One Life to Live OLTL: The Prospect Park Era (old production thread)

[CBRVA83]

Cutter's final scene on ABC's OLTL was actually him calling his mother Alex Olanov from a prison in Kentucky from a phone number he got from a business card she gave him when they had their reunion at that plastic surgery clinic in Rio!

[John]

Nope it was Kim. She told him no & hung up on him

[CBRVA83]

No, it was Alex! Go to youtube and look up "OLTL Cutter's Final Scene 12/29/11" if you don't believe me!

[John]

Your right. I missed it. It was only 15 seconds long

[cassadine1991]

Calm down

[Winchester91]

This is why I appreciated Kish. They had their weaknesses, but I bought a genuine love there. There has to be some kind of balance. On one side, it becomes the asexual fest that is Will/Sonny...and on the other side there is the Hollyoaks version of "twu wuv". Nuf' said. As of right now, i don't trust any soap to not veer into one of these extremes.

It's an opportunity wasted not to have Tonja Walker come back and form a scheming mother/son duo out to wreak havoc on Llanview.

[John]

As you know AMC & OLTL are sharing some sets but they are redressed for each show

AMC & OLTL's coffeehouses, police stations & Hospitals

AMC's Chandler Mansion and OLTL's Dorian's house are the same set

AMC's Opal house & OLTL's Viki's house are the same set

[CBRVA83]

Except for the Shelter nightclub set, which is only used for OLTL.

[John]

Right there are some sets that are just OLTL and others that are just AMC

[John]

[John]

This is better

[EricMontreal22]

You have a way with words

I *do* think, as much as I am wearyof a soap ever trying to do a "current" teen bullying story again, there is story to be mined there from the fact that some gay bullying can be seen as repressed attraction. dunno--it would be hard to do well, and I don't want it to become a same sex version of the now hopelessly dated and horrible soap trope of the saintly woman helping the abusive guy turn around and find love--and yet, there is some genuine reality to that situation (and an undeniable aspect to it that people find comeplling to watch.)

I never liked or wanted the idea of Shane and Jack to go that way--but that was mainly cuz I foudn the story badly acted and, more so, badly written (I *do* think someone--RC, FV, the director, the actors, flirted with the idea in some scenes though and it's not just fans wanting teen slash fiction.) But it does seem dishonest in this day and age to have a story about a bullied kid--one that the writers told the press was meant to reflect the current teen bullying problem--a bullied kid who shows, for lack of a better word, obvious gay characteristics, and then not to address the gay angle. But they woulda done a bad job--at least judging by the rest of the story--so...

Of course the problem with gay bad characters as you know is that if they're the only gay on the show it just seems like an old 1950s Hollywood negative stereotype. But saintly gay characters (just like the old saintly black characters are dull, especially on a soap. They've had trouble finding a middle ground (Bianca on AMC moreor less works for me, though she has been shown as a saint and a gay martyr and, often though this has improved, fairly sexless, but...) The Kish dynamic, despite some clumsy writing worked well too I thought (even if they had to make Kyle a bit less of a creep than he was before.)

I do think a lot of it is down to how uncomfortable soap execs and network execs are--I've heard stories from the actual writers (I'm sure most on here know who I mean) about just what an extreme nightmare every single line of dialogue they wrote for all the gay AMC stuff under Broderick in the 90s (from Michael, the shooting, to Kevin) was--how many hoops they had to jump through, and how many people they needed approval from to clear everything, and how much more work it was to get any of it on screen. I mean this is compared to stuff that was easy to get cleared like rape and murder. That was the late 90s--and as has been said, it seemed to get often even harder after that when soaps got more conservative. So I do hope that the PP "We're more edgy!" dynamics, and the fact they do have much more leeway in terms of how many execs they need approval from and advertiser approval means that some of the edginess will just mean that--even if there are some mistakes--the writers will be able to tell these stories with more nuance and honesty. That may be hoping for too much, but it already seems (rumours of why SUsan left as HW aside) a much more welcoming environment than ANY of the current daytime soaps have going for letting writers and the other sinvolved tell the stories how they want.

[EricMontreal22]

Right--which goes back to romance novel cliches too (the "bad boy" who just needs a good woman's love and sympathy.) Some of this is compelling and, like I said, comes from reality, but they just have to be careful how to do it (of course you get into major trouble with a character like Todd who I think--more or less--was written well, even his abusive past explainign some of his issues, until they wanted to put him in major romances and came up with problems.)

\

And maybe some of it is simply unavoidable. A lot of romance readers (and non romance readers--I should stop picking on them) find the idea of a rapist alluring, and unless he's shown as Billy Clyde Tuggle, or maybe even so, some of them will regardless. But...

[John]

[EricMontreal22]

It's down to sponsors, all the myriads of people you have to get approval for, etc, with network tv shows primetime and daytime. Mostly the cable stations pride themselves on saying that their showrunners get to do basically what they want. Now that cable shows are the big water cooler shows, network tv wants to emulate that, but it rarely seems to work because the networks, advertisers, etc, still want to please and appeal to what they see as the broadest audience possible and so interfere. But I still think it's worse on daytime--simply because the audience is seen as more conservative (even though I often think this isn't true and unfair) and because the execs in charge have less respect for it's "vision." If a network tv show is getting decent numbers and getting critical prestige for a network, they're more willing to cut it a bit of slack--daytime never gets that (especially now--I think in the 70s or 80s the execs might have more respect for, say, an Agnes Nixon and so allow her to tell stories they might question otherwise--at lest to a small degree, but...)

Still I think primetime tv has done a bit of a better job of at least aknowledging gay characters exist--though most of the attempts at having major gay characters, as opposed to minor ones, fall flat. Smash is a mess of a show (and probably would have worked much better if it had been on Showtime as originally planned) but, while they seem increasingly keen on putting heterosexual romances front and center that nobody cares about, they do do a decent job of making the gay characters or random gay (fairly chaste) kiss or sex scenese trated as no big deal. Just for example.

(And yeah, Spartacus actually did a pretty good job of this too--as well as being an equal opportunity offender when it comes to male nudity something which, as much as I'm a huge fan, Game of Thrones for instance doesn't. Which is funny because you would assume someone in charge would worry that would scare the cliched straight male geek audience away).