B&B: Old/Classic Discussion & Articles

[kalbir]

January 14 will mark 15 years since Darlene Conley passed away. Of the original B&B characters as written by Bill Bell, Sally Spectra was another one of my favorites. I didn't mention Sally in the B&B from the Beginning thread since her episodes are still a while away on the YT channel. There was nobody else like Sally on daytime and I would say her arrival was a turning point for B&B. Sally breathed new life into the show and Bill Bell smartly built a business and a family around her, eventually replacing the Logans with the Spectra gang by 1991. It was another missed opportunity during last year's classics that we didn't get a week of the best of Sally Spectra.

Edited December 31, 2021 by kalbir

[Videnbas]

I agree wholeheartedly! To this day, there is a huge Sally-shaped hole in the fabric of the show.

It is such a shame that the Spectras were completely written off the show. Sally's legacy could have been kept alive through Macy and CJ. 

[Soapysoap]

I always thought Macy‘s second death was complete waste. I just wish the show sent her on worldwide tour as she was making comeback.

[FrenchBug82]

Not only was it stupid and short-sighted but the almost insulting way it was written would be a strong indication that whatever happened BTS was personal in nature.

 

[Planet Soap]

RIP to a legend, Betty White. I was getting nervous when I saw all the press coverage hyping up her upcoming 100th birthday, thinking to myself "don't jinx it!". This reminds me of Cecily Tysons passing where there was so much press coverage around her new book and she suddenly just passed on.

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Edited December 31, 2021 by ironlion

[Videnbas]

 

I agree with both of you! It was unnecessary, short-sighted and poorly written. It almost felt like they decided to kill her off after she had already left the show and then they added in some random dialogue about her being dead to explain away her absence. There was zero emotional payoff (I even thought at the time there was an episode missing because I couldn't believe they just killed off a major character between episodes).

And since she was already in a coma, it would have been so easy just to have her remain in that coma off screen. No need to kill her off if they weren't going to show her death on screen anyway.

But really, I think the biggest mistake was speeding through too much storyline with Macy too fast after her return from the dead. In less than a year, she returned from the dead, married Lorenzo, left Lorenzo, reunited with Thorne, had Thorne cheat on her and get her best friend pregnant, had cancer, had a hysterectomy, divorced Thorne, almost fell off the wagon, met Deacon and married him, took part in Deacon's battle for custody of Little D, helped Eric get control of FC back from Brooke, restarted her singing career, had a chandelier drop on her head, and supposedly died again. It would have been so much more compelling if she had just stayed with Thorne and the truth about Aly hadn't come out until after Macy had adopted her.

With Macy they severed the strongest link we could have had back to the original Sally Spectra.

[AMCOLTLLover]

Oh no.. I feared for it. I checked all year long if she was alright and still alive.. 17 days before her milestone

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[FrenchBug82]

I wish I remembered what was known publicly at the time of the sequence of events but Macy died in October and BE first aired at AMC on December 12th. So the gap between her leaving B&B and joining AMC was very small.
My speculation - and it may be that this is *known* but I don't remember - is that she was auditioning for AMC while still working as Macy (despite the fact he had just resurrected her) and Bell was so pissed off when he found out that he made sure to 1) kill her off so that she knows she won't get a second chance 2) do so in a humiliating manner.

[Khan]

How exactly did Macy die the second time?  Did it involve a chandelier?

[Videnbas]

I did a quick web search and this was what I found on BE's transition from B&B to AMC:

https://www.soapcentral.com/all-my-children/news/2003/1020-eakes.php

This article is from Oct 19. Checking the recaps, I found the chandelier incident happened on Oct 3 and BE's last air date was Oct 22. The mention of "oh yes, and by the way Macy died" was on Oct 29. But other than that, it seems just about everything else in the writing is more consistent with Macy just remaining in a coma, rather than her actually having died. So it makes sense that the coma storyline was Bell's original intention and when BE left, he just changed as little as possible in the scripts, which led to the nonsensical off screen death. But the way I interpreted the article, the chandelier coma thing was written first (because Bell supposedly ran out of ideas for Macy) and BE's choice to audition for AMC came as a reaction to that.

[charholden5]

I find it so ironic that he said he ran out of storylines for her and he also said he finds it hard to write for Thorne. Yet, he can come up with tons of stories for Liam and Hope.

[DramatistDreamer]

Did the B&B post any clips of Betty White's scenes with Susan Flannery and Alley Mills? Everyone wants to post those final scenes at the beach, but that doesn't even capture the most powerful scenes between the actresses, which were those combative scenes where Stephanie confronted her mother Ann about the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, which Ann, at first refused to acknowledge, with Pam caught in the middle. Those actresses were going toe to toe.

It's a shame if nobody posts those clips because they were so dramatic.

[FrenchBug82]

I know I saw this one yesterday
 

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I will never for the life of me understand why Bell killed Aly. Talk about unnecessarily short-sighted. Not that I want to encourage the merry go-round for the Spencer brothers but imagine what having a third Forrester option for Liam and Wyatt - and one that is slightly coo-coo and hates Steffy in a more visceral way than "sweet" Hope - could have done to make this ever so slightly less tedious while keeping Forresters front and center.

And keeping Thorne in the mix.

Edited January 1, 2022 by FrenchBug82

[Videnbas]

Those final scenes at the beach were beautiful though. Possibly the most beautiful death scene B&B has done. 

Especially ironic since he had just given her about three years' worth of storyline compressed into six months. No wonder he ran out of fuel.

And yes, Thorne, Macy and basically all of the Spectras have all been in the same boat. Brad Bell seems unable to write for them because they are not his favorites. And yet I have always preferred that group of characters over the ones favored by Brad Bell. Which is kind of discouraging when their story goes something like: Macy gets her head bashed in by a random chandelier and dies, Darla gets her head bashed in by a random car and dies, Aly gets her head bashed in by a random tire iron and an even more random rock and dies... (Aly was my favorite in the young generation but she was related to the Spectra gang so I guess I should have known.)

Edited January 1, 2022 by Videnbas

[charholden5]

I don't know why Ally, Darla, and Phoebe were killed. Making way for Liam, Steffie, and Hope endlessly is BEYOND FRUSTRATING!  I'm sure that'sa part of the reason that Susan and Ronn decided to leave.