When was your favorite soap broken?

[JellicleCat]

B&B: Brooke's affair with Deacon.

Love her or hate her, Brooke has been an integral part of B&B since the start, and her sordid affair with Deacon was out of character for her and damaged her character in a way that she's never really recovered from. And as if he realized the damage he had done to the character of Brooke, Brad Bell then proceeded to do the same to other characters, Taylor and Stephanie for example. (I'm probably giving him too much credit here, and most likely he just sucks as a writer, but you never know.... 

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Now all the characters are ruined beyond repair and B&B is nothing more than an empty shell.

 

And when you consider that the Brooke/Deacon affair also produced Hope it's even more obvious how damaging that story was......

[titan1978]

Reilly’s second stint on DAYS is another of those perfect examples.  What worked once before didn’t quite work as well that time.  And even he knew it and changed course late in his run the second time and started doing more traditional family oriented drama.  He killed Zach, correct?

 

I know everyone thinks they changed his original story.  It certainly seems like that happened.  But I can’t believe the show intended to permanently kill off Alice Horton in such a brutal way.  And have Marlena be the culprit, ending in her possibly being off the show too.  He loved writing for Marlena.  Although I think I read somewhere his favorite couple in the show was Bo & Hope.

 

But who was watching Days of Our Lives and wanted to watch Alice Horton be murdered?  And why would you go there when creating the show.  Such a bad idea that yes, clouded everything and made the show have no consequences through to today.

 

 

About Guiding Light-

 

Even though Annie was a fantastic character and a great run of stories, was the show kind of broken by Rauch?  He didn’t kill Nadine and do Brent/Marion, which while entertaining is also kind of a dark time for that show.  But he also wasn’t really making the same type of soap that had been so excellent in the early 1990’s.

 

I kind of think he and Pam Long would have been a good pairing though, had they lured her back as HW.

[will81]

100% agreed. Brooke was such a pivotal part of this show, that destroying her was akin to destroying the show. For years Stephanie called Brooke the whore from the Valley, but that was never who Brooke was. She was a hopeless romantic with some rough edges, a little lack of sophistication in the early days. Brad Bell decided to make Brooke the very thing everyone who hated her had always felt she was all along. It was the biggest mistake he ever made. 

 

I would even go back to 97-98 when Brooke hid the truth about Taylor's pregnancy to get Ridge down the aisle. Then potentially faked a pregnancy and miscarriage, then suddenly gave up on Ridge and felt Thorne was the great love of her life. The show was still good here, but it was definitely the beginning of the end.

 

If Ridge and Taylor were truly endgame (and I have no horse in that race). Then Brooke, just like Jill, should have been setting a course for a life as her nemesis - Stephanie 2.0 (or in Jill's case Katherine 2.0) Instead Brad just didn't get who Brooke was or where he could take her and his writing for the character made me feel he had no idea how to write her or the show.

[Gray Bunny]

 

It's been widely speculated by us fans that by the time they killed off Alice, there was already plans in the works to reverse course and have them all be alive. 

[Khan]

 

David Paulsen once remarked how DYNASTY never "paid off" any of their cliffhangers.  The fallout (or lack thereof) from the Moldavian Massacre would be a perfect example.  The revolutionaries fired off crazy rounds; yet, when the proverbial smoke cleared, the only ones killed were Ali Macgraw (what is it with her and roles where she dies at the end!?) and Billy Campbell.

 

I still agree with whoever said the best way for DALLAS to recover from the dream season was have each subsequent season be another dream or figment of another character's situation, thereby resetting the clock each season to just before Bobby's death.  Sure, it would've turned DALLAS into pure sci-fi.  However, it was really the only way to make sense of the madness.

[AbcNbc247]

That’s true. I remember reading in SOD that Frances Reid was the only actor who knew that she was coming back.

I would’ve made it Bobby’s dream instead of Pam’s. Katherine runs him over, but instead of him dying, he spends the year or whatever in a coma and basically, we saw what Bobby saw. I usually hate that type of reveal but I think it might have worked in that case. Plus, the writers wouldn’t have needed to go back as much as they did for Season 10. JR and Sue Ellen could have stayed together, Ray and Donna could have kept their adopted son, etc.  They could have had Bobby dream about all of that because over the course of his coma, the family kept telling him about everything.

[Vizion]

B&B - It absolutely positively was the Ridge/Bridget arc. B&B had always been somewhat trashy, but respectable trash. That turned it into something else. It went from guilty pleasure to cheap Jerry Spinger-esque junk. Ridge was never a great character but that effectively killed any appeal he once had as a romantic lead. It was also when it became crystal clear to me that the days of Bill Bell having any input or overseeing the direction of the show were completely gone. I know Bill Bell was not there in an official capacity, but from what everyone said he was still overseeing and giving some direction to B&B until he got sick (which I believe was around 2000-2001).

 

Y&R - The sperm saga. I like Kay Alden but I felt she was given too much of a pass for this story. To have not 1 (Nikki), not 2 (Ashley), but 3 (Diane) women fighting over Victor's sperm was uttrrly ridiculous. I HATED what it did to all three female characters and I think that story did irreparable damage to Ashley. We are still paying for that atrocious story today with all the Abby focus - a completely useless character that should have never existed. 

 

GL - Peapeck and Wheeler. 

 

GH - Opie's Opus. That was when the destruction of GH started; the fight over Michael and specifically Sonny snd Jason forcing AJ to give up his parentsl rights. That was the beginning of what become two atrocious decades of the mob and specfically Sonny and Jason ruling all and the show systematically destroying vet after vet after vet to make sure they looked good and righteous in every single story. 

 

 

 

[DRW50]

OLTL- While I give most of the "credit" to JFP, I think that the revelation of Victor sexually abusing Viki and Tori murdering Victor, along with the "Fall of the House of Lord" story in general was, in the long-term, a horrible, horrible mistake.

 

- Todd never should have been tied to the show's core family, especially since even by this point, there were no other members of the family to act as a balance to him. As the years passed, viewers not only saw Viki, their moral beacon, forced to support a gang rapist and sociopath, but also saw the male side of the family in particular decimated for his benefit. 

 

- Tina entering into a consensual affair with a man she thought was her brother. I don't believe Malone "got" Tina - I think he just saw her as a somewhat endearing but mostly vapid woman who would always "follow her heart." There are limits to that approach, and Tina committing sibling incest surely should have been among them. While I understand why this particular story was never brought up, it galls even more when you remember that Tina was lured into bed by a man pretending to be Bo, someone she trusted, only to learn that he was a psychopath posing as Bo, and ending in a pregnancy she did not want followed by a gruesome miscarriage. Yet there was little sense of betrayal on her part - instead, she was almost immediately fine with the whole thing, and with conning Viki. Malone treated Tina as a plot device, and along with the miscasting of Krista Tesreau, the character faded into irrelevance. Her relationship with Viki, which brought out the best in both characters, was long forgotten.

 

- The idea of Dorian protecting Viki from the truth. I could possibly believe this for most of their relationship, but not when Viki was trying to have Dorian executed. And this was a story Malone himself wrote! Dorian would have said or done anything to free herself and to make Viki pay for, in Dorian's mind, persecuting her, destroying her relationship with Cassie, and killing Cassie's baby along with Cassie's sanity. 

 

- Too much angst. The backstory for the Lords, and Viki in particular, was already incredibly heavy, with her parents in a miserable marriage, a mother who died young, a father who repeatedly had children with other women, including with Viki's college roommate. Adding a third secret child, along with sexual abuse and murder all helped to break Viki's back as a character. She would rarely again have  the drive or agency she had before the abuse story. Part of that was down to age - a good chunk of it was probably down to age - but this story also served to remove most of Viki's core personality and left little behind to rebuild. 

 

- Misery catnip. The success of this story empowered Malone to try again with resurrecting Victor and having him try to cut out his granddaughter's heart, one of the most disgusting stories the show ever told. The story also made it possible for Dena Higley to tell the Tess story, one of the other most disgusting stories the show ever told. When an entire family backstory is filth and sickness, the door is open to just keep kicking that dead horse time after time after time. 

 

- Ruining Niki. I'm not going to act like the uses of Niki in the early '90s were golden - she was already too OTT (particularly in performance) - but the essence of the character was still there as a destructive, impulsive, but ultimately good-hearted side of Viki. In order to split Viki into various alters, Malone retconned Niki into being a deplorable figure who sexually propositioned Viki's son and was more than fine with her father's sexual abuse. This opened the door to later portrayals of Niki as going around pulling Looney Tunes murder plots, and as taking Viki's daughter to bars where she was sexually abused. A crucial part of Viki was tainted, ruined forever. And while I would have been fine with this if other alters had been further explored, like the fascinating Tori, that didn't happen. Instead we just got a vile mutation of stories that were goosed with an extra layer of rape. 

 

- Dorian and Viki relationship. To Malone's credit, he did try, in both his headwriting stints, to write a more mature bond between Dorian and Viki. The problem is he was not headwriter for most of OLTL's last 15 years. He set up something much too difficult for most writers to follow through with. Their feud, which was so rich and incredibly compelling in 1993 and 1994, such an obvious story gold to mine, could never be the same after viewers learned Dorian shielded Viki from memories of sexual abuse and Viki had unknowingly been responsible for the murder that had haunted Dorian's life for 20 years. Any attempt to go back to fighting and rivalry, even if they had been better written than anything on display in the '90s and '00s, would have looked incredibly pathetic and juvenile, because after that, how could they not? 

[DRW50]

 

KKL and Sean Kanan had so much chemistry together I didn't mind the story, but I do agree it was very corrosive. I think Brooke had already lost some of her depth before that point though - the whole Brooke's Bedroom story felt very silly and tacky to me. Bill Bell gave her more layers and respect. 

[Fevuh]

Bill's secret bedroom that was his office gym was even more awful.  B&B was never anything other than complete trash.  Capitol was so much better than B&B ever was.  

 

 

 

[DramatistDreamer]

 

I agree. I think that KKL and SK had a great deal of chemistry but SK and JF also had loads of chemistry and with Kanan's experience, it wouldn't have been hard to find someone else that he could've betrayed Bridget with had B&B not been so damn insular and incestuous. Anyone but her damn mother. They could've given Bridget a bosom buddy.  In fact, didn't Bridget have a good friend at the time she first met Deacon, or was that actress just a glorified extra for color?

 

And Capitol was so distinctly different from other soaps on the air, even back then. I was young when it got canceled and I was just getting into it when it got yanked.  At the time that it got canceled, the other soaps on the network seemed like a cut above Capitol but all it truly needed were some tweaks and a steady hand in the writer's room. Today's remaining soaps are in far worse condition creatively than what Capitol was when it got taken off-air.

In today's climate, if written well, it'd be the most topical daytime drama on air!

[Vizion]

 

When B&B celebrated it's 8,000th episode, Parade Magazine asked him for his 8 favorite Bold and the Beautiful storylines EVER.

 

His answers told me everything I needed to know (and explained why he's such a terrible writer - who in their right mind would pick these):

https://parade.com/728784/dianareese/bradley-bell-shares-his-8-favorite-the-bold-and-the-beautiful-storylines-and-shockwaves-coming-in-8000th-episode/

 

1991: The wedding of Eric Forrester and Brooke Logan. 

1998: Brooke’s Bedroom. 

2010: Stephanie Forrester and the homeless. 

2011-2017: Steffy’s wedding entrances. 

2015-2016: Maya’s secret. 

2018: Who shot Bill Spencer? 

 

[MichaelGL]

Guiding Light, I wouldn't even say the Clone or San Cristobal broke it. It showed some sign of hope under Taggart/Cullton and it brought me back as a viewer, but somewhere between Ben being a serial killer because he was molested and Jonathan & Tammy against the world/the Coopers taking over the show, the show I once loved was dead and gone. 

[titan1978]

Yeah that transition into Conboy really broke the show for good.  Rauch had finally gotten kind of back to basics, and there was a lot of good stuff and characters in the show.  Then Conboy decimated it all pretty quickly.  Ben being a prime example.

I’ve never watched B&B.  But when you read about Brooke’s history, she is nothing like the character Bill Bell wrote.

 

And I have seen lots of clips of both her and Stephanie.  And neither one of them were as great as when Bill was writing the show.  Sometimes I would see scenes of Flannery from Bradley’s era as HW and it’s just awful.  Even she can’t make it seem like good work anymore.

[DRW50]

 

Flannery was often painfully over the top in Bradley's era. Stephanie became an unrecognizable joke.