Members august1229 Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 That would be good - they need this fundamental change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JaneAusten Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 I don't have any doubt Ron will do a better job I mean he already has 4 characters coming on he knows how to write for. My problem is yet to see one objective interview with the man. I mean its impressive that OLTL got a ratings boost this past year(although not nearly as much as the online community claims), but I didn't see anyone in the press fawning over Dena Higley or Gary Tomlin in the same manner when DOOL got their boost for a couple of years liked crazed fangurls. As for Dorian I hated the writing for her under Carvalati but I am likely alone in that opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Antoyne Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 I didn't enjoy Dorian under RC, especially the last two years or so, but I think part of it was Strasser's need to nibble on every piece of scenery she could find. Though I did enjoy her scenes as she taunted Clint while he was having a heart attack. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cheap21 Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 I do think the best thing about Dorian in recent times was her friendship with Viki. I loved the way RC handled them in that regard. I love how Dorian had her back when it came to Echo with the two banding together against her. Unfortunatley he tried too hard to push David as her romantic pairing and I thought they were horrible and it brought her down as a character to his cartoonish level. The only time I liked them as a couple was under Higley during the Spencer story. I felt David had more layers then and he and Dorian worked as a couple Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LoveDays Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 I listened to the interview and it was okay! RC didn't give me all that great of hope really or nothing that makes me say "he's going to get the show back on track and to its roots." So I'm a little unconvinced. And how many times have we heard new head writers come to a show saying how he/she have watched to show since they were a child and respects the history of the show. TOO MANY! And still come in and do things which have you scratching your head! My hope is RC can turn GH around and reground it with good storytelling. His work on OLTL was somewhat questionable to me. There were highlights of his writing and work, then there were times the show was written in a complete utter mess. Personally I do think the returns of Anna, Robert, and Holly are steps in the right direction. But it ultimatley comes to how he writes them and the direction he plans to take these characters in. I would love for Laura, Scotty, Lee and Gaail Baldwin, Alan Q(somehow and there's always a way), Alex Q, Sean, Tiffany (but I think she's ill), Felicia, Bobbie, Lucas, Lucky (Jonathan Jackson, of course) to return to the show. This is just my feel for the show. I hope to see some great things on GH with RC writing. I have to take a wait and see approach! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LoveDays Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 Something that bothered me...The mention of how he would have brought Dorian back as being President of the United States...I'm sorry sounds stupid. I wouldn't have enjoyed that at all. Partly because the only soap that handled politics rather well was Capitol and could actually pull off the correct storytelling elements. That's an area of writing I don't think many should touch, let alone make it soapy or even campy. Leave that to the once great well written prime time drama that I watched faithfully when it was on- THE WEST WING! But I do agree with someone else in this thread who mentioned Dorian for the last 2 years under RC had not experienced the best writing. It was okay here and there. I wish RC would have dug deeper into Dorian's past relationships and brought back men who really had Dorian's heart at a point in time. David Vickers was never really the man for the job. He was hardly ever written to be serious for a long time. He was for comic relief and paired with Dorian made her seem very cartoonish. I would have definitely brought back Herb Callison. They were great together! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LoveDays Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 Agreed! I'm not going to say RC didn't have some good moments in his tenure, but there was a lot of mess that was my once well written soap OLTL! I'm heartbroken it is gone! UGH for The Revolution! Not interested! Only four soaps left. I'm crying on the inside because we went from like 20 soaps to now 4 (of course not all of them were on at the same time, some came later in years). Another World, Search For Tomorrow, Edge of Night, Texas, Somerset, Santa Barbara, Capitol, Ryan's Hope, Guiding Light, As The World Turns, All My Children, The Doctors, Loving, The City, Sunset Beach, Passions, Generations, Port Charles, NOW One Life To Live...just makes me so sad! All of these soaps brought such entertainment, SOME more than others, but for soap fans period, all of these soaps brought you into the lives of characters, families, romances, weddings, deaths, new beginnings, history, mystery, and so much more! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members R Sinclair Posted January 16, 2012 Members Share Posted January 16, 2012 Yup. Nothing like great, solid journalism at its... well, worst. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DeliaIrisFan Posted January 18, 2012 Members Share Posted January 18, 2012 Hmmm...I've defended Carlivati for a long time, even after I personally tuned out almost two years ago after the mass exodus of non-straight white people. I still wouldn't have want to be in his shoes, spending five years taking orders from the likes of Brian Frons at a show that the network was probably eager to cancel all along, and I'm sure many of the most overtly horrendous things that happened on his watch were not his idea and he was just trying to keep his job. But at this point it seems clear that the OLTL that he loved was not the same one I wanted to see. Not that it's my place to say what the "real" OLTL was...I do believe what he has always said about being a fan since long before I ever watched an episode, and my standard is the OLTL of YouTube videos and A Daytime to Remember and old articles about Carla and Sadie, et al. All the same, I would venture a guess that when Carlivati fought for things, all too often he was fighting for things that didn't appeal to me. And considering what and whom he was fighting against (or sometimes, I'm sure, choosing his battles and going with the flow), it's no wonder that his tenure ultimately did not satisfy me. Not to mention that, as time went on and he seemed to get used to writing the way ABC in that era pushed for its soaps to be written, his ways of addressing past mistakes often made the problem worse, from my perspective. Todd certainly became more irredeemable after he was recast, especially in recent years, but I would say that he already was by the time Howarth left. IMO, the solution in my book was not to have two psychopathic Todds running around - thanks to absurd plot twists involving brainwashing and plastic surgery and evil cartoon mothers - just to let the "real" Todd off the hook for (some of) his most heinous acts. I tuned in for one episode of that and overdosed on the camp and misogyny. An although I'm sure someone way above his head made the decision to rehire RH and keep TSJ for as long as he was on-contract, Carlivati genuinely seemed to relish writing that story from the way he spoke in this and other interviews. I will say that what first made me check out OLTL after he took over was a blog that Connie Passalacqua wrote about a subplot involving Viki befriending a waitress (Gigi) who could not afford her son's medical bills because she did not have health care and Viki giving voice to how appalling that was. Then after I tuned out for a time during the writers' strike the very first episode I watched after Carlivati's writing team returned involved Dorian and Langston discussing a woman's right to choose. How we went from there to "we brought back Powell to remind the audience that Todd wasn't the only one who raped Marty," I'll never know, but I did get a very different vibe from this show at the beginning of his run, and intermittently for a long time after that. I also have to say that I always find that there is surprisingly little depth to what Carlivati has to say in interviews, at least in recent years. It's all about "we're doing X for fans of Y" or "we love Z and we're going to bring him back in a fun story." And I know a lot of people complain about the dialogue being glib and/or clunky, which again I didn't find so glaringly bad in the beginning of his tenure. (Then again the types of things that these characters were conversing about toward the end didn't do his team's scripts any favors.) What I don't understand is that the guy is a lawyer - who went to a good law school, at that. I work with attorneys, and they tend to have good communication skills - written and otherwise. I don't know if he's come to think he needed to talk down to soap viewers or what. About the only interesting thing that he did say in this most recent interview was that he came up with Viki's ending because, although it was a cliffhanger, it boiled down to a choice that was up to her. I won't pretend to know whether he meant that in the sense that he was making amends for the lack of agency that Viki so often had in that area of her life in the last couple of decades, between all of the rapes and children conceived due to her mental illness stemming from that history of sexual abuse that were foisted upon her. But that angle does give me some newfound appreciation for that scene, which originally just struck me as a beloved character being reduced after 43 years to whether or not she ends up with a man (a man who was not her first or last love, played by a recast, I might add). Oh well...there are certainly many things he did amidst the worst of obstacles that I still respect, and if he can end GH in a better place creatively than it's been every time I've watched in the past 15 years or so, I wish him well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members EricMontreal22 Posted January 18, 2012 Members Share Posted January 18, 2012 I guess he still works for ABC, but I do wish these soap blogs would at least TRY to ask some hard questions--even things like "was there a story you wanted to tell but weren't allowed to", "Any story in hindsight you wouldn't have done" etc--these aren't even particularly hard hitting questions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DRW50 Posted January 18, 2012 Members Share Posted January 18, 2012 it's about a cult of personality - they love those who are hip or who treat them the right way. Sheffer, Carlivati, Guza, et al. The only one who has garnered open criticism after a period of fawning is MAB. I think RC may have felt burned by the negative reaction to the Tarty story - after that his writing was much more flip and bitter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members EricMontreal22 Posted January 18, 2012 Members Share Posted January 18, 2012 It's true that earlier you got more of a sense that he wsa trying (successful or not) for some more complex stories and tones--and then kinda just gave up on that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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