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OLTL: Linda Gottlieb


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I think he and/or Gottlieb thought Viki was too strong, and therefore boring, and that she needed to be torn to pieces. The problem is that once she was torn down, no one ever built her back up again. Viki was many things for the Rauch era - badly dressed, given some dubious stories, starchy - but she was never boring, or weak.

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Initially, I loved the "idea" of Todd and the use of backstory. Ultimately, his relationships with Powell and Kevin, not to mention his siblings, could have been fascinating stuff, but the character was given too long of a leash and many other characters lost their dimensions and full worth in Todd's shadow. He should have been written as one fascinating Lord among many instead of being given such a disgustingly large chunk of the canvas.

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Viki is a character who never should have taken a backseat to Todd and I just won't go for the all too convenient justification that she saw her father in him and out of her own issues she gave Todd a thousand pardons. Todd is psycho in a way that the Victor Victoria idolized never was. I just don't believe that she would have ever seen her dad in him. Felt sorry for his wounded soul, okay, but he was no Victor. The writers were first and foremost Todd fans, and they knew that there was a strong Todd fandom of crazies out there, and they too often used Viki as a pawn to remind us of why we should love this dude.

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They saw Viki as her abuse, and how the family she loved (both with Victor and then with Clint and the kids) was all a lie. The idea of Viki, to me, should have been her triumphing over her flaws and rebuilding a strong reality. Perhaps this would have happened if Malone hadn't been fired in early 1996. We got rageaholic Viki trying to shoot Kevin (the only justification for that would be if she knew they were going to cast Tim Gibbs). As it was, the old Viki never returned, and without that strength, her children, her identity, her job, her career, all progressively shrank into the darkness.

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Gottlieb left well before the DID story fully kicked off, and before any of the crap with Elliott Durbin the hypnotist.

I never found Gottlieb's Viki boring. I found her very human, with the affair story and so on. I know longtime fans despised it, probably rightly so. Erika despised it. But I thought it made her a real person, with real needs and issues, and I thought they went to the core of her illness and resolved it in the DID story. Even I, as a young kid, knew multiple personalities didn't just come from a bad fall or a single family dispute - I knew what that implication meant and that it had to be some bad [!@#$%^&*], so I thought it was about time they told that story. I don't think they ever saw her as a victim or her life as a lie. I think that whole team had such great affection for Viki, her children and her family. You'd never get scenes today like the ones they used to do with Viki and Joey and Jessica and Kevin. I think what they did with Viki was modernize her for the '90s. This was a woman of a certain age who was in the grasp of not only a midlife crisis, but deep, deep issues with her psychological demons that went back to childhood.

Linda did once famously say in print re: the Sloan story that they were going to give Viki what she'd never had - "an orgasm." I think she was brilliant, but she alienated many, many people at the show - Erika (who to this day never shies away from saying she disliked her both professionally and personally), Clint Ritchie, John Loprieno, James dePaiva. And yet I think most of those people did some of their best work under her. So go fig. I also think she did underestimate some of the core strengths of the '80s and even Rauch - Andrea Evans, Tina, those couples, etc.

I don't think Viki was never strong again. I think Jill Phelps, for all her faults, focused in on Viki again, even though I hated the stories with Ben. And yes, I think Ron did a great deal to rehab Viki after years of horrible victimizing [!@#$%^&*] with Dena Higley. She found herself again. Under Frons you could never show her at work, but work she did, and she was happy and viable and steady. One of my favorite scenes will always be her using her intellect and her former alters to realize the truth about Natalie's abduction via Jean Randolph, and then using her knowledge of DID to pose as Jean in order to outwit Bess.

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Viki had some frontburner material here and there after Gottlieb and then Malone left, but with the possible exception of the early story with Charlie, I think she never regained that strength or sense of self from the abuse story to the end of OLTL. She also let her family walk all over her. I think Todd took away Kevin and Joey, and Jessica just became a victim. A lot of the weakening was down to ABC's ageism and misogyny, but I feel like this started with the Sloan story and snowballed.

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I forgot to add that I didn't mean to imply Gottlieb or Malone had anything to do with the Durbin gun crazy. I meant that perhaps Malone did have some plans to rebuild Viki, which never materalized, because he was fired. Her only story for a few years after that was the Passanante/Sloane/Laiman Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot Me.

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LG wouldn't have stayed in daytime, IMHO. In that interview Carl posted when she joined One Life she made it pretty clear that she gets very restless and likes to try new things once she feels she's done all she can in one genre/medium. I assume her plan to do 13 Bourbon Street with Malone/Griffith would have felt like something new, being a late night, adult, supernatural soap.

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