Bad Writer Bloodbath

I never thought I'd see the day. Yes, finally, we're rid of Bob Guza, sloppy, misogynist head writer of General Hospital and fans are....mixed. Personally, my sentiments about Guza were fairly straightforward:

But I empathize with those who aren't so happy, because last time we celebrated the departure of a rotten writer, it was when Kreizman & Swajeski were fired in favour of Lorraine Broderick at All My Children...and then within the week discovered that she was writing the show's finale, not trying to get the show back to any semblance of reality or sense. So forgive us if we're more than a little skeptical.

Outgoing DAYS scribe, Dena Higley

But this IS great news. AND it gets better. Soon, Days of Our Lives' head writer Dena Higley will be gone. Not that I'm super-excited about that one either, for numerous reasons. For one, DAYS tapes so far in advance that the new writers, Marlene Clark McPherson & Darrell Ray Thomas Jr., won't see any of their ideas appear onscreen until at least November. This is just rumours, of course, but what kind of cruel god would foist this upon us all. That's five more months of directionless storylines that are at best unbelievable and at worst non-sensical. How many more times will Jennifer's heart be stolen? How many more times will Sami's children be kidnapped? Which one will it be this time?? Will EJ finally find something productive to do with all the time he appears to have on his hands?

Methinks he takes his job too seriously: Guza (GH)

The worst part for me really is that as soon as the GH news got out, everyone pretty much assumed that Garin Wolf's appointment as head writer meant he was writing the show to its end. How depressing. I understand how that's a likelihood and all, but let's look at things from a positive perspective. What if the stars align beautifully and some great stories emerge from Wolf's pen? What if we're treated to some complex characterizations we haven't seen since Claire Labine wrote the show in 1996? What if he does such a good job that the ratings jump a full point in six months?? Yes, it's completely unlikely and I'm being absolutely naive, but we can hope, yes? It's happened before (albeit under completely different circumstances at a time when the soaps were doing so well in general that there were viewers about to lure a million of them to a soap in six months).

So what can we expect now that the mob-lover is out? Well...not a whole lot of difference, actually. I mean...Frons is still running ABC Daytime and still picking it apart with a fine tooth comb so that won't change much, and Jill Farren Phelps is still Executive Producer, which means rape and needless violence will persist, but possibly to a lesser extent? Wolf worked under the great Douglas Marland at As The World Turns for many years, so that may be a plus, but he's also worked under Guza for many years, so I'm not entirely sure what will happen now. Apparently his ex-colleague Karen Harris has a lot to say though, posting on Facebook that:

Karen Harris- Oh, please. (lol) I have a new lease on life, Jami. But I walked the picket lines with a whole bunch of terrific writers. Garin quit the WGA so he could scab. This is his reward. I'm sad, because there are others there who are better writers and deserve it more.

Someone's bitter that she got fired and a scab got her job. Not that I can entirely blame her, but her opinion's invalidated by the fact that she's spent all these years kissing Bob Guza's arse and thinks he's actually good at his job. I'm sorry, any man who thinks THIS is good soap opera:

Or this:

OR...you know...Sonny shooting Carly in the head while she's in labour...someone had that posted too but of course they took it down. Too many angry people, I suppose.

This isn't enjoyable soap opera, people. Anyone who thinks that is insane. If Guza wanted to write this, there's a show called The Sopranos on HBO he could've gone to. Now, unfortunately Garin Wolf was part of the writing team all through this mess so I don't hold out a lot of hope, but now...maybe I could be wrong. Maybe he has a different vision for the show? Cross your fingers.

Alternately, I'm hearing good things from the right people about Marlene and Darrell at DAYS. Sheri Anderson, longtime head writer at that show, as well as author of two books based on the series (with more to come) had this to say about the new appointments:

Twitter: "Congrats to Marlene and Daryl. They are terrific writers, and I see only good things for Days with them at the helm."

Facebook: "Marlene Clark Poulter and Darrell Ray Thomas have been named the new headwriters of Days of our Lives. Marlene worked with me on the show in the 80s and she was always one of the most talented writers I've worked with. Congratulations to them both and show them your support!"

So at least in this case, things are looking up. Marlene and Darrell both worked on DAYS at its most recent 90s peak, and have spent the last decade at Passions, and as much as I find Passions to be a complete farce, I also know that the talent pool on that show was excellent and they've gone on to do great things: Lisa De Cazotte moved on to be Executive Producer at GH: Night Shift on SoapNet and did GREAT things there. So really, it's starting to look up! Let's just not cancel the Will Goes Gay storyline, and I will be happier than happy.

Is DAYS finally going gay?

Better unlock the closet Sami, Will wants out

It only took them 45 years, but there's a possibility now. The internet is all abuzz about the possibility that bottom-rated Days of Our Lives is spicing things up by possibly being the only soap left on US television with a gay romance on-screen.

Will DAYS have the guts to take it the whole nine yards and treat the couple as any other? Or will they go the uber-chaste route of As The World Turns' Luke & Noah, an eventual train-crash death finale for Luke & Reid? How about unceremoniously vanquishing them from the canvas after they "fail to resonate with the mainstream audience" as Kyle & Fish did on One Life To Live last year? Or will they just be like every other DAYS couple and spend 90% of the time saving the town from some maniacal super-villain (spelt DiMera) while otherwise combating their irrepressible libidos that get them into all kinds of babymamma drama?

Freddie Smith is the new gay @ DAYS?

I'm hoping for none of the above. I'm hoping for an intense, emotional tale with long-term planning, development, twists and turns, and a huge payoff at the end. Dena Higley has proved that she IS capable of it...just....not very often.

Regardless, the actor has been cast. Apparently former 90210 star Freddie Smith will do the honours. Smith is rumoured to be one of Justin & Adrienne Kiriakis' sons, and may finally be a proper love interest for Sami Brady's sensitive-but-ultimately-unconvincing-in-any-heteronormative-coupling son Will. His first airdate is said to be in mid-Summer.

Daytime's Biggest Mistakes: Part 2

So since the anger at One Life To Live and All My Children's cancellations have cooled slightly (at least for me), it's time to get back down to business. WHY are we in such a state? It'd be easy to say it's the ratings, but that hardly explains even a quarter of it. No one's ratings have been going up since 1996 in any appreciable way, and daytime's fallen faster than prime time, despite the fact cable during the day is probably the most uninspired television I've ever seen (any time I have the choice of over 100 channels and end up turning the TV off because the most exciting thing on my screen is Rachael Ray's smoker-phlegm voice screaming at me is not a good time).

And besides that, how can anyone tell me the reason ratings are going down is because there are "less women in the home during the day". That doesn't fly with me. If that was the truth, you'd be seeing the timeslot shares falling as well, and guess what? They're about on par with where they were 15 years ago for a comparable rating. So it's all on quality. Not SFX quality, not set design quality, STORY quality. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no season the soaps shouldn't be averaging at least a 3.0 rating right now. Instead, we're seeing ratings falling into the 1s, and widespread cancellation. Why is this happening? Let's go into some of the awful truths:


YOUR STORIES MAKE NO SENSE
  
Any time I turn on a TV and see a man who shouldn't exist because he was aborted in 1973 in a landmark, year-long story arc, I get angry. I change the channel. Any time I turn on that same channel and find out that he was actually implanted into another woman's uterus instead WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE, I get angry. I change the channel. 

The "Un-Abortion" himself, Josh Madden (AMC)

Head Writer Megan McTavish pretty much ruined any chance of All My Children recovering from her 2007 travesty storyline, unflatteringly titled "The Un-Abortion" by fans. McTavish had always gone for the ridiculous. A lot of the time it was good fun. Her 1991-95 Janet Green stories were excellent. The stories were ridiculous and Janet was absolutely insane, but they worked. The audience could suspend their disbelief and enjoy the campy nonsense onscreen because it was within the realm of (vague) possibility. Laurel Montgomery may have been a bit of a self-righteous pain in the ass, but she worked hard to expose Janet at every turn. Of course, McTavish reportedly wanted to have Janet disrupt Laurel and Trevor's 1995 wedding in an...er...explosive way. Bombing the church in the hopes of killing meddling Laurel. Of course, that would've been a bit untimely seeing as The Oklahoma City Bombing occurred weeks before the wedding was to occur, forcing McTavish to change course at the last minute. Apparently she does have SOME decency after all.

This brings me to my next point:

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Kendall Hart

YOU'RE RUINING THE SHOW'S HISTORY

When your show is as old as the mountains, you have to respect history. Megan McTavish thinks that history is this fun thing you wink at when it's funny to do so, and completely disregard otherwise...or completely change. See Kendall Hart, as played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. How one forgets giving birth is beyond me, particularly at age 14. How one forgets that her father wasn't the nice guy that she'd spent decades upon decades trying to track down and spent decades upon decades trying to fill the void in her life left by, finally having tracked him down in 1990 (where he was working as a clown at a circus), is beyond me. But McTavish made it work, having Kendall tear Pine Valley to shreds in the most excellent way possible. Unfortunately upon Kendall's 2002 return through today, the show's revolved around her in an increasingly nauseating way. Which reminds me...

THE SHOW IS NOT ONE-HOUR LONG PER DAY SO AS TO FOCUS ENTIRELY ON ONE CHARACTER

Note to Steve Burton (Jason, GH), steroids are NOT your friend

McTavish simply LOVED Babe Carey. She also loved Greenlee Smythe and Ryan Lavery. Too bad no one else does. I mean, they tolerate Greenlee if she's in the right pairing (Josh Duhamel's Leo, for instance), but Ryan is about as loved by AMC fans as a married gay couple promoting gun control in Sarah Palin's living room.

Another lovely case of this can be found on the last ABC soap standing (for now), General Hospital. Remember when the show's title had some vague significance to the subject matter in the program? Remember a week going by without seeing Sonny Corinthos or Carly Benson's faces for half the program? Well that would mean you've either been watching reruns on YouTube, or haven't watched the show since 1998, because not a day goes by without one of them grumbling about something (Brenda or Michael, usually), shooting something (each other?), being shot by someone (each other?), or listening to the entire cast praise Jason Morgan Our Lord & Saviour.
Notice none of these people are in any way associated with the medical profession? That's because you never see the hospital. In fact, I see more hospital on every other soap combined than I do on General Hospital. Feck, I see more hospital on talk shows most days! Which reminds me:

JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE YOUNG AND PRETTY, DOESN'T MEAN US YOUNG FOLKS WANT TO SEE THEM MORE, NOR DOES IT MEAN THEY'RE ACTORS

Charity Rahmer (Ex-Belle, DAYS) should not act

This has been an issue for a VERY long time. I blame The Young & The Restless for this in part (since they're the ones who initiated the whole 'young and pretty' cast thing), but it's really got out of hand the last few years. The desperation for 'young and pretty' to attract young viewers with disposable income is rank and impractical. Mostly because soap viewership is generational (grandmothers and some grandfathers pass it down to mothers and some fathers who pass it down to daughters and some sons, etc.) and good soap story is mostly generated from intergenerational conflict. 

General Hospital's comeback in 1978 would not have happened had it not been for young Laura Spencer falling for her parents' skeezy friend David Hamilton. Nor would it have happened without her pushing David down the stairs when he told her that the feeling wasn't reciprocal and that it was all a ruse to hurt her mother Lesley for rejecting his advances on her. Nor would it have happened without Lesley protecting her daughter and turning herself in for the crime.

So faced with a similar uphill battle against cancellation some 20 years later, and seeing Days of Our Lives' youth success being built off the success of a series of stories focused around the middle-aged Dr. Marlena Evans, what do basically every other soap do? Replace virtually every actor over 50 and replace them with 24 year old models playing 16 year old characters (I use that term loosely) badly. Even DAYS falls into this trap a few years later, with all sub-20 year old characters being aged all at once, regardless of any timeline issues or common logic regarding the fact that a kid born in 1987 was now dating one born in 1993, nor the fact that one character born in 1995 was now a senior in high school, while the other baby born in 1995 was still in pre-school. And that brings me to today's next-to-final point:

TIMELINES ARE IMPORTANT, DESPITE WHAT YOU THINK

World's oldest-looking 14-year-old, EJ DiMera

You can tell me it's alright to do this until you're blue in the face, but I still have a hard time believing that Days of Our Lives' EJ DiMera is actually Susan Banks' child. Never mind the fact that this supposedly suave rageaholic is meant to be running an international corporation with a name like Elvis, but the fact that he was born on-camera in 1997, while the woman he eventually marries, Sami Brady, has a teenage son who born two years BEFORE HE WAS. ALSO on-camera. This changes a whole whack of timelines, and renders a whole lot of history completely void.

This is the same show that had a landmark storyline in the 70s about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The same show that dealt earnestly Mickey Horton's mental illness.

Wait, I forgot.

This is also the same show that had a woman levitating above a bed due to possession by the Devil. Never mind. As you were.

FINALLY....

WRITE A BACKSTORY SO THAT YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE OPINIONS, PERSONALITY, AND SOMETHING TO DRAW UPON FOR LATER STORIES

BONUS: This means you won't ret-con the history later and piss off your (dwindling number of) viewers.

There is, in the last ten years, only a handful of cases where a show has delved into what a character thinks and feels and how it affects their decision-making process. One would be during the all-too-brief tenure of Peter Brash & Paula Cwikly at Days of our Lives in 2003, when Shawn(-Douglas) Brady pretended to be Jan Spears' babydaddy so that she wouldn't have an abortion. Abortion going against his and his family's Catholic beliefs, something he felt strongly about. This bunged up his relationship with Belle Black, and was generally well-done from a character perspective. It also meant we got to see deeper into Shawn, and it made him a much more well-rounded character.

DAYS' Chloe, sings opera, is also slutty, I know nothing else about her.

The only other time we get to see how anyone feels on soaps today is when it has to do with infidelity. Notice that absolutely nobody on any soap (bar DAYS' Chloe, despite what she says) seems to be alright with what is clearly the only viable solution to the rampant promiscuity problems in these towns: Open Relationships.

Also, condoms.

I recognize this would stop a lot of the storylines that happen on soaps, but let's face it, these storylines are as tired as Joan Rivers' plastic surgeon. There is a lot more to life than extra-marital sex. I know, it's shocking, but when a marriage can't last more than 6 months because you can't keep your pants on, then maybe it's time to reconsider marriage for the moment until you sort out why this is a problem. Not that we ever know why you're all so eager to get married all the time either. No one explained that when drawing out your character. You're not meant to. In an interview, Bill Bell once said that when pitching The Young & The Restless to CBS, he wrote out each character's history going back twenty years. This not only gave each character a rich history to draw upon in later stories, it also prevented later ret-cons (not that that stopped later writing regimes) and gave the audience more of a connection to everyone on the screen. He continued this for years afterwards when creating the Abbotts and Costellos Newmans. It's just good storytelling people. It's also horrendously out of vogue, it seems.

Apparently, it's to the point now where you can't even specify how many brothers and sisters you have, lest a new writer gets bored and wants to write in another appendage to your emerging family Redwood. Thus why DAYS' Hernandez family is slowly eating the show (because to introduce other Hortons would be completely out of the question, they're only the show's founding family, after all).

Frankly if this is how soaps are going nowadays, it's almost a good thing they're dying out. I hope that some of them can be salvaged in some form or fashion. Agnes Nixon is desperate to keep All My Children and One Life To Live going. And I can see how it could work (15 minute episodes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays online perhaps?), but the casts would have to be majorly whittled down. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I could do without all that Ryan Lavery douchery on my screen, thank you very much.

Lisa, this isn't something you should be PROUD of, dear...

 

Honestly, Lisa. Eat something. And while we're at it, it's meant to go BETWEEN your lips not into them xx

Daytime's biggest mistakes?

For the life of me I've never understood how an entire industry could get it all so wrong so completely so quickly. Since 1996, one by one, every single one of the US soaps has gone down the toilet. Some holding on longer than others, but eventually they have all succumbed to a sort of mass panic and reactive approach to writing and producing that has seen us go through almost an entire decade with no new soaps (the last new soap to debut in the US was Passions in 1999, and the UK's Doctors in 2000), and the cancellation of another eight. Today's post will be part one of what'll likely be a 2-or-3 part post about the soaps we've lost between 1999-2010. I would've rounded it off to 2000-2010 but sine we lost two in 1999 and none in 2000, it seems somewhat more significant, really.


PART ONE: The Casualties

ANOTHER WORLD (1964-1999)

NBC's longest-running soap when cancelled in 1999, the end was in sight when repeat offender Jill Farren Phelps was hired as Executive Producer in 1995. In a bid to "youth up" the show, killed off fan favourite Frankie Frame so she could hire Days of our Lives favourite Robert Kelker Kelly, redesigned the sets, redesigned the show's opening, and got DAYS' head writer James E. Reilly to write a ridiculous evil twin storyline for show maitriarch Rachel Cory (Victoria Wyndham). Result? The ratings rose in 1996 then collapsed in 1997. AW was gone a year and a half later.

SUNSET BEACH (1997-1999)

Not quite as long-running as Another World but equally as troubled, Sunset Beach was the other soap NBC unceremoniously ditched in 1999. Considering NBC's youth-obsession in the late 90s, SUN's cancellation was about as puzzling as the show's 12:00PM Eastern timeslot. A word of advice to the networks: Don't make your new soaps an hour in length until they get a solid footing in the ratings, and don't have your characters impregnate their rivals with turkey basters....EVER.

SUN was a huge success in the UK, with ratings so strong that UK network Five even offering to fund its continuation, but NBC declined, and SUN was cancelled after 751 episodes.


PORT CHARLES (1997-2003)

2003 was a shit year for soaps. These things seem to come in batches. 1999 saw two cancelled, and 2003 saw another two cancelled, though this time not on the same continent. In the US, ABC finally gave up its attempts to beat CBS' The Young & The Restless in 2003 after this General Hospital spin-off failed to attract even 1/5 of the audience Y&R had.
Their approach to beat the competition? Telenova-esque tales about sympathetic vampires, of course! This show was doomed the moment Passions beat them in the ratings. Just goes to show you what desperation can do in the face of bad storytelling.

BROOKSIDE (1982-2003)

UK's Channel 4 was also getting a bit desperate for the young ratings, and after 17 years on C4, Brookside was in trouble. Though producer Paul Marquess managed to lift ratings with his well-received storyline where young Anthony Murray accidentally kills his school bully, the show slowly declined again.
By 2002, the show was lucky to net ratings over a million viewers, and then came the final strike: Big Brother. Because, dear readers, why pay people to carefully craft storylines about well-written complex characters when you can have a group of shallow attention whores behave badly five days a week for virtually no money at all! Brookside's final episode aired in November 2003 and netted 2.3 Million viewers, easily bested by its lead-in that night: Wife Swap, viewed by 5.9 Million viewers.

FAMILY AFFAIRS (1997-2005)

The end of 2005 brought with it the end of Channel Five's attempt a UK-based soap, with their low-rated Family Affairs ending after an 8-year run. Never the ratings winner the channel anticipated, hovering between 1-2 Million viewers weekly for most of its run. Initially this was fine for the fledgling Five, but by 2005, when the top-rated shows on Five were now watched by 3-4 Million viewers, 1 million wasn't gonna cut it. The constant revamping and influx of new characters near the series end in hopes of evading cancellation didn't help in the slightest, and the finale was watched by a mediocre 1.35 Million viewers.

PASSIONS (1999-2008)

It was time. In fact, I don't think Passions would've lasted much longer even if NBC had decided to keep it on the air. Head writer James E. Reilly died shortly after Passions' final episode aired on DirecTV's The 101 in 2008 while recovering from surgery. The fact of the matter was that the show's brand of ridiculous over-the-top storytelling (a girl whose dialogue was uttered only in thought bubbles, and a talking doll were among the cast members) had gone out of vogue by 2008, and had taken all of daytime, desperate to keep up, with it. The problem wasn't Passions', it had consistently won huge ratings in the 18-34 demographic for years, often beating or tying lead-in series Days of our Lives for #1 in that demo, but with the rest of daytime's increasingly desperate and contrived plotlines which tried in vain to emulate Reilly's success at crafting completely unbelievable and completely entertaining storylines. Reilly was equal parts an unendingly frustrating and an insanely talented writer, and his presence in daytime will be missed...kind of.


GUIDING LIGHT (1937-2009)

Here's where things get really sad. Guiding Light was my first soap love. The most enduring dramatic story of all-time, Guiding Light began life on NBC radio in 1937 and ran concurrently on CBS radio and TV between 1952 and 1956.
The show was almost always a major hit, running consistently within the Top Five of the US daytime ratings from the 1950s thru the mid-1980s. By 1990, the show was back in top form, thanks mostly to the incredible writing of Nancy Curlee & James E Reilly, but once EP Jill Farren Phelps got her hands into the pot, things got messy, and by the late 90s, stories like Amish Reva, Princess Reva, Clone Reva (I kid you not), and Maureen Bauer's focus-group-determined death (Phelps' favoruite excuse for an ultimately unpopular decision: point to the focus group), ultimately drove the show into a gutter, and by 2008, the show could no longer afford to be shot in its NYC studios. The series was moved into Peapack, NJ, in an attempt to emulate the success of soap/reality shows like The Hills (I WISH I was joking), and the show became the butt of every joke in the industry. The show ended in September 2009 in a flurry of publicity, yet the finale only watched by 3 Million viewers, a number they'd bested only a year and a half before.

AS THE WORLD TURNS (1956-2010)

Our most recent casualty was the victim not exclusively of bad writing and desperation on the part of execs or writers, but moreso by the network. Tales of frustration from Executive Producer Chris Goutman at what he claims was severe interference from not just CBS, but even P&G caused huge problems for As The World Turns in its final years. When the show turned to the groundbreaking Luke/Noah love story in 2007, actress Cady McClain claimed that someone high up at P&G was resistant even to the idea of a gay storyline on the show due to "religious reasons". This resulted in the soap world's chastest storyline in recent memory, with Luke & Noah not even allowed to kiss on-camera for well over a year. Once the audience's frustration over the storyline heated up, viewership dropped, and the show sank almost overnight from 3.2 Million in March 2008 to 2.5 Million by June, a level the show would keep until it's September 2010 cancellation.


And there you have it. The shows we've lost and the reasons it (probably) happened. Next time: The shows that are left, the good, the bad, and what can be done to fix it (as well as what will/won't be done about it).

Organ Harvesting Adventures!

No, this blog will not be Days of our Lives-centric, but damned if it isn't entertaining as of late. Yes, they actually are running a storyline where Police Commissioner Bo Brady's broken his soon-to-be-ex-wife Hope out of jail. Not especially exciting on its own. Except for one small detail:
He's breaking her out because the Prison Warden is having All My Children's Janet Green kill off the inmates to have their organs harvested and sent to University Hospital where the host of Merv Griffin's Crosswords will use them in transplants.

That sounded strange, but allow me to explain.

Days of our Lives has a habit of hiring actors who are known for their work on others shows in similar roles to what they'll play on DAYS. In Robin Mattson's case, she spent six years playing a similarly homicidal character to the Prison Impaler she's currently portraying...except on DAYS' direct competitor.

Alternately, the doctor using the dead prisoners' organs was the host of Merv Griffin's short-lived Crosswords. He was about as convincing as a game show host as he is as a potential love interest for Hope's cousin Jennifer on DAYS. Hint: The answer is two words, has 7 letters and rhymes with Hot Berry.

There's never been a less engaging "on the run" storyline as this one, really. Back in the 80s when Hope's life was in virtually constant danger, Bo would ride in on his motorcycle to save the day from pretty much every conceivable misadventure. Now he's hiding in the kitchen of an unnaturally bright houseboat, looking for clues on a laptop computer for weeks at a time. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.

Of course, since there's about $6 in the budget these days, going on location is an absolute no-go, but of course they continue to write the show as though it were 1984, which in turn, leaves the storylines slightly....lacking.

As for the doctor looking for livers, he's out courting Hope's cousin Jennifer, who is, in turn, using her investigative reporting skills by working undercover, using her mother's maiden name, of course. Who knew you could get a job at a prison without a background, let alone a background check?

The most frustrating part of all this is the fact that these characters, who've been on our screens on and off for the better part of three decades, are being given some of the most shallow, vapid stories I've ever had to sit through. Besides this we have YET ANOTHER paternity test switcheroo on the heels of yet another baby switch storyline. A "classic teen romance" between two characters who have so little chemistry they seem disgusted with each other whenever they kiss (the guy has more chemistry with his male co-star, probably why they're never in the same room anymore *rolls eyes*).


This show is entertaining in SPITE of the storylines, not because of them. Even my dear ol' faithful Vivian Alamain has failed me. Far too goofy and her lines are atrocious. Louise Sorel is likely disgusted every time she has to go to work. Her former sidekick, Ivan, won the lottery and quit, so now she has a new henchman: Gus. An expressionless gay man (the only one on the show, of course only a prop for Vivian devoid of any desires of his own) whose rage even seems forced. I'm hoping he never comes back from the island they've recently been deserted upon to "hilarious, wacky" results. *yawn*.

Now, given the choice between General Hospital's mob-sympathizing and Y&R's doppelganger-o-rama, I'd take this crap any day. But come on, it could be so much better than this. All it takes is a writer who can write anything interesting. When you need organ harvesting storylines to bring in the viewers, you're in trouble.

What Is This Thing??

Oh yes, dear people. It is what you think it is. It's me finding a place on the internet where I can freely rant endlessly about soap opera and why I simultaneously love and loathe it. Unlike some others floating about the net (whom I have the utmost respect for) I'm not always watching, nor do I claim to keep up with most shows regularly anymore (I weave my way in and out of Days of our Lives' Salem and Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden's Meerdijk regularly and that's about it as of late). But I definitely can say I'm dedicated to the cause.

There won't be many first-come spoilers or daily recaps (unless they're particularly hilarious), because I adhere to the school of thought that says "if I know what's going to happen today, why in shit would I bother watching??"

Besides, that's what Serial Drama and Daytime Confidential are there for, no?

Expect some great surprises, some treats from back in the day, and a few rants along the way. It'll be fun, because that's why you watch soaps, no?*


* = yes, I realise most soaps lately are about as fun as poking yourself in the eyeballs with dull knitting needles, but you could at least TRY to play along, no?