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.
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.
If you were cancelling a TV show and blaming low ratings, high production costs, etc., you would apply this to a show that was over budget and doing badly in the ratings, right?
Not if you work at ABC you don't. Which is why this week, after ABC made the stellar move to cancel not one but two of its long-running soaps All My Children and One Life To Live citing these exact issues, does it all prove to go absolutely abysmally wrong.
How so?
Neilsen Ratings (same day + 1) (courtesy: Soap Opera Network)
1. Y&R 3.3/11 (same/-.3)
2. B&B 2.0/6 (same/-.3) <---- ties low (3rd straight week)
2. OLTL 2.0/6 (+.1/+.3) *
4. AMC 1.9/6 (+.1/+.1)
4. GH 1.9/6 (same/same)
6. DAYS 1.7/6 (same/-.2) <---- ties low (6th straight week)
Yes, friends, the very shows that were cancelled so that precious friend General Hospital and its band of merry mobsters could live on ARE NOW BEATING IT IN THE RATINGS. Never mind the obvious fact that One Life To Live is the only soap on television right now to post consistent ratings gains over last year (they've been at least .1 above last year for over a month), the exact thing Brian Frons, head of ABC Daytime, has been saying was NOT happening. And the best part in all this is that he was planning to cancel OLTL in the first place, AMC's ratings collapse in the last year was simply a happy accident that allowed him to cancel both shows in favour of TWO already-done reality shows instead of just one.
Here's another problem: OLTL is the only soap on the network to be significantly under budget all the time, and has been for years. The show is extremely cheap to produce, and if a show is performing this much better than it did the year before, that's absolutely nothing to sneer at. Particularly when you consider that these gains are happening in April, a time when the ratings in daytime are usually falling fast, and not during a sweeps period, the time of year when the shows' ratings need to be as high as possible to attract advertisers for the next advertising period. The next sweeps is in May.
Won't Frons have quite a bit of egg on his face if OLTL maintains these ratings gains and moves into a consistent #2 position by the summer? I dare him to try justifying cancelling the network's two top-rated soaps in favour of their trainwreck ratings disaster and getting away with it. Only a fool would see how it makes any sense.
Keep in mind that this is based off one month of shows. I realize that at the beginning of the year, it was GH that was pulling in the big numbers and now they're struggling. But if OLTL can keep things moving like they're doing now, they're going to make ABC look like fools by the time the network plans to pull the plug in January. And won't that look sweet if they're a consistent #2 in the ratings by that point?
Yea this whole AMC/OLTL cancellation stuff has got me re-energized. I'm so angry, I could spit. Brian Frons spent 8 years hucking crap at these shows, and now he and Anne Sweeney, his boss, have got what they wanted. They've destroyed two pieces of enduring American culture, and they treat it as though it's rubbish.
But here's the best bit, they're replacing it with two new talk shows. Yes, yet more talk shows. Because the world really needs more of those. Even the creator of one of the shows is upset about it, as he doesn't want to be responsible for the thousands of people his show is putting out of work, not to mention the damage his show's going to have on the already-lifeless New York television scene.
Even worse is how All My Children and One Life To Live's staff found out about the move. The staff discovered via pre-recorded (and edited) video message about their "great new, authentic" programming, even having Frons LAUGH during the interview.
What is the "great, new, authentic programming they speak of?
One is a cooking show called "The Chew", and the other is a weight-loss show called "The Revolution". Seriously?
CBC posted about it, and I sent in a sort of eulogy for these dear, maligned friends.
These shows were at one time groundbreaking. They told stories about modern society in a way prime time wouldn't dare touch with a 20ft pole. One Life To Live was able to tell honest stories about race relations in the late 60s with a touch no one at the time would even think about. All My Children tackled abortion, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS and the Vietnam War at a time when prime-time would have still blushed to refer to these topics euphemistically.
What has been done to these shows in the last 15 years has been nothing short of slow poisoning. Over-the-top, terrible plot-based stories that make no sense about young characters disconnected from their rich family histories. Almost all characters of colour having been wiped off both shows, and most embarrassingly of all, the swift, callous firing of One Life To Live's groundbreaking gay couple last year. I blame the network's micromanagement, the writers and producers' desperation to keep up with Days of our Lives and Passions' outlandish, over-the-top camp, and the constant misogyny I see onscreen (particularly on the ABC soaps). At some point, someone up there forgot that women (who are the target demographic for these shows) don't want to be patronized, and belittled. That's when I tuned out.
EastEnders and Coronation Street are in absolutely no trouble at all in the ratings and it's because they haven't forgotten how to write character-based stories about generations of families and their conflicts, as well as making sure that there are strong female characters to appeal to the women watching at home.
Honestly, I see these shows being canceled as a great shame, as they have been a constant on our screens for many generations. But it's definitely a mercy killing after years of rotten writing and insulting viewers.
PS: Love the fact some dim bulb disliked my comment, yet mysteriously no rebuttal. As if you have anything to possibly counter with. The number of "oh well, doesn't affect me" comments are hilarious as well. It begs the obvious question: WHY ARE YOU POSTING IN AN ARTICLE YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THEN?!?!"
Yes, it's finally happening. The Young & The Restless is finally free of the world's least diverse producer: Paul Rauch. Y&R's Co-Executive Producer has one of the most diverse, as well as patchiest histories in the business, as he previously produced for Another World, Texas, One Life To Live, Santa Barbara, and Guiding Light. Without fail, every single one of those shows crashed and burned under his watch, though with many his tenure initially brought a creative resurgence.
Rauch's problems are generally brought down to three major issues:
1) Lack of racial diversity
Upon his arrival at One Life To Live in 1984, Rauch almost immediately fired original cast member Lillian Hayman, infamously by telling her on her way home for the evening that she'd just filmed her last scene. Hayman's on-screen daughter, Ellen Holly, lasted only a few more months, being canned later in 1985. From that moment on, OLTL was white as bleached socks, with only a smattering of supporting African-American characters until Rauch's 1991 departure. I don't recall even one African-American being mentioned on Another World during Rauch's 1971-1983 tenure there, black characters appearing only after Rauch was canned from that serial. Texas was too busy trying to be Dallas to remember that there are black people in the South. Guiding Light's black cast members were hastily canned upon his 1996 arrival, and Y&R's black set have been quietly backburnered for ages during his tenure there. Some issues, Paulie?
2) Ridiculous plotlines
For some reason, Rauch didn't think to include any crazy storylines when he was at Another World or Texas, but once he moved to One Life To Live, boy did things go a bit insane. I always have said that Days of Our Lives' late 90s resurgence owes a lot to OLTL's nuttiness from the late 80s, and how can you really argue with that when confronted with some of the stupidity inflicted upon the unsuspecting audience, starting around 1986. Crazy supervillain Mitch Laurence and his never-really-going-away evil cult, magic insta-poisons that can kill you within seconds simply by being lightly dabbed on your earrings, the underground city of Eterna built into Llantano Mountain, Clint Buchanan's trip back to 1888 in the Wild West after falling off his horse (which he was riding while temporarily blinded....which makes perfect sense of course....<_<), Mad scientist Patrick London magically having plastic surgery to look exactly like Bo Buchanan in order to take over the family company (Y&R fans will immediately recognize THAT one), and of course, Viki Buchanan nearly dying and going to heaven for a few weeks on a magical spaceship.
This madness carried over to Guiding Light, where Rauch had popular character Reva Shayne (Kim Zimmer) cloned after her presumed death, and obviously carried over to Y&R where the show produced multiple doppelgangers in two distinct story arcs, and an endless string of psychopaths and has-been guest stars (all white, of course) in a desperate bid to prop up the show's flagging ratings.
3) Repetition
Of course, by what I've just said, I'm sure you realise there's a bit of repetition going on. One would imagine that Rauch wouldn't have so much influence on the story direction, being Executive Producer and not head writer, but as he co-EPs with head writer Maria Arena Bell, it's not hard to see the line. Wait for Jill Foster-Abbott-Fenmore-whoever to push Katherine Chancellor off a balcony and have her despondent family clone her before Rauch's time is through. I can see it happening yet!
Not to mention Rauch's awful production (the lighting and sets on his shows being absolutely generic and bright they zap any drama out of the scene), and you begin to wonder why anybody would hire this man. The problem is, when he's good, he's damn good. From a business perspective, anyway. But is it time to put the dinosaurs to sleep, already? Some fresh blood did OLTL good: Linda Gottlieb, Rauch's replacement, renewed the show dramatically, moving it back to the Top 3 in the ratings after bottoming out in 9th in the summer of 1991. Yet, no one's thought to hire from outside since then, and ratings are in the toilet across the board. Would some fresh blood do the soaps some good? Will Y&R take advantage of this opportunity, or simply plug in more dinosaurs from the 80s who will continue with the cliches and plot-based nonsense?
Just a quick aside from your regularly scheduled diatribe: One Life To Live, what are you thinking???
I knew there was a reason I gave up on you numerous times since 2000, but seriously, this is just getting extreme. It was bad enough that after spending the first 30 years of the series obsessed with Viki Buchanan (sorry...Viki Lord Gordon Riley Burke Riley Buchanan Buchanan Carpenter Davidson Banks) and her Dissociative Identity Disorder (which, in the end, was turned from a trite plot device into possibly the most brilliant and honest representations of DID and child abuse in television history), suddenly we find out, HUZZAH! DID IS GENETIC!!
Yes, Viki's own daughter (apparently part of a set of twins that Viki only remembers having one of...) Jessica Buchanan (sorry, Jessica Laurence...I'm having a hard time keeping up with this show's retcons) was revealed to suffer from multiple personalities as well. Reason: her rebound husband died. Yes, to get back at her ex-, she married his half-brother. And said half-brother died. Yes, logical and quality storytelling at its finest on ABC!
Like mother, like daughter, Jess' first personality "Tess" is a wild child party girl like Viki's alter "Niki". After causing all sorts of ridiculous havoc that in the end really amounts to nothing that means anything down the road, we find out that Jess has yet another personality: Bess. A cold icy figure similar to her mother's "Jean Randolph" personality.
Best bit: Jessica, Tessica, and Bessica are all going to be making a comeback in the new year! More contrived storylines about mental disorders that won't be treated are in store! Expect the stress of all this nonsense to knock Jessica back to Age 8 and she'll burn down Llanfair again. Let's hope one of the Ford kids are babysitting and die in the fire.
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?
