Stories that annoyed you more than they should have

[DRW50]

There are always stories that are known as being horrible, or as disastrous, and then, stories that were so awful to you that you had to stop watching, or came close to it.

What were the stories that weren't on that level, and maybe didn't do any serious damage to the show or to characters, but annoyed the hell out of you?

For me it would probably be Stacey Winthrop blackmailing Donna Love into giving up custody of her adopted son on AW. I hated the storyline, it just seemed overly depressing and unnecessary (this was used to break up Donna and her husband Michael when he learned later on that she'd given up custody to his biological parents because Stacey was blackmailing her over an affair she'd had that Michael didn't know about). Even worse, only Donna and her daughter Vicky held a grudge against Stacey - everyone else was fine with it...Michael even took her to bed.

I've always liked Hilary Edson but that story absolutely destroyed Stacey for me, and made me despise sanctimonious Michael to boot. Garbage.

The only good thing I can say is that I enjoyed the scenes where Vicky treated her like absolute crap, because Anne Heche never held back in moments like that. (my favorite was when she started spraying mustard on Stacey)

[juppiter]

DAYS' Nurse Ali storyline -- I actually loved it and the actress doing Nurse Ali was terrific. The problem was -- Mike DID sexually harass her!!! And the show made him the hero who didn't and her the psychopath trying to bring him down. The actress doing Ali totally salvaged it.

It's funny-- DAYS has Jennifer in the PR role who makes me wanna barf, and Carrie in the PR role then made me wanna barf.

[juppiter]

Same problem I had with the movie Fatal Attraction, I guess. As Thomas Hardy said and was crucified for, "The Woman Pays"

[DRW50]

He did? I never knew that. I wonder if they changed it to be less ambiguous.

[juppiter]

IIRC he said he was gonna give her raise while [!@#$%^&*] her.

[DRW50]

Bleh.

I think AW did a sexual harassment story with Jamie but otherwise most soaps don't seem to want to have a 'good' character do that.

[Ira]

I kept watching, but Y&R's porn addiction story for Daniel was a damn mess. There were other worse things going on, but this just seemed really stupid to me.

As for Days, John's drug addiction after Melaswen was a horrible storyline. The Stan story in general was worse, but John becoming addicted to "pills" and going all over town to find them was asinine. The same thing happened to me when Chloe came back to town and it was said that Brady developed a drug addiction off screen. It was pretty much a worthless story (similar to the retconning of Parker's paternity, now that I think about it -- how many stories did Chloe arrive in Salem to retcon?!), but the entire mystery of "what happened to Brady?" beforehand was badly bungled too.

[DRW50]

What bothered you with the drug story? Did you think it cheapened his character?

[Winchester91]

The KAD story on OLTL early '09 or so. Some people say it helped "redeem" VicTodd for the rapemance, but it just wasted otherwise good characters of Wes, Powell (who could've been a great addition to the Lord family) and Rebecca.

[Ira]

John or Brady? Either way, for both -- John, I thought it was poorly mishandled in the same way Carly's addiction was. Pill addictions on television shows are always horrible because there's no way to gauge how someone is addicted the way we can with liquor or harder drugs. Characters always seem to take handfuls of pills -- but it's never specified which brand or exactly what the normal effects of these pills are supposed to be -- that amount should really KILL someone, but people who have pill addictions on TV pop them like there's no tomorrow. I get them wanting to show how hurt John was over Marlena's "death," but it also cheapened whatever romance they tried building with Kate and in turn cheapened Marlena/Roman. But that was normal JER chicanery. Not to mention the angle of Sami feeding drugs to John, which, as much as she hated him, I didn't buy.

As for Brady, that's an odd situation of a story working out in the long-run but being horrible in inception. I like Brady's addictive personality now, but it came out of left field for me when Chloe came back and was suspected of killing him, then we found out he was on drugs and Victor shuttled him into rehab. I don't think it cheapened the character, so much as completely robbed the audience of any emotional connection to Brady's drug addiction, or Chloe/Brady as a relationship, which was completely trashed by that story. They, for all intent and purpose, had a happy ending. It'd be like seeing Belle return to town with Shawn now having a drug addiction. On the other hand if Carrie or Austin returned and they said the other was a drug addict, I'd buy it, because they left on less than ideal terms.

At any rate, the addiction story for Brady was fixed for me when he started drinking again after locking Vivian in the sarcophagus. That entire story worked really well for me.

[Khan]

The less I say about Maryanne Caruthers....

Instead, I'll "nominate" Lori Jensen's murder on GUIDING LIGHT. (And the fact that you're probably asking yourself who Lori was proves my point, lol.) But, yes, some random girl gets herself killed off-screen; Linda Cook shows up as her grieving, vengeful mom (and GL wastes a damn good actress in the meantime); Michael Swan and Tonja Walker show up as Brad and Marie Green, whom we've never seen before and don't know from Adam and Eve; and maybe it all has something to do with the Spauldings, although THAT is tenuous; and by the time Swan gets himself replaced with Mark Pinter, whom longtime GL fans still remembered as Mark Evans, it just became another spoke in the wheel that was the show's shaggy-dog Antimonium/Delirium/"D" story.

And maybe it had something to do with the Garden of Eden story? I can't recall right now. I just remember THAT story being about the prostitutes getting themselves killed, and how pissed-off I was that Ben Reade was revealed as the killer and how it was all explained as stemming from sexual abuse he suffered as a child that no one had even the slightest clue about before his suicide at the story's climax.

[DRW50]

The Ben story is one of those that caused me to quit watching a show, although I was already pretty much done anyway. I forgot about the Green story. Wasn't Colleen Dion in there somewhere too? What a waste of talent all around. I forgot Swan or Walker were involved, and never knew Linda Cook was.

Thanks, Ira, for the talk about the drug addiction recap. Brady always seemed to have such an extreme personality, an addiction story makes sense to me, but the execution does sound poor.

I'm not a big fan of most pill addiction stories on soaps. They should build for years and years, but instead they are usually rushed, or just dropped at random times, like the pill stories on GH. Probably the "best" was Alan on GH.

[Ira]

I totally agree with Brady's personality -- from diving into helping Chloe with cancer to his lashing out at Marlena when he returned to town as Kyle Lowder. Plus his continuation of his relationship with Nicole. I was mostly just very annoyed that we were cheated out of a legitimate story. As well as it works now, I'll always be upset we never got to see Chloe/Brady's relationship deteriorate. Which is frankly my concern with all couples that break up off screen.

[quartermainefan]

One story comes to mind above all others for me: GH's Laurelton, perhaps the worst story I have ever seen on a soap. And then to compound the pain it lasted for what seemed like ten years. It just made no sense: A murder mystery set in the past, in another town, featuring characters who were not part of the cast. This is what Bobbie and Anna had to learn the secret about. Guza had seriously clunkers but Laurelton made no sense even at the concept stage, so it could not be saved by the execution.

[tune_in_tomorrow]

I mentioned the Laurelton mystery in another thread awhile back and that actually is the storyline that got me drawn in to GH! I've learned over the years how universally hated that storyline was, but it at least drew in and kept (for a couple years anyway) a regular viewer.

To answer the question about stories that annoyed me more than they should, I'd have to go with the Sin Stalker on AW in '87. I don't know if that was considered a bad storyline by most viewers, but I hated it. Killing off two veteran female characters in their 40s who had no familial ties to anyone on the canvas seemed pointless at best and, at worst, continued the bloodbath the show had been for a few years. It was enough for me to turn it off. I switched to ATWT and didn't return to AW until its final week.