Serial Drama

Everything Is Awesome (and All Is Forgiven)

No seriously. Life is good.

How freaking great was today's episode? What a payoff!

I'm not going to launch into some mea culpa here, because any anger I'd expressed regarding Duke's characterization since his return has been based on the assumption that this was Duke and, dammit, I expressed several times that I would accept any explanation that would fix it. So here I am, accepting the explanation! It's fixed!

Sure, by Friday when the Duke mask came off (yeah, that's now a real sentence!!), we knew it wasn't really Duke. And I doubt too many people were shocked today by the reveal that it's really Faison -- I'm sure that's who about 99.9% of us (at least those who are long-time viewers) were certain it would be. But you know what? Sometimes exactly the thing you expect is exactly the thing you need. Would I have loved a total shock the way I got one on Ian Buchanan's first day back? Sure, but honestly, I do not care. Because this was way too awesome to play the whole, "Whatever, I saw it coming" card. Because I did see it coming, and IT WAS STILL AMAZING.

On so many levels, y'all! SO MANY LEVELS. First, it means we also got Anders Hove back. It means we got scenes between Anders Hove and Kimberly McCullough. It means we got scenes between Faison and Robin in which a chunk of skin from the Duke Lavery mask was hanging off of Faison's neck.

If that's not fun soap, I don't know what is. And then he ripped it off, all evil-like!

Oh, Mr. Hove, how I've missed you and your menace and the spectacular way you pronounce "fruition!"

Doing My Civic Duty, Like the Citizens of Port Charles

Well, it seems the "good" people of Port Charles all voted today -- my heart goes out to the task ahead of any elected officials in that town! And I voted too, as I'm sure the vast majority of you did. I feel it's my civic duty now to distract myself from watching windbag pundits and election returns and all the early conspiracy theories from both sides of the aisle by watching the utterly non-partisan General Hospital and babbling a little about today's episode!

A few thoughts:

- I happen to know of several people who are likely thrilled that Anna is gradually phasing out her "ombre" hair color. There are still traces of it, but fewer by the day.

(I hereby confess that I liked the ombre. I thought it looked great on her, what can I say? But this looks great too. Finola Hughes would have to work really, really hard to look not good.)

- Turns out Sabrina is Juan's cousin, and she filled Liz in on this fact. Is it exciting? It is not. Juan was dull as dirt. But is it adorable because Becky Herbst is married to the actor who played Juan? It is definitely adorable. More importantly, Liz's tales of the Nurse's Ball have gotten Sabrina all excited about ressurecting it. Liz tells her the hospital doesn't have the budget (perhaps offering up a wink-wink mea culpa to the audience about GH's budget as well?), but ain't no way they're bringing this up so much (and bringing back Lucy Coe for a freakin' visit!) just to shrug it off. Valentini and Carlivati managed to eke out entire musical episodes of OLTL on what was probably an even smaller budget, after all (dear lord I hope that was a relatively small budget). It's happening. Oh, it's happening. And man am I psyched.

- "Jax and Sonny survived that explosion; why wouldn't Jerry?" -- Sam, the only apparent brain-possessing Port Charles resident in regards to Jerry's "death."

A Visit to TV's Beverly Hills

I don't have the faintest idea what's possessed me to do this instead of writing about today's General Hospital or The Bold & the Beautiful but... wait, I do. More Sandy coverage meant they didn't record and I have to watch them online, and can I just whine about all the pausing I have to do to take notes while watching an episode on the computer I'm using to take said notes? LIFE IS SO HARD. 

So instead, I'm sitting down to something that did record. And hey, it's a soap, so I'll write about it. I don't know how many of you watch 90210 (as in the new version, not the original decade-long parade of bad fashion and smug behavior and general awesomeness), but I admit it. I do. It was god-awful for the first two seasons and then it shifted somehow and stopped trying to be something it wasn't and embraced its ridiculousness. And then another weird shift happened where I started loving the characters I had hated (Naomi and Ivy, for instance) and loathing the characters I'd loved (Silver and Adriana, for instance). Sometimes I hate-watch, sometimes I snark-watch, and sometimes I actually find myself being genuinely entertained.

Now the embarrassing truth is out there. Monday nights don't offer much amusing television, and tonight's How I Met Your Mother decided to stop being a rough copycat of Friends but with a fun gimmick and better continuity and mythology and turn into Friends, Part II with just not even a hint of an attempt to hide it (okay, I did like the little dog). So here I am, sitting down as Naomi, Annie, Ade, and Silver sit down to some salads. Naomi's talking about how she has to get a Brazilian before hubby Max returns in two hours, which seems like not enough time to let the burning and swelling go down but whatevs. I hear waxing in Bev Hills is magic! Ade and Dixon, apparently, are going to start focusing on their careers again so at least there will be something to fast-forward soon! 

Apparently Silver's little nude photo session has gone viral and some dude sends champagne over to the girls, which by process of elimination means Annie has to be the one to go say hello to this guy. Poor guy. He didn't know!

Liam apparently has a supermodel for a professor. This supermodel is very unimpressed with him, so I wonder how long till we see some gratuitous scene of Liam dry-humping her up against a chalkboard.

Something's going on with Adriana and Dixon and their "career," which somehow involves that dude Adriana was boning when Dixon got rammed by an eighteen-wheeler, which is about as exciting as... nothing. But I think his name is Taylor?

Silver is all offended that the nude photos of her are out there, so she gets all smug and pious about it because she is Erin Silver and it's kind of her thing. Her sister went through that phase, too, but at least her sister had unfortunate haircuts and smugmeister Brandon as things to blame.

At least Silver has nice hair this season. 
Colin, the dude from the bar, uses his fancy computer skills to remove all of the nekkid photos of Silver from the worldwide web. And yet Annie still turns him down for a date!

Catch Me, I'm Falling (Even Farther Behind)

Again, we offer our sincerest apologies for the Serial Drama radio silence lately--recent days have been all about recovering from Hurricane Sandy, who wiped out my power for days which left me very cold, very stressed out, very apt to put my makeup for work on completely crookedly, and very much fumbling to catch up on, oh, every single aspect of my life. I hope all of our Northeast readers are safe and sound and well on their way to regaining their pre-Sandy sanity.

After my power was restored and I cranked the heat up as high as it would go while embracing my hair dryer, I had myself a General Hospital marathon, because I wanted to at least know what was going on before diving back into the show this week. And, to be honest, I spent much of the blackout  daydreaming about how epic it must be in Port Charles to have AJ back and how the show was firing on all cylinders the week before. All of those things were true and then some, and can we reflect for a minute on how strange it is to devour multiple episodes of General Hospital and NOT search wildly for the number for poison control?!

So imagine my disappointment when the bulk of today's episode was preempted in New York for another Mayor Bloomberg press conference. And then imagine my hand-flailing excitement when the last few minutes of the show aired and included AJ and Monica and ALAN and FLASHBACKS and OHMIGOD, it was a fantastic six minutes of television. Who knows what the rest of the episode could have contained?!

(No, seriously, do any of you know what happened for the majority of that hour? Consider this an open post to talk about today's show or anything from last week that you're dying to discuss. Regular posting will resume soon!)

The Bummer & the Creepy

First, my apologies for our relative blog silence this week. I've been sort of half-following the soaps, but not with much clarity throughout and in the aftermath of that bitch Hurricane Sandy. So this one's going to be super-brief but I just kind of wanted to check in. I hope all our Serial Drama readers are safe and sound, and that you have somewhere comfortable to stay if you are without power or water or if your home has been damaged. 

Second, we didn't so much have Halloween in our part of the country, but happy Halloween nonetheless! (And have a happy one next week if you're in the rescheduled-Halloween zone!) The soaps usually throw a little love Halloween's way, so I was a little psyched to see what they came up with.

General Hospital started their big old Halloween party, so I'm sure a plethora of soap blogs and websites will have a lot of great screencaps for you (or maybe a weekend roundup here if things settle down?). How adorable was Dante's robber? How apt was Josslyn as corn... what with her slightly resembling a Child of the Corn (really, more like a kid in Village of the Damned, but I'll make the leap)? How hilariously awesome was AJ's Grim Reaper look? And Duke meeting Emma warmed my heart in memory of Duke and Robin's former relationship, which may have made me grumpy under the current state of his character, but I took it on its own and loved it.

But mostly I was curious about how The Bold & the Beautiful would tackle October 31st, considering none of their current storylines really lend themselves to costume balls. Hey, y'all, Stephanie's dying, let's dress up like goblins! Katie has PPD, let's take her to a haunted house!

So instead, they actually found a nice small way to honor the seriousness of their current stories while still giving a little nod to Halloween. Katie moved into a month-to-month rental (where she'll presumably wait out Heather Tom's maternity leave?) and started seeing much creepier home decor (in what was already pretty grim home decor).