Serial Drama

Washed Up Stars A Go Go

I was given an impromptu spring break of sorts this week and was excited to spend Monday doing non-Monday things like sleeping in, watching all of my soaps in real time and not despising life. But, alas, nothing ever goes as planned and Y&R and AMC wound up pre-empted because of the swearing in of our new governor (of course, GH wound up airing right on schedule because it is simply the show that cannot be killed. They couldn't do the transfer of power at 3 PM, thereby saving thousands of viewers the horrible sight of Carly imagining heaven as a place where she plays pool with a hitman?!).

Until I saw the TV Guide description of today's episode of Y&R, I was a little peeved about the whole situation, but after seeing the sixty minutes of sheer boredom I was spared, I need to give it up for Governor Patterson's sense of timing:

Amber and Daniel burn the money; Kay almost collapses with Esther; Gloria thinks Jeff is behind John's book; Jack looks for an actor to portray John's ghost; Daniel looks for an investor for Amber's fashion.

Wow, what an action packed episode. The ONLY thing I'm sad to have missed is Esther's triumphant return to my television screen, and in her full uniform, nonetheless.

I was also relieved that I didn't miss one of !!!Balki!!!'s appearances. Back when the news broke that Bronson Pinchot would be appearing on Y&R, Becca sent me an email with the subject line !!!Balki!!! and I have taken to referring to him as such in everyday conversation. I like to express the !!! part of it with jazz hands for when I am speaking of him aloud. It happens more often than you may realize and if this bit spot on Y&R is the push he needs to get back into the public eye, I wouldn't be surprised to see the jazz hands used on all sorts of entertainment shows. Don't tell me you can't see Ryan Seacrest doing it.

It does seem to be a trend to have 80s and 90s primetime stars show up for cameos, or juicier roles, on soaps: Betty White, Patrick Duffy AND Alley Mills on B&B, Shirley Jones on Days, Joan Van Ark and now !!!Balki!!! on Y&R. I really hope this trend continues, because a lot of former stars are overdue for a comeback.

more at twiigs.com...

I went to find the real name of Mr. Belvedere, because I was going to put him on the list of sitcom stars who can do no wrong ever and who I would unironically welcome onto any of my soap operas (also on the list: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss; Jamie Luner; any of the other Golden Girls) and it turns out that he is DEAD. He died in 2001! How did I not know this? It's entirely possible that I did, at one point, know and repressed it, but it's kind of tragic because I am going through the grieving process all over. Equally tragic is the fact that his last acting credit was an episode of California Dreams.

Speaking of washed up stars: Michael Damian comes back as Danny tomorrow and gave an interview to Soap Opera Digest about how excited he is and he mentioned that he is directing a new movie called Moondance Alexander, which...well, I'll let him explain:

It's a family film about a young girl who takes in a horse and learns how to ride with the help of a mysterious trainer. It then follows the journeys they take together. It stars [Disney channel girl], [someone disturbed enough to marry Melanie Griffith TWICE], [Aunt Becky] and [an ice skater].

Um, obviously this movie is going to rule in myriad ways and will most likely better than what we see on Y&R these days. Damning with faint praise, sure, but true nonetheless.

I, um, guess it's obvious that I will do anything not to talk about the state of Y&R these days. I am hoping that something happens soon, because I don't want to write about the ENDLESS bickering between Adam and his siblings and Victor and Nicholas and Chloe and Lily and Gloria and fashion sense. Petty people arguing pettily sounds great in theory, but in practice, it's not so fun.

General Hospital Week in Review

This show is still boring me.  But I've come to the realization that despite that, the blog must go on.  Plus Maxie had a super cute outfit this week that I had to preserve in screencap form.  So the official Week in Review returns.

The truly moving story of Will the Hitman Recover the Use of His Hands in Time to Kill Again and Sleep With the Woman Who He Isn't Supposed To Be Sleeping With Because As His Babymama She and His Kid Are In Danger From the Job He Is So Desperate to Get Back? continues. 

Ugh.  At least the visual of the oven mitts of gauze is entertaining.

I call this:  I CAN HAZ GUN?

(I also loved Sonny's pissy little rant about how dare Jason get injured, and maybe "this is just an excuse" not to do his Really Important job.  Yes, that gauze does look psychosomatic to me.  Although I would welcome the twist that Jason is faking all this because it's the only way he can break up with Sonny.)

Mike's amazement at Marianna's mad waitressing skillz was...entertaining.

Mike: I don't know who you are, but that was amazing.  And you did it all with a smile!

Yeah man, when she picked up those two plates, at two separate times, and then poured coffee?  IT WAS UNBELIEVABLE.  How DOES she do it?  One day I hope to be able to transfer liquid from one container to another without scowling.  I dream big!

Days of Our Lives Couple of Weeks in Review. Sort Of. Not Really. I'm Too Bored, Y'all!

I don't know what's going on with this show, you guys.  It was so good just a few weeks ago, but this week it really started backsliding into mediocre-ville, or worse.  I still like most of the story arcs, but the dialogue is getting pretty bad.  I think John, Marlena, Hope, and Bo have been repeating the same lines for the last two weeks.  Which in the case of those four doesn't particularly bother me, because I adore John loathing Marlena and Hope and Bo being all suffering supercouple-y, but this could reach problematic levels soon.  If I have to hear people repeatedly refer to Lexie as a competent doctor, or Shawn and Belle's plans to rip off his parents' dream trip around the world over and over again, I may lose the will to blog.

There are a few things I'm especially concerned about.

Dr. Jonas is hot, but he is WAY too old for Chelsea.  Way.  I think he would have been great for her mom, but the idiots in charge let Julie Pinson go.  Romantic interests do not pass on to the next generation like real estate and collectibles!  If Deidre Hall retires, does John take up with Sami?  No.  They better redirect Dr. Dan to a more appropriate target soon, because it skeeves me every time I see him and Chelsea onscreen together. 

Are they just replaying the same scene of Ava locked in her room, being all batshit crazy, over and over again?  Is she ever going to do . . . anything?  I'm getting bored by her already, and that really shouldn't the case with an insane interloper.  I love them.

Donna Martin Hallucinates

So you may have heard that the CW is considering a 90210 spin-off that would revolve around the next generation (or, considering the ages of the actors on the original show, the next next generation) of rich Beverly Hills teens.  (BTW, please note the plethora of Mom Jeans in the photo in that link.  I've been staring at it in horror/awe for at least 15 minutes.  Oh, and while we're on this subject?  Gap has some serious explaining to do.)

I am intrigued by the involvement in this supposedly real project of the dude who was in charge of Veronica Mars, because I heard that was a good show.  And I can rarely resist a cheesy teen drama.  However, this also promises to be yet another in a line of said shows that feature guys I used to lust over when I was a teenager as the father of one of the main characters, and this time it might drive me right over the edge.  I am only barely hanging on after Paul Johansson on One Tree Hill.  Not that I watch One Tree Hill.  (OMG, bringing us right back on topic, 90210 originated my crush on Paul Johansson.  Even though his character was an asshole.  And maybe a date-rapist?  I don't remember.  Whatever, don't judge.)

But more importantly, and a concern that should be slightly more widespread than the latest threat to my vanity:  90210 kind of sucked.  You know it's true.  We loved it, but objectively speaking it's a terrible show!  And without the kids being my same age, and pining away after Kelly Taylor's wardrobe (I told you not to judge, bitches), I don't know that I'll be able to overlook the flaws this time.  So for those of you who emailed us your similar concerns, I must agree that this is a truly WTF?! proposition that is still, somehow, oddly promising.

However, I haven't even gotten to the most WTF aspect of it yet!  You won't believe it!  When asked about her opinion on the possible spin-off, Tori Spelling opined:

Tori: They should give me a call.  Every teen drama needs a MILF, right?

TORI SPELLING CALLED HERSELF A MILF.  I need to go to a happy place.  I need to go to a happy place.  I need to go to a happy place.  The "F" in  that acronym stands for something else.  Fight?  Forget?  Fingerprint?  Flee?  Flog?  Fumigate?

[Yester]Day's Dumbest Dialogue

I "love" it when this show tries to be all Grey's Anatomy.  (You know, like we loved it when Night Shift did that?)

Ian: They had to ventilate him after the second seizure during transport.
Patrick:  We need to stabilize him.  I don't want to prep him for surgery until we know his body can handle the stress. 
Ian: Agreed.  Let's monitor him closely in case he starts to go south on us.

Yes, you should monitor him closely to prevent his death!  As opposed to all the other ventilated, unconscious, multiple-seizure-suffering patients that you just roll into a dark room and hope for the best?  (He and Leyla truly are perfect for each other.)

Also, "ventilate"?  Is that the right verb?  I thought it was "intubate"?  Wait, I forgot!:  I don't care. 

Oh yeah, and Ian is actually the evil criminal who's been working with Jerry, and Emily finally "died" for real.  Yadda yadda snore.  I am far more interested in those oven mitts of gauze poor Steve Burton has been saddled with.  He looks a bit like he tried to be the Pillsbury Dough Boy for Halloween but made the critical mistake of putting the gloves on first.

That's...Bold. Is Bold the Right Word?

Krystal: Adam -- shh, shh, shh, just keep it down, ok, you're going to wake the baby.

Adam: Who let you in?

Krystal: Lucretia.

Adam: What the hell is going on here?

Krystal: What does it look like?

Tad: Krystal's moving back in.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that crime lords and assorted sadistic criminals were after my best friends and, by extension, me and I wanted to keep my daughter and wife safe.

So I try to think of places to hide them and keep them safe. I'm a PI, so I know all of the safe places in town.

The most logical and safest place in town is the mansion of my archenemy who happens to be the ex-husband of my current wife who, for the duration of my wife's pregnancy, thought he was the father of my daughter because my gold-digging wife (I say this with love) was perfectly content to lie to him about the baby's paternity if it got her access to his bank account, but they eventually had a falling out and he stranded her while she was in labor and eventually attempted to sell my daughter and I kind of foam at the mouth whenever his name is mentioned and take in his older children and try to indoctrinate them into my world where he is evil and I am the arbiter of all things good.

Sure, you may point out, the mansion of my archenemy was also the place where a serial killer killed my soulmate via poison pancakes, but what are the odds of a sadistic criminal striking twice in the same place? Slim to none, my friend, slim to none.

No matter how impressed I was with my brilliance or how stressed out I was over the fact that my friends and family might die, I like to think that, if push came to shove and it was a matter of life and death and I really needed my wife and daughter to live under the same roof as my archenemy/her ex-husband, I would at least have the decency to shoot an email over to my archenemy/her ex-husband, giving him a head's up so that he didn't walk into his house to find my freakshow family making themselves right at home and get snapped at for speaking loudly in his own home. Then again, my momma raised me right.

General Hospital Week in Review

I still don't really care about this show, but once you got past the cheesy "special" effects early in the week, without a stupid and implausible serial killer reveal or any more homicides of legacy characters, this week didn't suck quite as much as many.  I'm not interested enough to do a full-blown Week in Review (those are surprisingly labor-intensive, and require significant inspiration!), but there were, I suppose, events worth noting.

The "This Stuff Is So Stupid It Makes Me Yearn For the Realism and Depth of One Tree Hill" List:

• Alexis and Jerry should not happen.  I know the actors have great chemistry, and Alexis is long overdue for a romance, but NO.  The guy is a psychopath.  Among other things, he tried to kill her nephew!  WTF?  That is not foreplay. 

• Were the "special effects" just so Liz and Sam could once again be damsels in distress and Jason could once again be the hero?  Please.  Those two get into some horrible predicament almost weekly, like in the grocery store or at the dry cleaners.  (Don't even get me started on that park.)  And Jason is a hero.  He just is.  He looks good shirtless, he kills people for a living, he wears the same outfit every day.  What is not to idolize?  (Tune in next week, when I share my ABC Daytime-sponsored thoughts on how all strong women are bitches.)

• 1)  The black-and-white Spinelli fantasies MUST END.  They are ridiculously cheesy and totally out of place on this show, which supposedly prides itself on being the non-campy variety of soap.  Ick.   2)  Why couldn't Spinelli just email someone to get them rescued out of the sewer?  Instead, he futzed around on his laptop for hours trying to find some code to open that gate that itty-bitty Maxie then somehow managed to get trapped in.  So bizarre.  (I did love her myriad objections to the sewageyness of the sewer, though.)  Maxie continues to make Spinelli far, far more tolerable, but I still don't want them as a couple.  I think they need to bring someone new in for him.  And I think she'd be good with Nikolas.  But I am sick and earlier the room was spinning so maybe I'm talking nonsense.  (Not that I expect you to notice the difference.)

An LML Survivor Speaks Out

I'm sure that many of you have already seen the interview Carolyn Hinsey did with an anonymous Y&R actor about Lynn Marie Latham's time with the show and I'm way behind the times for only discussing it now (check back tomorrow for my thoughts on this new movie called Titanic!), but I simply have to comment on this anonymous Y&R actor.

He/she? Is awesome.

Here are some choice quotes:

Carolyn: I think she was talented, but she seemed to have a lot of pet causes for a one-hour show.

Actor: Oh, please [I like to think this was in reference to the 'she was talented' disclaimer, in which case...hee!!!--ed.]. We couldn't keep up! First it was, 'Why is everybody at the gym with this bottled water all the time? Don't they know that pollutes the environment?' So the bottled water was gone, not a huge loss. Then it was, 'Can I also say that the fires in the fireplaces, romantic though they may be, are polluting the planet in the worst possible way? You can't build a house anymore with a wood-burning fireplace. Let's stop that.' "Uh, okay, now we're doing a soap opera supposed to be about romance, without any fireplaces. Then she saw the movie "Blood Diamond" and that was it. No more diamonds.

Carolyn: I remember that, because Phyllis got a pink ring from Nick and I was like, "What the hell was that?"

Actor: Exactly. It looked like it came out of a Cracker Jack box. The other thing was, she didn't understand the character of Ashley. She wanted her out, too. Ashley was out.

Carolyn: IS Y&R going to murder [LML's friend's] character?

Actor: No, I think our producers are reluctant to have one more f--king murder in this town. I heard one of the new writers suggested maybe someone in town could read in the newspaper that the crime rate in Genoa City just dropped precipitously.

So much love.

Like everyone else reading it, I wonder who the actor is. It could be Michelle Stafford, but she's pretty forthright and I don't think she'd need to speak out anonymously with her face blurred like she's on an MSNBC documentary or anything. Melody Thomas Scott has every reason to despise Lynn Marie Latham, what with the whole firing her husband who was a long-time producer thing, but I would think her loathing would be so great that she wouldn't really care about things like bottled water and fireplaces. Mentioning the shabby treatment of Eileen Davidson's Ashley makes me think it's Peter Bergman, because he's made comments about that before, and if this is the case, I'd love him even more than I did before, which would bring my levels of love up to...um, stalkerish.

There's always the off chance that it's Hunter Allan, though.

Does Ricky Paull Goldin Have Low Self Esteem?

You know how certain people act out or cause physical harm to themselves because they believe they don't deserve to be happy? Does Ricky Paull Goldin have that condition? Is there any other explanation for him joining the cast of All My Children? Is the low self esteem caused by the extraneous l in his name?

I am really trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and not assume that he's out of his mind for doing something so foolish. Maybe it's some sort of community outreach program that he, Debbi Morgan and Darnell Williams are a part of where they try to make crappy things less crappy. Or perhaps he lost a cruel bet. I don't know.

I am not ultra familiar with him; I remember when he was a wackadoo stalker on The Young and the Restless, but I never watched Another World or Guiding Light (as if that's even a real show), so I haven't seen his most popular roles. But I think I might sort of love him, a little, because a trip to his IMDB page shows that he has appeared in award-winning movies like Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, Hyper Sapien: People from Another Star and Moment of Truth: Into the Arms of Danger. Someone who shows such commitment to quality programming, not to mention the colon, is completely worthy of my respect. Also, he played someone named Paul Mallory in a TV movie with Yasmine Bleeth about a crazy woman with plastic surgery. Awesome!

RPG's possible craziness aside, it will be interesting to have Jake Martin back in Pine Valley, if only to see exactly how many men Greenlee can have stories with at once. Between Aiden, Ryan, Zach (it's coming, people) and Jake, it will be...a very Greens heavy show. I didn't like Jake and Greenlee together the first time around (LEO&GREENLEE4EVER<33333333), but that could just be that my knee jerk reaction is to be irritated by J. Eddie Peck...

These Are the Soapy Components of Our Lives

Are you watching Days right now?  If not, you are missing out.  Especially if you are not watching Days and are watching GH.  I don't think I could continue on with soap-watching if I didn't have Days to balance out GH right now.  Take yesterday's episode; it had virtually every component of good soapiness.  (Bonus:  No Marlena!)

Classic supercouple, threatened by secrets from when she thought he was dead!

Batshit crazy interloper!

80s flashback!

((((((Mary Beth Evans' late-80s bangs))))))