Harrowing soap moments

[I Am A Swede]

Charlotte is phenomenal in these scenes. There's just no other word to describe it. 

[AMCOLTLLover]

The Terror Island Story on Sunset Beach shocked me to death.. I was just 8/9 when I watched it and was really shocked about the murders. I thought the Crew would have a great vacation and then it turned into “Scream”.

it really haunted me for years.

I still can’t believe my mother let me watch this.

This hit personal for me. I went through a tough time and this storyline was really hitting home and helpful!

i will never forget Aidan’s death and Johnnys reaction! Johnnys reaction was the only one I truly loved and which broke my heart for him

[te.]

Absolutely. They were all meant to be dead up until the moment that Tom Horton's head scared Marlena out of the Horton house. I think the sequence where Marlena comes back and "kills" Alice is where the re-write started. It's almost as if you can see the switch in that episode.

[Khan]

There really needed to be a moment in that story where Barbara's insanity becomes too much even for James to handle, thereby forcing him to side with everyone else and get her the help she clearly needed.  If the same thing had happened to GL's Roger and Holly, with Holly going off the deep end, like she did during the Nursery Rhyme Stalker mess, Roger would have had enough sense to tell others, "Okay, so I'm an evil s.o.b. who doesn't deserve to live.  If it convinces you all that Holly is in trouble, so be it!".

Agree.  You could tell just from the change in the story's tone that something was going on BTS.  Before Melaswen, the SSK storyline was unsettlingly grim and sinister.  Afterward, the whole thing became non-stop camp.  JER was a great many things, but he was never tonally inconsistent.

Hands down, the silliest moment in soaps' history.

[DramatistDreamer]

The difference being though, that Holly and Roger teetered back and forth between enmity and romantic situations. James and Barbara never had that. They never slept together after James resurfaced "from the dead" in 1986 or when he returned afterwards. In fact, James was perfectly willing to let Barbara rot in prison for a murder she never committed, a murder that never happened. I liked when Barbara once told James that she was no longer afraid of him because she was an even match for him, James' eyes lit up as he told her she was never more beautiful than she was after telling him that and Barbara smirked in response. That was the most sparks we saw between these two after their bitter divorce. Not the same type of tension between Roger and Holly, imo.

I still maintain that James never should have been resurrected after Paul practically drove a stake through his heart with those bullets in 1989. Those scenes were so powerful, which really should have "done it" for James Stenbeck. I realize that Anthony Hererra was a very charismatic actor and James had been involved in some of the most dramatic stories during the 1980s but the storylines that he was brought back for in the '00s were demonstrably worse, even the spa story was m several steps down from what he'd previously been involved in when on the canvas.

[Khan]

Absolutely agree!

[titan1978]

I think it suffered from the Stefano disease. It felt like they wanted him to be Stefano without giving credit to the actual type of character and stories James was in.  If anything, I think Paul being driven to the dark side as time went on would have been more compelling than James returning.  It also was a Barbara crutch- don’t know what to do with Barbara?  Let’s resurrect James.

Edited February 18, 2022 by titan1978

[DramatistDreamer]

By then, I don't think the writers knew much about the show's history. Hogan Sheffer himself admitted to not having watched any ATWT before he began working on the show. At that point, I doubt he had much time or desire to watch what came before his tenure as HW.

I am not sure if he was the sole or the last writer to resurrect James Stenbeck but whoever it was by then had made what used to be a dashing, charismatic and malevolent force into a caricature.

I do agree, it was a device to plug holes in the story that illustrated a lack of creativity.

Edited February 18, 2022 by DramatistDreamer

[Manny]

Eden's rape on Santa Barbara

[Khan]

Didn't James dress up as a clown at some point?  I could swear I saw him in full clown regalia one afternoon and thought, "Okay, even the most mediocre HW'ers that ATWT had back in the '80's would NEVER have done THAT to James Stenbeck!"

[Soapsuds]

Yes I believe it was Jean Passanante that wrote that garbage.

[titan1978]

He may not have watched the show, but I clearly remember him saying he read all of Marland’s bibles, and thought they were incredible.  So he did do some research.  It lead to some shallow characterizations lol.

[DramatistDreamer]

I was going to say they made him look like a clown but I figured that would be too 'on the nose'.

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I just remember him declaring his love for All My Children as he accepted the award for As The World Turns at the Daytime Emmys and wondered why he wasn't writing for AMC.

[Khan]

Hogan Sheffer wasn't writing for AMC, because God is real.

[DRW50]

The first thing they did when James returned was to reveal he and Lucinda had been lovers 30+ years earlier and she gave their child up for adoption, even though they very clearly met onscreen for the first time in 1986.

Marland went to great lengths to kill James, and not in a wink wink way like Roger Thorpe. James had an autopsy, and I think we may have even seen him on the slab. And he was right to do so.  I know that the job provided Anthony some comfort in his later years, but that's the only positive I can really say about the character being resurrected.