AMC: Was changing Erica's b-day neccasary?

[DRW50]

I think Susan Lucci was very good at playing understated pain, although it's not something they ever truly tapped into. I feel like her work around the time of Erica's 1996 miscarriage was her best work, because there were no attempts to balance this with I'M ERICA KANE!!! It seemed like the show never found the balance between drama for Erica and camp for Erica - even the mask stuff just had a little too much camp for me.

[Khan]

Frankly, the time to tell a story about a teenaged Kendall coming back into Erica's life was during the early '80's, just as Erica's career as a model was really starting to take off. Because, as scandalous as this revelation was, Erica's career as cosmetics mogul and fashion icon was far too secure by the early '90's to be potentially ruined by the revelation that she had a secret child.

[ellabelle]

Around the time of the pain killer addiction story, the soap press waxed poetic about the drama involved with telling an addiction story "in real time." To me, a teenaged fan who LOVED Erica, what that meant was "this storyline is massively depressing and almost entirely lacking in humor, and it's going to go on for a LONG ass time" in the hopes of getting an Emmy for Susan because the Emmys don't reward humor, and they don't appreciate the subtlety of her performances... and before I'm raked over the coals for the subtle comment, Susan is known for her over the top performances, but there's a depth and a subtlety to her work that I think is often overlooked.

I hated the addiction story until they got to Kinder the soapy villain part, and I thought that it was massively depressing that Erica dealt with the return of a teen daughter who hated her guts, the revelation of the rape, her rapist coming to town, Dimitri's stabbing and the trial, her marriage falling apart, her mother dying, a serious injury to her back, a drug addiction, the collapse of her TV career thanks to addiction, and then Travis trying to cut off Erica's contact with Bianca because of it. That this was then followed by Erica losing a much wanted baby, dealing with her cheating ass of a fiance, and then kidnapping Maria's baby and going to jail for it really pissed me off. Don't get me wrong - I LOVED Susan's work as Erica circa 1993-1995, and I loved her work with the miscarriage, but I felt like Erica had SO much dumped on her in such a short period of time... and it was followed by Bianca nearly dying from anorexia. I think that's why I loved the Mike/Erica/Jack triangle and the romance with David that followed her car accident because they were so much more light-hearted after a really awful decade for her.

[Khan]

Perhaps it was due more to a combination of changing times and the fact that Erica's adventures throughout the previous decade had grown more and more outlandish, but I really felt like AMC's writers had lost touch with who Erica was and what worked for her somewhere around the mid-'90's. I just don't believe Agnes Nixon and Wisner Washam ever would have done even half of what Megan McTavish or even Lorraine Broderick did to her during this last decade.