8 hours ago, Vee said:

It's amazing to me how quickly she came and went, for someone who Frank adored. They must've gotten feedback on Claudette that rivaled anthrax because she vanished.

ROFL

I do remember that Claudette/Griffin mess and it was all a total WTF.

 

Edit:  Didn't realize that Nathan was part of that mess, too. 

I just read a Claudette wiki.  That's 5 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Edited December 27, 2024Dec 27 by janea4old

8 hours ago, Vee said:

It's amazing to me how quickly she came and went, for someone who Frank adored. They must've gotten feedback on Claudette that rivaled anthrax because she vanished. I think she's supposed to be dead offscreen today? That character is even stranger to me than Jessica Tuck's art dealer/crime boss/whatever, who unlike Claudette/Bree did keep coming back. And Jessica Tuck could've actually played an interesting villain on this show.

The hiring of Bree Williamson as Claudette was so.... weird to me. And very much a "Hey, this is someone I worked with and am giving them a job, even though they were leaving the last show I worked at!"

And, I cannot help but wonder how Jessica Tuck would have worked opposite Cynthia Watros, because she did well against Michelle Stafford (which is not a difficult task).

9 hours ago, Vee said:

And Jessica Tuck could've actually played an interesting villain on this show.

I totally forgot Jessica Tuck has been on this show, lol!

1 hour ago, carolineg said:

I am not sure I have ever heard someone say they liked Claudette and if they did it was because they like Bree Williamson-not the character.

And I question the sanity of anyone who says they like Bree Williamson.

1 hour ago, carolineg said:

I don't believe Bree or Claudette ever belonged on the show, but that had to be one of the strangest character introductions I have ever seen.   The paternity saga was not only confusing, but involved Nathan, Griffin, and Valentin.  None of these males were captivating or long running enough to make me care.  Then all of a sudden the show forgets everything they told us for the last months about Claudette and just makes Charlotte Lulu/Valentin's baby.  Claudette wasn't a defined character to begin with and they just kept throwing more backstory on top of her.  I have doubts any actress could make that character work and certainly not Bree with her moderate level of talent and popularity.

It's insanity to me that Valentin is still on the show all these years later.  I know JPS rarely appears and he usually crying about something, but none of his stories have been good.  I still don't know what/who/why Pikeman exists and that went on for over a year.

It felt so random. She has this bizarre name, is the ex/whatever of not one but two incredibly boring males (the forerunners of Chase, who is only slightly less boring than both of them) and it's another OLTL star. Just the dumbest idea I'd heard in awhile, and classic overcomplication c/o Passanante and Altman. It later got even worse with Valentin's even more convoluted origins, which rival Miles Laurence from OLTL (who has a similar background).

JPS is only still with the show because FV inexplicably considers him a major get and tilts the show's schedule and storytelling around his primetime outs. (JPS is on a kind of contract-adjacent recurring like several key Sheffer-era ATWT stars were, including IIRC Cady McClain as Rosanna.) Like that endless period where Anna, Lucy, Valentin, maybe others were all hanging out at a house out of town pretending to be dead to trap someone while JPS was off doing some other show. I think the last several writing teams were also in love with the character, or at least Altman/Passanante and I think Korte were/are. It is beyond me.

I don't understand Pikeman at all either. Mulcahey made it make sense for me with Valentin and Brennan, but then he quit/was fired and suddenly Anna is saying Brennan covered his tracks with the WSB and pretended he had been undercover to stop Pikeman in order to escape prosecution. (Except I think the show now wants us to believe dayplayer Brennan actually was undercover and is a great guy after all.)

Edited December 27, 2024Dec 27 by Vee

48 minutes ago, Liberty City said:

The hiring of Bree Williamson as Claudette was so.... weird to me. And very much a "Hey, this is someone I worked with and am giving them a job, even though they were leaving the last show I worked at!"

And, I cannot help but wonder how Jessica Tuck would have worked opposite Cynthia Watros, because she did well against Michelle Stafford (which is not a difficult task).

It was baffling because if she was Frank's buddy, why was there no plan for the character?  Or why was it such a bad character?  I swear every single day a new secret came out about Claudette and her past and I sometimes wonder if FV was intentionally sabotaging her lol.

5 minutes ago, Khan said:

I totally forgot Jessica Tuck has been on this show, lol!

And I question the sanity of anyone who says they like Bree Williamson.

Same.  I tend to forget Jessica Tuck played Chad's mom on Days too!

Bree Williamson is definitely an acquired taste.  Someone will have to explain her appeal.

2 minutes ago, carolineg said:

It was baffling because if she was Frank's buddy, why was there no plan for the character?  Or why was it such a bad character?  I swear every single day a new secret came out about Claudette and her past and I sometimes wonder if FV was intentionally sabotaging her lol.

It was a bad character, derived from an even worse storyline: the birth of Charlotte, and everything surrounding it.

Lucas is absolutely right... Willow can kick rocks with her cheating ass. 

2 minutes ago, carolineg said:

Bree Williamson is definitely an acquired taste.  Someone will have to explain her appeal.

She can’t act for sh!t, lacks charisma, and never had any romantic chemistry with anyone she was paired with. I’ll never understand Frank’s tastes and loyalties. 

1 minute ago, carolineg said:

Bree Williamson is definitely an acquired taste.  Someone will have to explain her appeal.

I don't think Bree is untalented. She was never my Jessica Buchanan but she has some talent. But she also has a limited range, and OLTL learned that the hard way but kept leaning into giving her bad stories, or they'd skew her important character's personality around her range instead and those would be equally bad stories.

With a better writing team and the right kind of character (maybe another scheming doctor, a la Lisa Niles but y'know, not Lisa Niles), in another era, BW could've done okay on the show. But by the time she was foisted on the GH audience they were already very tired of OLTL performers in unnecessary roles, and yet there were still more to come. The whole thing where Frank kept giving the (previously) little boy who played Sam Manning airtime as Boy Scout Wyatt, even making him Jake's BFF as this sweet kid aged up to adolescence and clearly was not an actor and was just wanting to go do ice hockey or whatever IRL was mortifying lol.

3 minutes ago, Vee said:

She has this bizarre name

"Bizarre" doesn't even cover it.  There hadn't been a "Claudette" on any soap since AMC, and that was way the hell back in 1980.  But it seems like GH has struggled with naming characters appropriately since the end of Guza.  I halfway expect a "Maybelline" to pop up any day now.

Hopefully they'll kill off Sonny with a heart attack. 

4 minutes ago, Vee said:

It felt so random. She has this bizarre name, is the ex/whatever of not one but two incredibly boring males (the forerunners of Chase, who is only slightly less boring than both of them) and it's another OLTL star. Just the dumbest idea I'd heard in awhile, and classic overcomplication c/o Passanante and Altman. It later got even worse with Valentin's even more convoluted origins, which rival Miles Laurence from OLTL (who has a similar background).

JPS is only still with the show because FV inexplicably considers him a major get and tilts the show's schedule and storytelling around his primetime outs. (JPS is on a kind of contract-adjacent recurring like several key Sheffer-era ATWT stars were, including IIRC Cady McClain as Rosanna.) Like that endless period where Anna, Lucy, Valentin, maybe others were all hanging out at a house out of town pretending to be dead to trap someone while JPS was off doing some other show. I think the last several writing teams were also in love with the character, or at least Altman/Passanante and I think Korte were/are. It is beyond me.

I don't understand Pikeman at all either. Mulcahey made it make sense for me with Valentin and Brennan, but then he quit/was fired and suddenly Anna is saying Brennan covered his tracks with the WSB and pretended he had been undercover to stop Pikeman in order to escape prosecution. (Except I think the show now wants us to believe dayplayer Brennan actually was undercover and is a great guy after all.)

I think Claudette married Nathan to get her American visa because she was French Canadian and wanted to live in New York?  That's.........not even interesting.

I don't know how anyone think JPS is a catch lol.  The only time I thought he was mildly popular is when he was paired with Nina.

Yeah, I still don't know if the Pikeman story is over and I definitely couldn't summarize the details coherently at this point.

1 minute ago, BetterForgotten said:

She can’t act for sh!t, lacks charisma, and never had any romantic chemistry with anyone she was paired with. I’ll never understand Frank’s tastes and loyalties. 

I will go to the mat for her having serious chemistry with Mark Lawson and yes, hambone Forbes March, whose character's violent death I did not regret. But she is very limited.

3 minutes ago, Liberty City said:

It was a bad character, derived from an even worse storyline: the birth of Charlotte, and everything surrounding it.

But I don't even think Charlotte was the original plan.  She was Nathan's unknown ex-wife and all that jazz before the kid popped up right?  

Just now, Khan said:

"Bizarre" doesn't even cover it.  There hadn't been a "Claudette" on any soap since AMC, and that was way the hell back in 1980. 

It was part of the whole weird French-Canadian fetish thing Ron or Frank or whoever started with Nathan West. Someone on staff either got off or caught onto the audience getting off (usually Ron in those days, who was Very Online and would write in responses quickly) on wooden Ryan Paevey's flawless French pronunciations, so he started doing it onscreen all the time. Suddenly his ex-wife(??) is "Claudette Beaulieu".

Just now, carolineg said:

But I don't even think Charlotte was the original plan.

As I said on the other page, I still think it was an outgrowth of RC's likely plan for Stavros and Lulu having a rape mutant child c/o surrogate captive Robin or something. Instead, the next team gave Lulu a rape mutant spawn created via Valentin and Bree Williamson. Hooray!