Criminals and the Criminally Lame

It took me all of six minutes to watch today's episode of All My Children. I started the episode with the best of intentions, planning to watch the entire thing with...well, not exactly with an open mind, but I was going to try not to pre-judge the episode and sit through the whole thing, which was a ridiculous goal to begin with, so it's unsurprising that I failed, ESPECIALLY since the show revolved mainly around Annie's trial and the drama surrounding Madison, her father and Randi. Those are two plots GUARANTEED to have me diving for the remote and pressing the fast forward button so violently that I sprain a finger.

As far as the former is concerned, we all know how I feel about Pine Valley's version of the justice system. To recap: I feel pure hatred for it, and watching the circus that is Annie's trial is not easy for me.

And as to the latter...I generally have no problem being honest about my feelings and have a tendency to be blunt, overly harsh and incredibly critical and even I feel bad talking about Denise Vasi's performance. She seems like a lovely girl, and she tries so, so hard! So I feel like I am saying nasty things about an adorable puppy when I say that the show could easily recast her with a Cabbage Patch doll and have an animatronic voice read Randi's lines and viewers would either not notice or they'd wonder why Randi all of a sudden has so much more screen presence. See?! I am a mean and awful person! Although to be fair, she's not at all helped by the writers, who have made Randi nearly too dumb to function and boring on top of that.

But there IS a silver lining to the Madison/Randi/Madison's Creepy Father story, albeit a silver lining that rewrites history: Erica's memories of her own troubled past. Now, as far as I know, Erica's father wasn't abusive--he abandoned her, not abused her, right? And the scenes that Erica is remembering from her fourteenth birthday party are from when Richard Fields raped her (and got her pregnant with Kendall), not from anything with her father hurting her, which seems to be what the show is trying to sell. I am not at all surprised that this show blithely ignores and/or tramples on history, I'm just pointing that out. Unless I am wrong, which is possible.

Where was I? Oh, right, silver lining: the show is giving us the MOST AMAZING FLASHBACKS EVER TELEVISED: SUSAN LUCCI AS FOURTEEN YEAR OLD ERICA.

The world is a better place because of the insane decision they had in the mid-90s to film these ridiculous flashbacks.

Comments

[Beth R.]

You are correct in your memory of what the flashbacks of the fakebacks were actually about but OMG...FLASHBACKS TO FAKEBACKS FAN FOR LIFE!!!

[Carl]

I still really can't believe they actually had Susan Lucci do those flashbacks, especially since, around the 1993-1994 era, she was sometimes made up to be very matronly. Maybe they did that to compensate for her having a daughter who was, depending on the episode, either 16 or 21.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0JeAAfLYWQ

They really have tried so hard to make people care about Madison. I know Stephanie Gaschet has some following from her GL days, but she's always seemed very blank to me.

I preferred the Annie story when Janet did it 14 years ago. The defending herself in court story.

[L.]

Okay, if soaps actually have this kind of vintage footage, why can't they freaking release dvd box sets of when people actually wanted to watch these shows?

[Season]

Well, her father was responsible for the rape. He offered his daughter to Richard.

[Elizabeth Kerri Mahon]

I get the feeling that TBTB had no plans at all for Madison to stick around, and then they decided to keep Stephanie Gatschet, so now they've rewritten her from a spoiled rich brat who killed her husband to an abused victim which I find annoying. Why can't Danielle come back as an intern at the hospital, and Randi has to deal with her husband being around a beautiful, accomplised woman, while she doesn't even have a job as a receptionist at Fusion anymore? I know they are trying to play up that Frankie likes to rescue women but I'm not buying the Madison Kool-Aid.