Strange / Awkward / Random Story Plots

[carolineg]

I never understood why DH insisted on bringing Wayne back.  Maybe she was helping a buddy out with a job?   I also got the feeling DH didn't like working with Drake as much and preferred WN and their version of Roman and Marlena.  Drake was a perfectly fine Roman.  And it basically ruined the character of Roman to the non-entity he is now.  It's strange.  You might be right because Roman and Marlena had nothing to do until the affair storyline started.

[Vee]

I think WN got a very raw deal and should be back as Roman today. That being said, given the total hash that's been made of Roman since he exited, if you can't get him back they might as well bite the bullet and say that actually, John is Roman after all. Drake inhabited that role well for years. Why not do it?

 

John's origins were ripe material but DAYS kept changing it. They should've left it at the silly Santo/Colleen story, however dumb that was. But the last retcon to it that Josh Griffith did - with Jigsaw from the Saw movies and something about a Vietnam vet with torture chambers(!!) - was insane. I have no idea who the [!@#$%^&*] John is at this point and they've long since mangled that potential. So why not just make him Roman?

[carolineg]

 

Because it makes Belle/Shawn and Brady/Theresa related and they both have kids?  Listen, I am willing to completely overlook that if they make John Roman.  I would also welcome a Wayne return.  Did they even ask WN back in 1997?  Or was he doing PC back then?

[Vee]

Oh, right, I forgot that. Eh.

 

I assume they asked Wayne and he said no. IIRC he was unhappy with DAYS back then due to a) his last return and b) how they treated Lynn Herring during her short run.

[titan1978]

Wayne was just so great.  A completely different Roman.  I used to love his antagonistic relationship with Bo.

 

I can’t count how many times Austin was in the room with Sami as she was talking to herself and still didn’t hear or understand her.

 

I freely admit that when Reilly got there, and we had stuff like Carly buried alive, the Marlena/John affair, Peter Blake’s arrival, Sami and Carrie’s story with Alan and just Sami’s teenage issues, the Curtis Reed story and Kate being Billie and Austin’s parents, Maison Blanche and Hope being alive- it was a great period on the show.  It was one of the most entertaining of all the soaps I watched.

 

But mid possession I started to loose interest in the dragging it out and crazy antics.  He burned through way more actual story his first two years before he modified his style and the stories started just dragging on forever.

[Paul Raven]

A lot of writers start off with great ideas but the real test is a few years down the line...

 

Wayne hasn't aged well IMO. Part of the problem is Deidre is still looking pretty much the same ( gotta get the name of her facemaker) which makes the men around her age look even worse.

 

At the time of her return, Deidre did push for Wayne, saying Marlena would have stayed away from Salem if she was protecting Roman. She probably envisaged a hot triangle but it wasn't written that way.

BTW Never found Wayne appealing /sexy at all.

[Khan]

 

IA.  I've always said that either John is Stefano's son, or he's really Roman Brady after all.  To me, those are the only two conclusions that will ever make any sense.

 

I think WN could (and probably even would) return as Roman (and only as Roman, not as another Alex North-type character); and I think he could sell the hell out of a Marlena/John/Roman triangle, too, if the writers wrote him closer to the kind of person he was BEFORE JER sucked all the life out of him to prop up John & Marlena as his personal endgame.  That's always been my big issue with how he handled that particular triangle -- Roman vs. John for Marlena's affections was never a fair fight w/ JER as HW.

 

(And if it ends up with John and Marlena staying together and Roman finding someone new (like a returning Anna, for starters), that's fine.  I, for one, could live with that.  I just want there to be a fair fight this time.)

 

Furthermore, I think DAYS could bring back WN as Roman and not sacrifice Josh Taylor, since his friendship with Ken Corday is clearly what got him the role and has kept him around all this time.  All they'd have to do in that case is bring back Wayne, let Josh be offscreen for a month, then bring Josh back as Chris Kositchek and work on making him and Kate a viable pair.

 

See?  You get THREE couples out of such a deal.  Now is that so damn hard, DAYS?

[amybrickwallace]

 

Why did Lynn leave GH and join DAYS? I never knew what happened there.

[Franko]

Piggybacking on this, what (or who) made her time on Days so unpleasant?

[carolineg]

 

I think the ship has sailed on a Roman/Marlena/John triangle.  In 1997, sure WN would have been great.  Even in 2006 during the Alex North storyline if Wayne played Roman it would have been viable.  But now I think John/Marlena are endgame.  I am perfectly fine with that, but I don't see why Wayne couldn't return as Roman and Josh reappear as Chris.  I have bought a lot more crazy crap from Days.

 

I don't think she ever said who made her time unpleasant but she did say she was treated poorly (I have my suspicion it might have been Michael Sabantino?).  Also, they promised her a huge storyline and instead Lisanne Gardner was a pretty awful character.

[Soaplovers]

I had heard a rumor that lisanne was intended as a love interest for Shane Donovan.. but I guess the actor left shortly after she started..and sp shr floundered before being killed off months later.

[amybrickwallace]

During the first weeks of SB in 1984, Augusta Lockridge had her daughter's carrier pigeon killed and served to the family for dinner. Lucky for the show and NBC, PETA had yet to form. Louise Sorel herself went on record objecting to this plot point.

[Titus Andronicus]

 

Herring announced she was leaving in September 1992, about six months after she started. There was talk of making Lisanne Shane's love interest that summer in a few columns, but that didn't seem to progress on screen past a conversation or two as they were aiding Carly's search for Nikki.

 

Patsy Pease as Kimberly was back soon after. 

 

Don't know if it nipped a potential romance with Shane and Lisanne, but Pease's return seemingly did alter Shane's storyline. Shane was paralyzed since a January explosion, but with Kimberly back, Shane naturally got over that really quickly and the focus became Kimberly's latest crises.

 

Charles Shaughnessy did announce he was leaving about a month before Herring, but by this point Lisanne was exclusively in the Carly/Vivian/Lawrence orbit.

[carolineg]

 

I remember her being killed off by young Nicki Alamain in a fairly demeaning way.  Hit by a statue I think (I was going to say Elephant Statue but that was a more recent plot involving Eric and Melissa Archer's character)

 

You would think she may wanted to work with her husband too, but I think they only had a couple of scenes.

 

[Khan]

IIRC, Lisanne Gardner fell and hit her head on a statue.  Then, she got up and ran as fast as she could back to GH.