I'm amazed that people are shocked by this, but according to ABC Soaps In Depth, Rebecca Herbst is out as Liz Webber on General "Hospital", a role she's played since 1998. She was put on "extended holiday" once returning showhog Vanessa Marcil Giovinazzo (EDIT: Why in the hell is her name that bloody long? I'm amazed I was able to SPELL it right) came in late last year and has barely been seen since, let alone given much story.
Frankly, the fact she's a nurse should've been a dead giveaway that she'd be fired. She isn't in the orbit of the mob anymore since her split with meathead mobster Jason Morgan, and most people who've ever watched the show since 2001 realise that the show is trying very hard to pretend that the hospital never existed, unless Michael's been injured or killed someone, of course.
I gave up on this show ages ago, and between this and the fact that my favourite remaining (read: character not violently killed off during an Emmy-pandering sweeps stunt) character, Monica Quartermaine (Leslie Charleson) has been silently moved to recurring status, I'm probably never coming back.
A quick note that will inevitably fall on deaf ears: I don't care for Brenda, Carly, Jason, or Sonny, and I never will. They were boring in the 90s, they were boring in the 2000s, and they continue to elicit about the same reaction in me as Carly has to everything. Snarling rage.
Having Tonja Walker's Alex Olanov return to Llanview (the fictional setting of ABC's One Life To Live) is almost enough to get me back watching the show for a few episodes to see if I'm interested. However, it may not be enough. As SoapCentral's Best & Worst of 2010 pointed out, OLTL has changed pretty much overnight this year. It's gone from a multi-racial show about complex characters who've overcome intense issues and fighting their way from the fringes of society, to a show featuring an assembly line of plastic bimboes and Ken dolls with zero personality or background.
The first strike against the show came at the beginning of the year, when whiny manipulator Stacy Morasco drowned in an icy pond after having given birth to a baby of questionable paternity in a snowstorm. It was a stupid way to deal with the reveal, for one. Soaps of old would've taken pains to make sure Stacy got her just desserts in an emotional context, playing out her sister GiGi's (yes, I know) sense of betrayal and anger, and having a major wedge placed between the two of them, as well as Stacy's efforts to win back her beau Rex, and how it affected everyone involved. The custody case for Stacy's baby (whatever her name was...I think it was Serendipity Orchid or something equally stupid) could have easily played out as a high-drama case where the secrets and lies Stacy kept over the coursed of 2009 could have played out. Instead, she drowns. And everyone blames Schuyler, the gay couple get the baby...and then everyone but GiGi and Rex leave town. I should also point out that GiGi and Rex are about as exciting a couple as watching grass grow in real time on a comfy bed. Next came the Great Minorities Purge of 2010. I took simultaneous delight and disgust upon hearing the mass firings make their way into the headlines one by one, as ABC systematically destroyed everything that wasn't white, rich or heterosexual on their affiliates between the hours of 2:00pm and 3:00pm.
The ball first dropped in early March, just as OLTL, Brett Claywell and Scott Evans (Kyle Lewis & Oliver Fish) were announced as the winners of the GLAAD Media Award for Daytime Drama. Simultaneously, ABC announces the pair had been fired, as they had "failed to resonate with the mainstream audience," because ratings were "particularly dismal" when Fish came out of the closet. The "blame the gays" attitude set in motion a media firestorm, and garnered OLTL and ABC some very unpleasant media attention after months of positive feedback from the press. Particularly from the gay press, who'd grown weary of As The World Turns' irritatingly chaste gay storyline, which due to what Cady McClain claimed was "someone with very strong religious points of view way way high up at Procter & Gamble...[who] didn’t want to have a gay storyline at all and if they were going to have it then it was a fight every step of the way to have that", spent close to a year not even kissing on camera.
Once ABC had rid OLTL of the pesky gays, they then set their sights on all the black people. A quick side note: One Life To Live is historically one of the highest-rated soaps in America with African-Americans. They actively market themselves to black markets, with Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, and Wendy Williams having made frequent guest appearances on the program. So of course, one would imagine that having a healthy roster of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish characters would be advisable. Right? Well, you'd be wrong. What do you think this is? 1968??
In the span of 6 months we lost the characters of Rachel Gannon, Layla Williamson, Evangeline Williamson, and Greg Evans, as well as Schuyler Joplin, Kim Andrews, and of course, Kyle & Fish. It seemed almost every week as news of another actor's firing or quitting the series. It became a running joke in my house. The whole situation seemed so fishy the show couldn't get the press' seagulls to bugger off for the life of them. The show's ratings collapsed, falling from 4th place of seven soaps and 2.7 Million viewers in early November 2009 to dead last and 2.2 Million by April 2010.
By summertime, things had calmed down, but were still incredibly painful to watch, as the result of the wintertime kidnapping of pretty blonde Jessica Buchanan by her psycho cult leader father Mitch Laurence (I wish I were joking about that) and subsequent brainwashing at his hands left Jessica the world's most irritating amnesiac. Jess' memories after 1997 were wiped clean, and while I appreciate the sentiment, as 1998 saw Llanview eaten by the gaping maw of the Rappaport family plague, watching a late 20-something Jessica cavort about Llanview High pining after her ex-boyfriend Cristian Vega (one of the few remaining minorities on the show), was horrifying. It also introduced the worst thing that happened to One Life To Live in this already-vile year: The Ford/Salinger Family, also known as "The House That Abs Built".
I give the show some credit for casting, at the very least, they're believable as brothers. But taking a heavily-disliked recurring character and centering the entire show around him is probably one of the stupidest moves any television show can do. Robert Ford came to town as a videographer working for the sexy-and-hilarious David Vickers (and I don't usually like older men, but Tuc Watkins is just great). But while David was a sleazy manipulator in a refreshingly humourous way, Ford was sleazy in a pompous, "wish he fell through the ice instead" kind of way. After tearing the oh-so-femininely-named Langston away from her realistic relationship with normal-looking-yet-adorable Markko, he proceeded to slimeball his way into multiple other girls' beds, before bedding a despondent Jessica after the excellent High School Musical-inspired episodes (which briefly lifted the show's ratings back up around 2.5 Million).
Of course it was at this moment that Jessica realised how old she was and who she was in love with etc., and ran out in a panic. Simultaneously, Langston discovers Ford's been screwin' the pizza girl; Markko discovers Langston thinks monogamy is kind of tree, yells a lot, dances around the school gym after the prom (see the video for that), and proceeds to wash blood off his hands. Oops! Ford's taken a candlestick to the head. Obviously Markko didn't do it, since it's too obvious.
And thus the saga of the Ford family begins. Suddenly Ford brothers appear from out of the woodwork, kidnapping female characters, stealing them from their boyfriends, and walking around without shirts (or body hair) most of the time. Matthew Buchanan, who had been dating Danielle Delgado-Manning-Rayburn-whateverthehell, was brushed aside (presumably for looking like someone of the age he was portraying, heaven forbid) in favour of the third Ford brother, who has no discernible personality other than liking movies a lot and having abs.
About this point, I gave up on OLTL for awhile...only to tune back in a few weeks and discover that in my absence, the show had become a manic breakneck-paced onslaught of craziness. Presumably because the show's ratings hadn't improved despite ditching every new character the show had created since 2006 (except Rex & GiGi, of course), the show's pace was sped up to the point where in one 2-minute period at the beginning of a September episode, five different scenes averaging about 6 lines were blown through. How in the hell is anyone supposed to keep up/feel any tension/care about what's going on at that pace?
The summer was positively unwatchable, in spite of a fantastic cancer storyline that saw fan favourite Téa Delgado battle a brain tumour, and confiding in her longtime rival Blair Kramer. In the end, the brain tumour killed her...except it didn't. It turned out that she had been kidnapped by yet another evil supervillain who just happened to be the first non-asshole boyfriend Blair had ever had. And then it got weird and the guy's brother showed up and yeaistoppedcaringaboutitetcetc. Blair goes to Tahiti with this guy, kills him, is rescued by the World's douchiest cop, and everyone comes home to Llanview (Téa included), and carries on as though nothing had happened. Surprise, surprise. Ratings remained stagnant at around 2.3 Million (again in dead last).
So of course, everyone panicks, and the show brings in their secret weapon. What could it be? MORE Mitch Laurence? A return of some of the hastily written-out minority characters of old? heaven forbid no!
Kim Zimmer, of course. Playing an obscure character who was on the show for 6 months in 1983. Surely that will fix everything!
Except that it did, to some extent anyway. No one foresaw it, but Zimmer's awkwardly named Echo DiSavoy created story for the veteran characters on the show in a way that hadn't happened in a long time. Through most of the past while, long-time characters Victoria & Dorian Lord had been relegated to stewing over the well-being of their respective children with nary a peep of story to call their own. Enter Echo, who was a former lover of Viki's husband Charlie, and voila! Echo claims to have conceived Rex Balsom (whose parentage has been in question for so long that the only person on the planet who still seems to care is Ron Carlivati, OLTL's head writer) with Charlie. Except that she didn't. Rex's father is actually Viki's ex-husband Clint, whom Echo coerced into an affair in 1983. Clint doesn't want anything to do with Rex or Echo, and threatens Echo into not exposing him as Rex's true father. It's not a great story, but Zimmer's personality and her brash nature when compared to Erica Slezak (Viki)'s ice queen nature has made for good television at the very least. And although it's still somehow managed to involve the Ford family (Inez is currently being courted by Rex's father Clint), at least we don't have Inez's vapid Ken doll offspring sticking their noses into it. Always a silver lining with me, innit?
So really, 2010 on One Life To Live has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. But in the end, it really came down to a show on the right path being systematically dismantled to showcase a hastily-thrown-together new family that nobody cared about, history and character development be damned. I don't even know who bopped Ford over the head with the candlestick, as some random heretofore unheard of character began stalking everyone in town and probably did it (which really is a lazy way to write a mystery), he may as well have smacked himself with the damn candlestick. At the very least it would've been more intriguing than what ended up ACTUALLY happening. I don't know how much damage to the Afro-American audience was done by the mass firings early in the year, but I can tell you, with Wendy Williams' upcoming appearance on the show, the black audience still matters to them in some form or fashion. Which makes the Diversity Purge all the more confusing. But I'll leave that up to OLTL's Executive Producer Frank Valentini to explain. He won't, but a boy can dream.
Oh I'm in heaven now. Hilariously homicidal Alex Olanov is on her way back to One Life To Live soon, according to actress Tonja Walker's Facebook page.
Now, if you know anything at all about me, you know I love the sharp, bitchy manipulators on soaps...so long as they're fun and aren't desperate. Alex started off desperate, but grew into a character that could really play with the big boys, someone who could really challenge Asa Buchanan's bravado. It's a role you don't see much on soaps anymore, and I'll be thrilled to have Alex back.
Walker has played the role of the former FAB Agent on and off since 1990, and spent much of that time weaseling her way in and out of numerous schemes along the way, including trying to drown her rival Cassie Callison by tricking Cassie onto a canoe and tipping it over, marrying mob boss Carlo Hesser and taking over his empire when he was presumed dead, using his twin brother Mortimer Bern to impersonate him as a figurehead, and being elected mayor of Llanview, despite the opinions of the majority of the community.
What's she back for this time? Well...nobody knows. All we know is she begins taping March 13. Is this enough to get me watching again? Only if they slow down on the whiplash-inducing pace the show's taken on the last couple years. I don't need to have twelve 30-second scenes per segment. Amazingly enough, I have the attention span to watch 3-minute scenes! You know like, what used to be the standard. Amazing, eh?
I'm amazed that people are shocked by this, but according to ABC Soaps In Depth, Rebecca Herbst is out as Liz Webber on General "Hospital", a role she's played since 1998. She was put on "extended holiday" once returning showhog Vanessa Marcil Giovinazzo (EDIT: Why in the hell is her name that bloody long? I'm amazed I was able to SPELL it right) came in late last year and has barely been seen since, let alone given much story.
