Serial Drama

The Words I've Been Waiting To Hear

My fondness for David Canary is well-documented and potentially worrisome to his family and friends; I promise I'm not dangerous, Mr. Canary! I just really, really love you and would like to have a conversation with you over a cup of tea. It's just that the conversation may just be giggling on my end, but--you know, I'm just going to take a break from digging this whole for myself and say that even though I knew I was excited about Adam returning to the show, I was taken aback by just HOW excited I am.

Colby: Hi, Dad. We really need you.

Why would that make a person tear up?! I don't know, but I did! Maybe because it's true: we do! We do need you, Adam. And by we, I mean AMERICA. America needs Adam Chandler. And not just Adam Chandler smirking cockily at JR from a picture frame, although that is delightful for sure.

So much of All My Children right now has me weepy. David and Cara are so sweet and sparkly together that it makes me tear up (is Lindsay Hartley a miracle worker or something? She is able to pique my interest in characters I had long written off as fatally irksome. Except that not even Cara could make Jake remotely okay...). And Tad and Dixie. Tad and Dixie! GUYS.

Tad: Dixie, please come home. From the bottom of my heart, please. Please live with me.
Dixie: From a first date to moving in?
Tad: Well, you know what Chicken Little said.
Dixie: Uh, the sky is falling?
Tad: It's a new day. And that's exactly how I'd like to wake up every day. Every morning, for the rest of our lives together. With humor and with love.
Dixie: There's no other way I would like to wake up.
Tad: You know you wanna!
Dixie: Woo! Is that an egg in your basket, or are you just happy to see me?

Tears. Actual tears. Like, 36 hours ago I was complaining to someone that Tad and Dixie weren't doing it for me this time around and that I was still bitter that I didn't get the Tad/Cara romance I've been publicly begging for and here I am, watching dopes in a chicken suit crying.

The closer we get to the end of this show's run on ABC, the uglier I think it is going to get for me. I am probably going to be--literally!--shaking and crying two weeks from now, and full-on ugly-sobbing whenever someone says the words "all", "my", or "children".

What Are These People Even Talking About?

I'm a little confused. Two episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful in which nobody even mentioned the trials and tribulations of a nineteen-year-old girl's virginity? There are other things in the world that are relevant? I'm baffled here, people.

Honestly, I do apologize for having been such a B&B blogging slacker lately, but it's been weeks now of every single episode being about Hope losing her virginity or not losing her virginity and Liam being willing to wait or not willing to wait or Steffy trying to tempt Liam and being successful or totally unsuccessful. And when it's not one of those three? It's the entire rest of the town having conversations about the "issue." It's been truly tedious and I was sincerely questioning my commitment to sticking with this show for the foreseeable future. If I had to see that supremely unsexy video of Steffy prancing around in lingerie that covered more than the average dress, with the most irritating song in history about how you should "stop being a good girl," I was going to lose it. To add insult to injury, her family members were watching this video and then watching various men drool over it (while not discussing Hope's virginity, of course).

But now they're finally shaking things up. Now! We actually have some hints of a story with Justin and Donna (seriously, I've been watching again for months now and it took me a minute to remember their names). Stephanie's back and at odds with Taylor and confiding in Brooke. Steffy and Taylor actually had a sweet, fun mother-daughter bonding scene today. Taylor saw some sort of a clairvoyant who told her she's going to meet a man soon -- and it appears to be Nick (no joke, another name I had to start looking up... which considering he's played by the obvious great love of my life, this is a problem)! Will Taylor actually get a love interest?

And most importantly, Steffy got bangs!

The world has changed!

Llanview, Town of False

I've been quite the letter-writer to my OLTL pals lately and today was inspired to write a letter to Téa Delgado, but partway through writing it I realized it would be better to talk behind her back because (a) I was unable to find polite ways to word my thoughts and (b) the poor woman is grieving right now so I'll give her a break. So tonight I'll be talking about a few of our favorite Llanview charmers behind their backs. Does it make me terrible? I'm just blowing off steam, y'all! That doesn't make me a mean girl, right?

Allow me to start by saying all the residents of that messed-up little town need to give up one particular pursuit as soon as possible. They need to stop having arguments about whether Todd was a worse person than Victor or Victor was a worse person than Todd. They're both psychotic asshole rapists that hold different levels of interest to various different observers of the town and evoke sympathy from various passers-by for a number of reasons. They need to stop pretending that either one of them is or was a good guy. (In fact, for years it was to the show's credit that for the most part we were never asked to think either one of them was an out-and-out swell guy, but this seems to have changed. In an effort to deepen the grief of Victor's loved ones, he has now been remembered repeatedly as a doting and loving father and as an attentive grandfather who was allegedly "so good" with Hope. No. He wasn't. And we're all sophisticated enough viewers to be able to feel for his grieving family without being told retroactively that he was sweet and tender and caring and wonderful. No. He wasn't. Not even a little bit. As I may have mentioned once or twice, we can still feel sad for his loved ones' loss just based on their own experiences with him. Credit here? Please?)

Okay, actually none of this is true according to Téa. Victor is a good guy who made some mistakes, while Todd is a sexually dysfunctional unfeeling monster. And a rapist, while Victor is not. Whoa. Téa's right about one thing: Victor was not an official sex offender. That's because Téa heard about the charges against Victodd (let's just call him that for the times during which everyone thought he was Todd) and came to town specifically to represent him and get those charges dropped. But today, according to Téa, she was suspicious at the beginning that he wasn't really Todd, despite her first lines to him upon her return in 2008 being, "A whole new face, only I could recognize you anywhere." At the time, she thought he was the man who acted as ringleader in a gang rape against Marty and then years later held her captive while she had amnesia and fed her lies about who she was and who he was until she fell in love with him and he slept with her while she was unable to give valid consent because of his own machinations. That version of Todd was worth returning to and representing in a court of law. But the (Vic)Todd who only did the last part of that is a poor fellow who makes mistakes, while the Todd who did the first part of it is somehow worse than the one who she thought did both?! I'm just trying to follow the logic here. That seems to be the equation laid out, but the math doesn't add up.

On A Scale of Uncomfortable To Cringe-Worthy, This Wasn't Actually So Bad

When one considers how typically--and boldly and brazenly over-the-top..ily--un-subtle General Hospital's writing tends to be ("How can we make the audience understand that Jason Morgan is a HERO? I know, we'll have every character on the show say 'Jason Morgan is a HERO! He SAVES LIVES!"'), today's Hershey's Chocolate Milk product placement was nowhere near as bad is it could have been.

Because I've seen bad product placement before, people: there are some YA novels that namedrop at least a dozen products or designers per page (it's not uncommon to see a passage like, "She twirled her hair, the highlights--touchup courtesy of the Richard Ward Salon!--in her ponytail perfectly complementing the gold Tiffany ring she wore on her right hand. Smoothing out the skirt of her Chloe dress and praying that she didn't trip in her Marc Jacobs wedges, she strutted out the door, hoping that there wouldn't be too long a line at Starbucks...") and, well...Days of Our Lives. Midol. Need I say more? I apologize if that unearthed memories you'd been attempting to repress.

So Cam (!) and Liz's ode to Hershey's Chocolate Milk? I took it in stride.

Elizabeth: Hey buddy, guess what I've got for you?
Cameron: What?!
Elizabeth: I thought we should celebrate your first back at school with your favorite: Hershey's Chocolate Syrup! Yaayyy! What, no yay? What's the matter?
Cameron: Jake loved it, too. I used to make it for both of us.
Elizabeth: I know. You miss your brother, don't you? You know what? I miss him a lot, too. I have an idea. Do you know what a toast is?
Cameron: The thing that we do with the brownies?
Elizabeth: Yes, exactly. But doing it with brownies is a little weird. Most of the time, people do toasts with special drinks, and what's more special than Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, right?

It wasn't that bad, right? Plus, I appreciate how the writers decided to throw in some gratuitous mentions of Jake. "Just in case they hate it, let's throw in something completely un-mockable. Like...a dead kid! Make fun of that, you soulless cretins, but just remember: they don't have Hershey's Chocolate Syrup IN HELL".

But that doesn't mean we're totally in the clear as far as discomfort goes, because if I know GH, this thing with Steve is going to go to some embarrassing, poorly written places.

Olivia: [Blows Steve a kiss]
Steve: [Deep in thought, remembers the sound of a guitar twang and the applause of an adoring crowd, hinting at either a past filled with musical fame or some sort of mental illness that manifests itself through narcissistic daydreams]

Actually, if I know GH, this will never be brought up again...

Well, You Take The Good, You Take The Bad, You Take Them Both And There You Have....

....the Facts of One Life to Live.

Some of the bad:

• First of all, Kim is the real Aubrey and actually Cutter's real sister. Bad enough in itself (can any character on this show be unrelated to someone else ever?). And so now the Wentworths were poor? I thought part of the whole deal with the back story was that Joey wouldn't believe Aubrey (aka Christine) was after his money because she came from the well-known Wentworth family. Didn't we hear phrases like, "She's a Wentworth, why would she marry for money?" several times?
• Just after they seemed to be giving Jack Manning some sliver of a conscience about his past misdeeds, they did a complete reversal. What a DICK, y'all. On top of everything else? He grabbed adorable little Sam and yelled at him that his father is dead.

Get your hands off little Sam, you little sociopath turd!

• Watching Cris try to reconnect with Jessica made me incredibly uncomfortable. There was something very sweet about it because there's something very sweet about Cristian, but it was a little cringe-inducing.
• Dani has already spent more episodes grieving over Victor than she did over the man she thought was her father for fifteen years. I realize Ross was just a recurring character and this was a male lead being killed off so it's obviously going to get more screen time, but I might still be bitter about Ross. It's not that I think this reaction is inappropriate, it's that that one lasted a day. And her big speech about how she's barely even met her biological father and the man she thought was her father is now dead? Eh, that should be old hat by now for her, right? 
• Hints continue to be dropped fast and heavy that stupid effing Stacy Morasco is still alive.

Sucks So Good: True Blood 4.11, "Soul of Fire"

Let me start out with a huge THANK YOU to all of you who stepped in for me and took over recapping duties while I was out on Irene leave. After five days without power, I have finally caught up on all of my soaps, both daytime and primetime, and am ready to dive back into the happenings in Bon Temps (and Port Charles and Pine Valley, but those are substantially less exciting).

And we only have ONE MORE WEEK of excitement in Bon Temps before a cruel, cruel autumn and winter and spring. Why must that always happen? We spend twelve glorious weeks peering into the zany brain of Alan Ball and then, abruptly, it's over. It's downright depressing, is what it is.

After the gratuitous Northman, click after the jump for "Soul of Fire".

I Love Lucci

I'm pleased to know that if I were to ever--fingers crossed!--spend an extended amount of time with Susan Lucci, we'd have a lot to talk about (I mean, a lot to talk about following a series of questions that I'd try really hard to make more conversational and less interrogation-like: "Which of Erica's weddings was your favorite? Is David Canary as adorable in person as he is on the show, or is he even more so? How do you get your hair so big?"). Like, we could probably fill at least three hours trading stories of just how much Brian Frons is THE WORST, EVER because Susan Lucci hates him.

The New York Post has a glimpse of the new epilogue to La Lucci's memoir which includes a takedown of the world's least favorite entertainment executive.

"I think our being in this position is the result of some very bad decisions by [Frons].”

The Emmy winner claims Frons oversaw “subpar” writing when he installed soap vet Chuck Pratt as headwriter in 2008 and pushed out AMC creator Agnes Nixon. She also maintains that Frons told her last spring that the legendary sudser would be replaced by food-based talk show The Chew because it was cheaper to produce.

“An iconic show was losing out to greed,” she allegedly writes. “If Brian Frons could show his bosses that he could save the network 40 percent … he could keep his job even if the rest of us lost ours… I watched Brian Frons’ decisions destroy the production of our show and the lives of people on both sides of the country… [He] has what, for me, is that fatal combination of ignorance and arrogance. I cannot fathom any network executive choosing to alienate millions of loyal viewers in these economic times.”

First of all: STARS! They're just like us! Except their smackdowns tend to be polite (calling Pratt's writing "subpar" is probably the biggest compliment he could ever hope for) and eloquent and most of my commentary on the increasingly bad decisions made by Frons have tended to be a string of expletives and a caps lock HATE! for good measure, but still, we're totally on the same wavelength here.

And secondly: yes, yes, a million times yes! I hope more people follow this trend of publicly calling out Frons on being LUDICROUSLY inept.

The Catch Up Blues

If you'll pardon the caps for just a moment: OH MY GOD, IT FEELS SO GOOD TO TYPE! AND HAVE LIGHTS, TEMPORARILY! DAMN YOU, IRENE!

As much as I wish my extended blogging hiatus were for a fun reason, it...is not: Hurricane Irene didn't do as much damage as anticipated; bitch just robbed me of power. For days. It has been--well, let me put it this way: yesterday afternoon at 3, I thought to myself wistfully, "I should be watching General Hospital right nwo!" and almost burst into a stream of legitimately sad tears. Terrifying, right?

There is still no word yet on when I'll actually have television, but ABC.com should get me caught up enough eventually. Until then: what have I missed, folks?! If you tell me that I missed an epically great week of soapdom, I will...well, I will not believe you. But after I accuse you of lying, I will cry in jealousy.