Has Hogan Sheffer had one decent story - beginning, middle, and end - in his entire career as a soap writer?

Hells NO....at least not in his time at ATWT.

im sorry to say this but sheffer & goutman gave ATWT one last shot in the arm! it became a emmy writing/ best show winner for a couple yrs. plus every hot performer was jumping ship to the show. not saying it was the best but it at least gave some kind of enjoyment watching it daily and once sheffer departed everything went downhill imo!!!

Aside from Cady McClain, every hot performer who joined was abysmal.

You don't think there would be a major fan backlash if Geary was fired? I get the impression that he is glad to be out of the whole Luke/Laura thing, but I'm not sure why.

its not about whether there will be fan backlash or not. I dont think they'd have cared.

Has Hogan Sheffer had one decent story - beginning, middle, and end - in his entire career as a soap writer?

LOL. No, actually. Everything he did well on ATWT were stories he inherited from Laiman. Anything he actually started was uneven at best and a disaster at worst.

im sorry to say this but sheffer & goutman gave ATWT one last shot in the arm! it became a emmy writing/ best show winner for a couple yrs. plus every hot performer was jumping ship to the show. not saying it was the best but it at least gave some kind of enjoyment watching it daily and once sheffer departed everything went downhill imo!!!

Whether or not he wrote a cohesive story is a separate issue from the publicity he garnered for ATWT. I don't deny at all that he gave ATWT "one last shot in the arm"---but there's a difference between being a publicity whore and mastering sound writing. Winning the emmys were nice----but that's as much about politics and chance.

I'm saying Sheffer never plotted a solid story that made a lick of sense. Ones that started out well (or at least somewhat well-plotted like Babs/James kidnapping the girls) devolved into "mysterious blue drinks", rapid aging and Dr.FunkyGlasses with all the menace of a Scooby Doo villian. His answer to everything was camp, some-pull-it-out-of-his-ass villian and a bury-it-and-forget-it mentality. Look at the way he copped out and made pre-teen Will Rose's killer. Or Les/Julia. Or how many times he brought back some "fan favorite" to completely trash their character to engineer a nonsensical story (he brought back Damian from the dead and made him a monk for cryin' out loud. A MONK.).

No writer is perfect. But with Sheffer, you never got any sense of growth. He kept repeating mistakes. If anything, it was the cast that got too little credit for making the material seem fresher than it was.

I think Sheffer's first two years were great, but he did say that somewhere along the line, it turned into Goutman and the network interfering in everything he came up with. I think his best work is at ATWT compared to DAYS and Y&R. However, I could see where longtime fans would lose interest.

How is Sam, Alexis' daughter? Who is her father?

How is Sam, Alexis' daughter? Who is her father?

Some lame plot where they never got a dna test and used some old school records( someone said it was a yearbook) to help determine that Alexis missed ex amount of school days that year and gave birth at some clinic. An Alexis fan can tell you.

No one knows who Sam's father is but it's likely a cousin of Alexis'

Or how many times he brought back some "fan favorite" to completely trash their character to engineer a nonsensical story (he brought back Damian from the dead and made him a monk for cryin' out loud. A MONK.).

That was Jessica D. Klein IIRC.

I think Sheffer's first two years were great, but he did say that somewhere along the line, it turned into Goutman and the network interfering in everything he came up with. I think his best work is at ATWT compared to DAYS and Y&R. However, I could see where longtime fans would lose interest.

Actually I couldn't find this interview when I looked for it, so maybe he never said that. I could have sworn I read it somewhere though.

No one knows who Sam's father is but it's likely a cousin of Alexis'

Does it really matter? With Valentini and Carlivati in charge, won't it be a different man every time the moon is full?

Since Sheffer has told the same stories on DAYS and Y&R that he told at ATWT, I don't know how much interference he faced.

That was Jessica D. Klein IIRC.

Klein had him studying to be a priest, but I think he was a monk when he came back in 2001 (or pretending to be). I guess it's still better than the writing for him later on though...

Klein had him studying to be a priest, but I think he was a monk when he came back in 2001 (or pretending to be). I guess it's still better than the writing for him later on though...

Well, I guess I was a little confused on the timeline and who "revealed" Damian was actually alive. But it was definitely Hogan who had him in a kidnapping round-robin after the boat explosion where Holden and Luke were presumed dead.

With the first Holden fake funeral. Little did I know that the only way to get one of my favorite characters (Seth) back was to "kill" Holden every decade or so.

Overall I never got the impression that Sheffer had a lot of interest or respect in the history of past characters. Not that he was the only one, but still, the Craig mess, or the image of Julie as the long-suffering mother battling years of illness, just did not work for me.

I guess I should be grateful it wasn't much worse, as apparently Sheffer casually rewrote one of the show's longtime popular leading men (Mike Horton) as a child beater.

Edited April 29, 201213 yr by CarlD2