Serial Drama

The Icing On The Cake

On our ongoing list of Things General Hospital Ruins Without Even Trying, we can now add cake.

Damn it, GH! Why must you use chocolate cake for evil?! Although maybe cake is the Emily Post-approved gift of choice for thanking a hitman for doing his best to protect you from evil law enforcement agents after you broke the law multiple times...

The use of quotation marks cracks me up, though. As if Cook at the Quartermaine mansion was like "I refuse to say Stone Cold Rocks as if it were a factual statement, so I am just going to quote this obviously misguided sentiment". It would have only been more amusing if it had been Stone Cold "Rocks".

There were many wrong, baffling aspects to the toxic balls non-sweeps, non-event, but most wrong of all is that we are apparently stuck treading water until real sweeps happens later this month. Is anything ever going to happen on this show again? Or are we going to be subjected to repeated conversations endlessly while the writers kill time thinking of new and exciting ways to off Quartermaines during sweeps and finding out what post-partum depression actually is?

Well, to be fair, actually, something did happen on this show and it is something that has not happened in a long time: I was delighted by something Sonny Corinthos related. I KNOW, RIGHT? Shocking!

Fatal Attraction and Basic...Idiocy

Just to recap:

• When Reese's wife and alleged great love took their daughters and went back to France, Reese stayed behind in Pine Valley, where most people (and 99% of viewers) hate her and where she doesn't know anyone, because of some stupid "I've never been to me" reason.

• Julie Hanan Carruthers claimed that any AMC viewer who sees any sort of attraction between Reese and Zach is "rewriting what's not there", like we all make it through an hour of the show and immediately go around constructing elaborate fantasies about what really happened, when, really, our main thought is "Oh, god, in 24 hours I have to watch that again!"

On yesterday's episode, Reese and Zach had this pleasant conversation:

Reese: Kendall is wrong. I would never intentionally hurt either of you. You have to believe me.

Zach: I don't have to believe anything. Adam Chandler? What is that? Revenge? You want to go after my family because of that, because of revenge?

Reese: No, I want Bianca back, and I need to prove it to you. It starts with you.

Zach: No, it does not. You come after my family, we have a real problem.

Reese: Go ahead, walk away. Go.

I think what Zach was saying is pretty explicit, but apparently since Reese is great at everything, this includes being great at reading subtext and she interpreted that subtext to be "Please come over to my house tonight and we can discuss this further. You can bring some snacks, and I'll provide drinks. It will be fun! Peer into our windows first to make sure that we are home".

Which she did, putting approximately ten times more effort into repairing her relaitonship wth Zach than she has in trying to get Bianca back. And then she got all crestfallen when she lurked around the window and saw that Zach and Kendall had just had sex. And we are apparently not supposed to find her creepy!

I shudder to think what it must be like to have a social interaction with an AMC writer, as they obviously have no idea of what normal human behavior entails.

There is much more AMC to discuss! Next time: Zen sex, Emmy pre-noms and the promo of evil. Spoiler: it's all terrible!

Things That Are Not Okay in Salem (Hint: "Everything")

Mallory and I have an ongoing email conversation about which is worse, General Hospital or Days of Our Lives.  (And I mean "ongoing" in the broadest sense of the word, since this particular debate has been going strong since 2005 or so.)  Over the years, GH has generally taken the crown, since we were almost always able to say something along the lines of "Sure, Days is incredibly [boring/nonsensical/ridiculous], but GH [killed 17 people yesterday/fed a Quartermaine to lions/had Sonny and Carly have disgusting sex in a limo]."  Lately, though -- and it's entirely possible this is due to GH's high concentration of attractive people because please remember we are shallow first and foremost -- Days has been taking the title.  It is unbelievably boring and poorly written, and the boring and poorly written lines are said by characters that you either don't give a crap about or that weren't even on the canvas two years ago.  I don't know what's going on with the ratings, which I heard are actually up (?!?!?), because I almost have to be forced under threat of violence (and/or cranky blog comments) to watch it.

Anyway, as is probably obvious by this point, there isn't a whole lot in Salem that's setting my world on fire in any kind of good way these days, so I am compelled to focus only on the negative (much to my obvious and heartfelt dismay, obvi).  Let's take a closer look at the many things that are, using one of my favorite super-sophisticated analytic phrases, very much not okay, shall we?

Not okay:  Chloe as devoutly religious.

I'm sorry, this was hilarious.  Something about Nadia Bjorlin's way of just rolling her eyes toward the ceiling sent me over the edge into outright giggling, which is probably not exactly what the writers were going for.  (Not to imply that they are going for anything in particular, because I've seen no evidence of that.)

 

 

I cannot stop laughing.  For real.  I've looked at those screencaps at least a dozen times, and I laugh every single time.  I am easily entertained.  Which makes this show's inability to do so all that much sadder.

While we're talking about Chloe, I must discuss another thing that is not okay, specifically her hair (spoiler: bad hair is going to be a theme today!).

It Ain't Me, Babe. It's You.

The pain I feel while watching All My Children usually doesn't start in earnest until the show goes to its first commercial, but I barely made it twenty seconds into Friday's episode before my head started to throb.

Krystal: Too much, huh? What's your going rate? You were incredible tonight. Babe would have been proud. I know I was.

I am so sick of hearing about Babe that I can't even come up with a witty metaphor to describe it. She died in freaking October, which is almost a decade in soap time, but her memory has not faded from the show yet, and how can it, when she is mentioned every thirty seconds?

I am sick of hearing about how she shimmered, I am sick of hearing about how she made the world a better place, I am sick of hearing about how it's an insult to her memory that Amanda is sleeping with JR as if there's a more fitting memorial to Babe than sleeping with multiple men. I am sick of the revisionist history claiming that she was this amazing angel who always thought of others when the words "bigamist", "liar", "babynapper", "adulteress", "smug", "tramp" and "waste of space and screentime" come to mind.

It's getting to the point that when I hear people use "babe" as a term of endearment, I do a full-body shudder. It took me a while to realize the other day that Jesse was referring to Angie, an actual babe, as "babe" and was not having a random soliloquy to Babe's memory, and then I started to wonder how long until that random Jesse soliloquy actually happens.

But, I wondered, maybe I'mnot being fair to AMC. Maybe it's just thefact that I hated Babe with a passion usually reserved for short, unrepentant criminals that is making me feel like this show is All Babe, All The Time.

So I decided to take my thorough research skills and investigate how many times Babe has been mentioned since January 1st of this year. I am fully aware that I am opening myself up to criticism for being a nerd and having nothing better to do, but I wanted to be sure that my hatred of this show was completely justified!

(I also needed something to do while I caught up on Law and Order besides doodling I <3 Cutter on my Trapper Keeper)