other story notes/plans we've seen before as well as in her hellraising memoir. That is capable and impressive. Unlike Agnes and others in the writers room with her who she critiques to Shapiro, et al, Megan doesn't seem to care what story is right or wrong, what leaves a positive impact or is foul and regressive, what makes sense for the characters or which veterans the audience loves; she cares what will bring the show to the top of the heap, what will help it take on Days, what will not make it seem 'old' and leave it in the dust of O.J., etc. There is something to admire in that instinct, though in the end it helped neither AMC nor her career.
I disagree with Megan on many things but I will agree with both her and @Jonathan that I never bought into Janet and Trevor ending up together. Yes, as an older viewer looking at some of the material again I can say she and others actually did write a solid, nuanced and carefully laid out love story for them in retrospect. But at the time as a teenager I was just aghast and grossed out. I remembered Jane Cox. So she's right that a portion of the audience would never buy into a male lead again who willingly got with Janet. I didn't. She describes all these things and more in very mercenary terms but she's not always wrong. And yes, I absolutely thought Brooke was an over the hill embarrassment for much of the mid-late '90s. I have a more informed and nuanced take on Brooke and her larger history now. But as ugly and awful as Megan can be, she wasn't always off the mark. The problem, I think, was how she never challenged any of those perceptions or stereotypes, or tried to make them better for characters like Brooke who the audience loved. She just leaned into them, and would go for the next 'sensation' as Agnes called it, or stunt, or headline.
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Vee ·
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