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.
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).
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?
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.
