GH: April 2024 Discussion Thread

[Contessa Donatella]

I would totally love for Krissy to miscarry. But I still want Kraze if and only if the show is going to really do them as they began to! 

[janea4old]

Kate Mansi has endometriosis in real life.
Also Lily Brooks O'Briant who plays teen Lucy Romalotti on Y&R.
It is a physically painful condition, often misdiagnosed for years.

Mansi and O'Briant have each posted about it on their instagrams.

They've referred to women who bring awareness to the issue as "endo-warriors".

Mansi has also mentioned it in interviews.  Mansi said one of the reasons she was happy to take the role of Kristina was because of the endometriosis storyline, in that she was hoping to bring awareness.  Something about it being a cause important to her.  She was hired just before the writers strike began, so she didn't comment much at first.
Mansi knew Kristina was bi and would have expected that to be written as part of her character.  Mansi has said she's friendly with Lexi A. in real life and they had communicated.

I would speculate that Mansi had hoped C&D would write Molly's diagnosis with a small bit of being informative.
Some of NLG's storylines had medical stuff (and NLG-adjacent with Gregory's ALS) so maybe Mansi was hopeful?

But then just as Mansi was hired, Pullos drove drunk, there were three replacement Molly actresses, and the writers went on strike.

The Kraze pairing was created by the strike writers with some flirting at Charlie's. And also the Kristina at Sonny/Nina wedding on the island - when Blaze happened to show up on the island where her grandmother had lived. 
But yeah it does seem like, "let's throw people together and check some boxes" instead of it evolving organically.

I don't think what aired about the endometriosis medical diagnosis was done accurately (I know soaps rarely get medical stuff right, but anyways).
Molly was having trouble conceiving but did she hide the symptoms from TJ?   
Admittedly I wasn't watching but I read recaps - I don't remember Molly being having symptoms of physical pain.  Or if she did, how would she hide that from TJ?
There should have been other stuff besides infertility that Molly was dealing with.  But with the recasts and the writer strike, it all kind of fizzled.
 

I hope Mulcahey writes something good for Mansi, whatever it may be.

Edited April 7 by janea4old

[j swift]

I despise when soaps push the common misconception (pardon the pun) that gestational surrogates all want to keep the baby.  In fact, that occurs far less frequently than portrayed.   It is a terrible myth that causes families to overpay for other forms of treatment like IVF which is 98% less likely to succeed.  Much like how soaps have adults abandon their adoptive parents once they connect with their birth parents, it is a gross idea about the supremacy of self-gestation that should not be promoted in order to sell diapers on daytime TV.

Now, can someone help me down off of this high horse

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Edited April 7 by j swift

[titan1978]

I agree. It’s lazy conflict. 

[janea4old]

I think Deidre Hall would agree with you.  She and the real-life gestational surrogate of her sons remained friends, and there was never any notion of the surrogate wanting the babies back.

[Khan]

I agree as well.  But the problem is, where's the drama in Kristina having the baby and then just handing it over to T.J. and Molly?  That's why I, too, wish this surrogacy storyline would end, because I can see only one outcome for it, and that outcome is cheap, tacky and not at all realistic.

[titan1978]

I haven’t watched entire episodes of GH daily in almost a decade. I’ve been a daily viewer again for over a month. There is a lot of cleaning up needed on the show, and hopefully they have the courage to cut some losses sooner rather than later.

Any writing team that makes me care about a barely established (even though it’s been years), thrown together couple like Sam and Dante is doing something right. And credit to Dom and KM, they are both killing it.

If I started watching with Jason’s return, I would think Sam, Dante, and their family were major characters on the show, and truthfully they haven’t been treated that way in years.

Cody can do every scene without his shirt on all summer. Please. They cannot possibly be hinting at Tracy taking this stud out for a ride can they? 

[j swift]

Not to mention disrespecting the Gay audience by suggesting that our families are somehow less than ideal because we didn't give birth to our kids.

[titan1978]

The only other dramatic option I see would be if there is a medical crisis, the baby ends up fine but Kristina can no longer have children. Couple that with postpartum depression, and maybe some fixation on the baby and it leading to her life coming unglued again. within that fixation, Molly decides her family needs a fresh start and they leave town.

It doesn’t have to lead to Kristina trying to keep the baby or taking it, there are plenty of other directions to fall down- trouble with the law, alcoholism, family strife, etc.

[j swift]

I think there are enough potential issues for dramatizing the upbringing of a biracial kid (especially in a town with such little diversity) that outweigh the need to use scare tactics to vilify women's choices for how they choose to start a family.

[Vee]

It reminds me of what Lemay talked about in his book - how Irna Phillips supposedly wrote every social worker in her stories as a conniving busybody. He thought that was a disservice to the profession and did the opposite.

@Darn asked me that the other day. I have a bit to catch up on today but I'd be all for it, just as I thought they should've paired her and Finn when he first came on and actually had a personality. Cody/JK is one of the few over-30/under-50 adults I'd salvage atm because he's a funny stud you can plug in anywhere.

Edited April 7 by Vee

[janea4old]

Mulcahey wrote for the Avant family at B&B.
The main storylines were by HW Brad Bell, of course, but Mulcahey did some scriptwriting for this storyline.

Trans woman Maya wanted to be a mother, and her sister Nicole became the gestational surrogate.  The conflict was from the sisters' father Julius Avant who disapproved of his daughter Maya being trans, and Julius wanted his other daughter Nicole to keep the baby.
 Nicole willingly gave the baby to her sister. 
A very minor conflict arose later when Maya was working as a model and the baby was ill, and for a moment, Nicole considered refusing to sign the adoption papers, but then Nicole signed.  
Meanwhile a larger conflict arose after the baby was born, when Nicole was revealed to *NEWLY* being unable to carry any more children. But it wasn't about Nicole wanting to take Maya's child.  She was just dealing with her new medical condition. 
There was also some stuff with Nicole's boyfriend.  But he later proposed.
(Then suddenly Brad Bell wrote the entire family off and moved them to Paris and/or other places out-of-town, but that wasn't Mulcahey's fault.)

My point is, Mulcahey has been scriptwriter for a surrogacy storyline,
but in the B&B story, the mother was LGBTQ and the surrogate was cis.
Mulcahey knows the way to write subtleties for this and he *could* write the Molly/Kristina storyline.

I think there is potential in Kristina miscarrying, and then Kristina being support for Molly's endometriosis issue.  Kristina could support her sister without having to be the surrogate.

 

Edit, I see that @titan1978 wrote while I was composing my post "The only other dramatic option I see would be if there is a medical crisis, the baby ends up fine but Kristina can no longer have children."  Which is what happened on B&B, but the surrogate still let go of the baby.

Edited April 7 by janea4old

[titan1978]

I loved the scenes of Portia going off at the hospital about Heather. Soaps used to be all about the community reaction to the actions of the characters. And her point of view makes total sense to me.

I also like Joss and Kristina’s natural animosity. The show was very lacking in essentially good people having true differences. I even liked Joss handing Dex a burned grilled cheese. It’s exactly what she would do. Everything isn’t so generic anymore!

[Vee]

It's not that I don't think there is a good way to tell a surrogacy story. It's that I think there is no need for the story to exist.

90% of baby stories that play out on soaps today are done a) in lieu of riskier content and b) in order to simply pad out months of the year. They are time-fillers and safety valves. That's all this is to me. Molly and T.J. as characters have been dead ends for over a decade, and while I've enjoyed some of Molly's recent scenes with her family re: the past, Alexis' alcoholism, the law, etc. ultimately the recast feels like a temp relative they threw into wardrobe as a quick fix and I see no great spark there. I would just add them to nearly 10 characters if not more that need to be dumped instead of sinking the cost more and more on people who have been here way too long - let Molly come back someday, but not now.

So much of this show IMO has been bent for years around institutional inertia, where it feels like FV will not dump anyone, ever, for fear of admitting failure, losing a decibel point among Facebook-based senior viewers and losing his overall grip on GH. It felt like it took the Jaws of Life just to get rid of Peter August or Gladys. But that has to change. It might as well start with Molly and T.J. who the show has had absolutely no interest in major story for since the Obama administration.

Edited April 7 by Vee

[j swift]

Oy don't get me started.  It is nuts how in modern times we associate every dramatic choice that a Black or Gay soap writer makes with their minority status.  But so few comment on the amount of projection about the stability of families and neglectful mothers, Irna Phillips wrote into her shows.