Serial Drama

Interview With A Vampire King

Full disclosure, y'all. I did not watch Port Charles. It is the one blip in my ABC daytime soap viewing history. I mean I've got The City, Ryan's Hope, Loving, all of 'em. I did watch the very first episode of Port Charles with some friends over a great deal of what was probably tequila and we had good laughs at Audrey's impromptu brain surgery or whatever it was, but I did not have time in my schedule to take on another soap at the time. I was tempted by Lucy Coe, but it just never happened. I sort of vaguely knew about the evolution of the show into conceptual story arcs and I definitely knew that Caleb and Livvie were a hot item, but I don't have the full story.

And I'll admit, when I heard about this upcoming callback to the vampire story, I was less than excited. I'm always on the side of minor stunts or character "gets" that might add some viewers' eyes to the show so that it continues its uptick in ratings, but are there really that many Port Charles viewers who don't already watch General Hospital? And those who don't, would they really be lured back with this sort of thing? Not to mention that this is not like jumping Todd, Starr, and John over from One Life to Live. Because those are now GH characters. They are who they were on OLTL (well, the Todd part has been hotly debated, but you know what I mean). But didn't PC basically happen in some alternate universe? My feeling was always that PC events didn't really happen in GH's Port Charles unless it was occasionally convenient. You'd think someone on GH might have mentioned a vampire takeover in the town. Moreover, Kelly Monaco is not playing Livvie and Michael Easton is not playing Caleb. It's one thing to throw out a few winks at the audience like when Sam and John first met. But it's another to actually turn it into a story arc.

But then I heard this:

Lucy: I am just as impervious to you as I was the day you arrived in Port Charles with that stupid band of yours, thinking you could hypnotize everybody with the glamour. Well, you can't glamour me.

Look, I don't know what the everloving fuck she's talking about, but that is hilarious. HYPNOTIZE EVERYBODY WITH THE GLAMOUR?! He had a band? You mean like a band of marauders or something or a rock band? Either way I am REALLY EXCITED and I need to look this up.

Then later there was this gem:

Lucy: He's turning the police department into his own personal coven!

The PCPD, a coven! I'm enjoying the image. Plus, after Lucy stabbed John with a stake (!), she kept screaming that's he supposed to "combust." I am seriously going to have to hit up YouTube for some of this madness. Combust? I want to see a vampire combust on a daytime soap special effects budget, like, yesterday.

At Least There Are Some Silver Linings...

I hesitate to refer to this Trey situation as a missed opportunity, because that implies that I'd have liked to see more of Trey, and Trey and Kristina, and Trey and Connie, and I can honestly assure you that that is the opposite of the case; in the months that he's been on the show, the writing he's received has improved enough to take him from aggressively douchey to mildly irritating, but he never quite landed on entertaining. 

So it's not that I'm going to miss him. It's just that this show has the most frustrating need to...well, to kill. The writing staffs over the past decade have been frighteningly bloodthirsty, always willing to see someone exit in a body bag so that surviving actors can pad their Emmy reels. It's pretty wasteful. Why can't people just move? Or even be in a good old coma for a few years? What was the point in creating this character and giving him an elaborate and tortured backstory, and adding about ten layers of tragedy and horror to the already convoluted and depressing backstory of Connie, and saying "You know, I think we've hit all of the notes we could possibly hit with this guy, except for fully exploring his relationship with his mother. Next!"?

At any rate, Trey passed away surrounded by friends and people that he is technically related to but who he shared no interaction with since last summer. Let's all shrug half-heartedly in unison.

While we are having synchronized reactions to this show, let's flail our hands A LOT over McBain's befuddled reaction to hearing Lucy call him Caleb.

Michael Easton, you are a delight.

I wasn't watching Port Charles by the time it turned into a vampire telenovela so I have absolutely no idea what to expect with these two worlds colliding, but if it leads to hilarious McBain reaction shots, I'm all in. Crossing my fingers that he does a spit-take.

And then there was Carly and AJ. Carly is awful--I mean, she is just a beast of a human being. Snarling at AJ that he's a loser? Taunting him to drink? She is wretched. And yet...

All I could think when watching them was "OH MY GOD, KISS HIM ALREADY. A LOT AND FOR A LONG TIME!" Laura Wright and Sean Kanan have crazy chemistry (he actually has crazy chemistry with basically every female he interacts with. It makes me all flustered and giggly). All I want is to watch them banter. Please, GH. Make this happen.

The Bold & the -- FORGET IT, THERE ARE NO DESCRIPTORS

I'm seriously speechless about this, y'all. I mean I sat down to watch today's The Bold & the Beautiful and assumed I'd write up some rant about how annoyingly disloyal a mother they've made Brooke to Hope in this whole situation or how awful that scene was between Hope and Steffy in which Hope just literally spelled out her character arc and all the ways she's changed (you know, instead of B&B doing something crazy like demonstrating this character growth), but then the ending happened. And rendered all of that irrelevant.

If this shit does not end up on The Soup, then they've really been sleeping on the job.

I'm just going to walk y'all through in case you missed it, want to re-live it, or in case you simply won't believe me if I tell you it happened. Because really, you wouldn't. No sane person would.

Right, so Liam went to yell at his daddy because even though Liam is a spineless waffling douchenozzle, his father is basically a million times worse and Liam found out all about Bill's evil machinations. Liam had a sad.

And so you know those stupid little tiny swords that both Bill and Liam wear around their necks to be all bonded as Spencer men? (They really should each wear half of the same one where the two halves fit together, that'd be adorable.) Well, Bill begged Liam not to remove his, but Liam wanted no part of it anymore since Bill is a grade-A jackass of the highest order.

Enough of that! And off he went. But Bill wasn't done with him, and Bill especially wasn't done with the tiny little Spencer sword. No sir, he wasn't.

80% of Feeling Good is Looking Good

Okay, that title isn't really all that relevant, but when I turned on my TV before turning on the DVR for today's General Hospital, that was a direct quote from some sort of men's hair club commercial and I almost died laughing. 80%, you guys. Empirical fact! STUDIES HAVE SHOWN! And so I couldn't help but experience the entire episode in this context.

For instance, Trey doesn't look half bad. Sure, he's got some dark circles around his eyes, but he's a pretty boy. Brain dead? C'mon! When you look like that, chances are you feel good.

Carly has looked fabulous for two weeks of episodes. Seriously. Ridiculously fabulous. That hair! The sort of night-before smoky-eyes residue! That cute jacket! Plus she's a little less made up than usual, so her freckles are showing and I am a fan. And she always looks cute in jeans. So what's she feelin' so bad about? Please! Just because she just found out her ex-boyfriend killed some kids and blackmailed her current boyfriend, who it turns out swapped her friend's live baby out for a dead baby and is like the world's worst grandfather and was blackmailing her ex-boyfriend right back... I mean that's no reason to feel bad.

So 20% of her current state is not so great. She looks good, and that's 80%. Quit whinin'!

(And hey, shout out to this excellent sequence:

Sam: Sounds like you saw yourself in Todd. (laughs) You should've known that was a huge, huge mistake, Carly.

Carly: You know you can be a real bitch sometimes.

Sam: You know it takes one to know one.

Carly: You know, who knows, maybe I can use this for good? Maybe I can get women to line up their boyfriends in front of me, and if I'm attracted to them, they should run -- run -- for their lives.

Nice, ladies!)

Wholly Unbelievable!

Please don't misunderstand, it is TOTALLY believable that Carly would take a situation concerning, among other horrible things, dead children and make it all about her. And it is EQUALLY believable that she'd make it about her at the loudest and shrillest volume imaginable and make wounded faces while she self righteously lectures on the importance of honesty. This is CARLY. She is a terrible and hilarious human disaster who has never had an unselfish thought.

But for Carly to hear that Todd was involved in a baby switch involving Jason's child and say these words? I call the foulest of fouls.

Carly: The crazy thing is, I would have forgiven you. I would have been really mad about the whole Jason part, but I would have listened to you explain and I would have forgiven you. Hell, I would have gone to my grave defending you. But you didn't trust me enough to give me that choice.

The Carly I know and love and would be absolutely terrified of if she was a real person and I had the misfortune of knowing her would never forgive anyone for anything for even midly irritating Jason, so I am supposed to believe that she'd not only forgive Todd for keeping Jason away from his son but would also defend him for the rest of her life? No. I'm sorry, that would never happen. Ever. I don't even think Carly would go to her grave defending Morgan if he did something to upset Jason. She'd be more likely to send Morgan to his grave for upsetting Jason.

This is absurd, is what I'm saying.

The Hopeless & the Returning

Happy 2013, Serial Drama readers! Sorry we've been taking a while to get off the ground with the year's new episodes, but getting back into the swing of things post-holidays is always tricky (plus, co-writing that Best and Worst post drained my brain of so very many of its few remaining cells).

Do any of you have any stories of soapy ways you spent the holidays? I switched a few paternity tests (as is Christmas tradition in my family), but I also did a ridiculous amount of binge-viewing One Life to Live episodes from 2009 (the ones they show back-to-back weekdays on SoapNet, which I am blissfully lucky enough to still get from my cable carrier). Ross! Eli! Jared! Fish! Kyle! Rachel! The Defenestration of Blair Cramer! Dorian's Big Gay Wedding! It's all way too much fun.

Speaking of OLTL, I saw the play Water by the Spoonful tonight (it was this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama) and none other than Frankie Faison, aka Richard Evans aka Destiny's dad/grandpa aka Shaun and Greg's pop, had a major role in it. I highly recommend the production in every other way as well, but Mr. Faison did some really powerful and heartbreaking work. Warmed my heart to see him in action!

But let's get down to the real business of soap blogging! I am sitting down to watch yesterday's The Bold & the Beautiful, so let's check it out and see what that dastardly Bill is up to these days...

Hope's trying to get Liam to consider taking her back and he's all condescending and, "That's enough, Hope!" (Weird, he never said that to Steffy the six hundred times she kissed him while he was with Hope.)

Taylor asks Steffy about the Liam/Hope situation, and Steffy is perfectly confident that Hope is no threat.

Katie and Brooke are calling Bill out for drinking in the hospital waiting room. Katie tells him it's wildly inappropriate. "Wildly?" he says smugly. Bill leaves for a meeting with Justin and Brooke gives Katie a knowing look of some sort.

Oh em gee! Dani and Karen live! They stop by the hospital room to see Caroline. I always forget that she's their daughter since they're so much more interesting than she is.

Steffy tries to call Liam and Alison tells her he's with Hope. Meanwhile, Liam is continuing to insist to Hope that he's moved on and is not interested.