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HOLIDAY MIRACLE: Prospect Park Back On Track To Revive AMC and OLTL


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Oh, dear god! How could you say that? That means living, breathing human beings would be out of a job! Don't you care? Don't you care about the living, breathing humans? Are you not compassionate about the breath and the life of these beings of which are human? For shame, I admonish you! For shame, indeed!

Annnnnd, scene! You all have been a wonderful audience!

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Yes. At Michael Zaslow's suggestion, Strasser had a meeting with JFP about becoming GL's nuAlex after Beverlee McKinsey abruptly quit. After the meeting, she was spotted by a soap reporter outside of CBS. Strasser knew that the reporter would probably run with this, and she remembered that she'd promised OLTL "first refusal" so to speak should she ever return to daytime. She met with Gottlieb who wasn't familiar with her work but soon became familiar with her popularity as Dorian. Linda offered Dorian back to Strasser in time for her big 25th anniversary plans, and let Elaine Princi go.

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OLTL had a wide variety of male leads, many strong, complex men. The women were strong too, which is what made the show different. This seems to be especially true starting in the late 70s, when Marco, Brad, and the Buchanans came in.

The only change was that after the noble rapist came in, the women began to be torn down (not just because of him, for many, many reasons), and this never stopped.

OLTL went from a show where Karen Wolek told the world that she deserved respect and love to a show where viewers were invited to get hot over a man drugging and mounting his own daughter.

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You keep saying this, over and over, but I REALLY don't think anyone expected the audience to get their rocks off from Mitch trying to rape Jessica. IIRC it was pretty horrific, what with him giving electroshock therapy against her will.

Maybe if you used that other Todd and Marty having sex as an example it would make more sense. That was meant to be salacious, to get people riled up but what went down with Mitch and Jessica was just disturbing.

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Yes, they wanted the Teen Jessica stuff to be considered light entertainment by the audience, when it was dreadfully stupid and unwatchable.

OTOH, I agree with Darn that the attempted rape by Mitch was not intended to titillate the audience or be played for laughs, that much was clear - it was horror. It was also totally unnecessary, however, and as a catalyst for the subsequent Teen Jessica storyline it was trivialized even more.

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Sometimes I think Carl is a tad overly dramatic when he describes stories he disliked ;) but I'm with him here. Sure the actual scene with Mitch basicaslly attacking Jess was *meant* to be horrific I think, but Roscoe was playing Mitch as such a camp villain by that time, the situation was so absurd (his secret lair, etc) and then the followup from it, instead of somehow showing her dealing with what happened, was an undeniably campy story of teen Jess showing up at high school, coming on to Christian etc... Oh and she was essentially raped ("date rape" or whatever you wanna call it--she did say no in the end) by Ford. Which was later retconned.

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Okay but I'm not talking about the overall story, clearly, just that moment. If anyone honestly believes that moment was meant to be "Haha, he's about to rape her, that's hot"...well, I just don't know.

I mean, I hate a lot of what happened on OLTL, AMC, Y&R, GH, etc. but I'd like to think I hate what actually happened.

I can't believe I'm defending (I hate to even use that word) some inane Mitch/Jessica story, two characters I came to despise. Nevermind, everyone, continue talking about whatever is going on with PP this week.

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I wish I could agree with you, but I just don't have that view of the writing. I think that the writing in this period had a very specific view of camp and that view was never supposed to be something to be taken seriously. They had other campy moments that were played straight, like the Nash corpse, and Mitch in Jared's coffin. I think that the Jessica and Mitch scene was done in this same vein. A shock. A thrill. The first two scenes actually worked very well because they stayed within the boundaries. The last one was a horrible, horrible mistake, but the writing at that time did not see a difference. I don't think anything in the aftermath of that story suggested we were supposed to be upset - even Viki was more upset about her husband working with Dorian than she was over anything else.

If I think about what actually happened and what the show intended, I get two very different pictures. This was at a time when Tarty was hot stuff but Ross destroying a kayak meant he was pure evil.

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More than fair. But I think with a soap you have to keep in mind the context. In no way do I think they thought that moment was meant to be for laughs--but the storyline already had campy elements before it--and then went into pure camp for the after effects. During that time especially on OLTL (ie immediately post Kish) I had a lot of issues with the weird tonal shifts on the show (OK I did in other moments too like were we meant to find the random girl has to do porn to find out about her mom story hysterical? Upsetting? What?). So it amplified it. But absolutely, I don't think it's fully fair to single out just that moment.

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I somewhat agree. The shock therapy scenes frankly hould not have been shown on screen--and seemed played like something from Bride of Frankenstein. Higley did that repellent kiddie porn storyline--and had the scene where we saw Clint and Vicki watching the kiddie porn (because the therapist said this would be therapeutic--what a crappy therapist!), and even hearing some of it. I dunno if that was better or worse because Higley seemed to honestly think she was telling a brave social storyline (and don't get me wrong, I actually think something as awful like kiddie porn could be a good soap story to tell--but not the exploitive way she told it).

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