Maria Arena Bell fans

[slick jones]

MAB was an atrocious EP. She tried to destroy the family's legacy.

[Chris B]

 

At the time, Nelson Branco hinted that she tried. Brad Bell also tried to get her on B&B as Dru or a new character according to emails in her lawsuit, but the network wouldn't let him do it.

 

I also agree that I did enjoy MAB partly. Didn't she bring on Jennifer Landon as Heather towards the end of her run? I thought she was great in the role, but the regime change led to her being written out before she could do much. I feel like she could've been a great heroine for them had she remained. I also liked the Marge 2.0 story, Cane's death and Nina's return along with her sons. I feel like there was good stuff, but so much bad as well like the horrible Mackenzie recast, too much Adam, Maura West as Diane when she should've been Grace. There was definitely a disconnect somewhere. I feel like both MAB and LML failed not because they were necessarily bad, but because they were given too much power. I wish they had just been allowed to WRITE with a strong EP to reign them in. LML in particular I feel would've lasted for years had Kay Alden and Jack Smith remained and she never became EP.

 

One thing I don't get with MAB is why she never went anywhere else. Soaps seem to love re-hiring people, but she truly seemed to be hated and disappeared. I'd be interested in seeing her write something else.

[Cat]

There was a lot about MAB's tenure which was watchable. After the damage wrought by LML, MAB's first year in charge was IMO pretty solid. She brought back the background music and signature Y&R style that LML phased out. She also tried to write some exciting SLs after LML's borefest. You could tell the character of Phyllis interested her. I will always remember one scene where Phyllis found out about Sharon and Nick's affair. She broke into Sharon's hotel room, scrawled "I hate you" on Sharon's mirror, then looked at herself in the mirror and saying aloud "I hate you too."

 

However, [!@#$%^&*] went haywire. MAB started running out of ideas, and she panicked and started looking to TV and film for ideas. Her pastiches were very obvious and not well done. She relied too heavily on shocking deaths (Diane, Colleen's HEART!!!!!!), doppelgangers and stunt Primetime casting.  One of the worst messes (besides killing off Colleen to provide Victor Newman with a heart transplant) was bringing back Philip III alive -- and writing such a horrendous mess of nothingness that they hastily bundled Philip offscreen, never to be seen again. For me, a longtime viewer of Y&R, this was sacrilege. Philip III was a *HUGE* part of Y&R back in the mid-80s. Amazingly flawed, vulnerable, soft-hearted and shy, this was a male legacy character unlike any I had ever seen on soaps. The decision to kill him off impacted the canvas dramatically back in the day. To make the decision to bring him back without a really good story in place was torture to watch.

 

People cheered when she got fired, I did too, but now I look back on her Y&R with a little nostalgia. It was rarely boring!

[FrenchBug82]

 

There is not much I can add to this. 100% agree.

Saying her first year was decent is not much to say. Most headwriters start off OK when they are fresh and we are relieved they are cleaning up the mess that got the previous team fired. 

What is particularly galling about her tenure is how much long-term damage was done. Killing a legacy character like Colleen is appalling.
And how it is not just the writing that was bad: it is how many behind-the-scenes decision were mishandled from start to finish,
The way she messed up bringing in a giant of soaps like Maura West and f***ed it up from beginning to end from miscasting her as Diane rather than creating a character to writing weird non-sustaining stuff for her to the insulting way she was written out. And that's the most glaring example: Genie Francis, Debbi Morgan, Darnell Williams. The number of great actors she mishandled and miscast is long.
Bringing Ricky in... Casting a good actor (I will grant her the casting team did a lot of good in her years)... And then turning him into a cheap psycho that was quickly written out.
On the other hand, we got MANY rounds of Daisy. Hum, what?
Goddard being fired... then rehired. 
And Phillip... Unwriting Phillip's death was bad enough. Making him gay just because Thom B. is gay (I am gay for the record) was just such an insult to the intelligence of viewers. I will give OP that, yes, bringing back Tricia Cast even for this dreck of a story was a highlight and boy did she knock those scenes out of the park but this was still unforgivable lazy and insulting writing.
Putting Sharon and Victor together was just horrendous and the overall treatment of the Sharon character just reeked of behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
 

PS: Oh and it is a small thing and I am sure few remember it but it still sticks in my craw all these years later: writing Victor pushing Diane out of a moving vehicle - domestic abuse AND attempted murder - and playing it for *laughs* should never ever have made it past the draft stage. That was a huge low for the show because it went beyond bad writing to an actually offensive and morally bankrupt plot point that, for all its flaws, Y&R had been better at avoiding than other shows.

Edited February 6, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[Liberty City]

 

Jeanne Cooper was not a fan of Maria Arena, either, especially after she was instrumental in killing off Marge, and Cooper remarked she wished she could've killed off the writers.

 

Maria Arena never wanted Maura West on the cast; it was CBS and Sony who orchestrated the hire.

[Planet Soap]

MAB was the most capable head of the show after the Bill Bell era, despite all of it's flaws. Every other executive producer has been terrible. The Lynn Marie Latham era would have to be second place in the post Bill Bell era, but that isn't saying much.

Edited January 27, 2022 by ironlion

[Broderick]

I was never sure how much "writing" Maria Bell actually did.  I believe she came into the job with some definite ideas.  "First we're going to void this Jill/Kay mother/daughter nonsense.  Then we're going to undo the Cane Is Jill's Son nonsense."  But after her initial ideas were executed, she probably turned things over (to a great extent) to Hogan Sheffer.  Maria Bell was, first and foremost, a socialite -- not a writer.  She was always appearing at first one "gala" and then another, prancing up and down red carpets in ugly shoes, giving press conferences about the LA Museum of Modern Art.  She never struck me as someone who spent a lot of time in deep thought hunched over a keyboard.  In fact, when she was fired, she was flitting around in Europe.  

Hogan Sheffer was a "writer", albeit not a very good one.  I expect that he produced about 10,000 ideas a week -- a few of them good, most of them lousy -- and he typed them up for Mrs. Bell.  While she was lounging by the swimming pool or jetting off to an event, she probably flipped through Sheffer's portfolio, picked out a few ideas that didn't strike her as especially bad, and the next time she thought about it, she called his cell phone and said, "Use this idea, and throw the rest of this garbage in the trash.  I'll see you next month."  That seems to be about the extent of her "writing" discipline.  (According to her bio, she's also a novelist.  If anyone's ever seen a novel this woman has written, I'd love to know about it, because I believe that's just another exaggeration of a somewhat lazy person's resume.) 

And I don't think there was any sexism at play -- a LOT of women are good writers -- but Maria Bell never struck me as a woman who'd done very much serious writing.  I think she was more of a Bell family "figurehead" than anything else during her tenure on the show.