[RW: Chicago (2002)]

19 minutes ago, choclatechip45 said:

Also is Chris the most boring person that has ever appeared on The Real World?

Oh, I liked Chris and found him interesting enough, just laid-back and big on the "recovery-speak," I just thought he was that calm, levelheaded person who occasionally ends up on the show and isn't going to be involved in the shit-stirring, so has sounding-board scenes. Pam in San Francisco was another one. 

Not sure who my most-boring-person candidate would be for the seasons I saw. If they went beyond a certain level of forgettable, I probably forgot them! 

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

26 minutes ago, ljenkins782 said:

To be fair, I think Tonya had already commandeered the phone multiple times by the time Kyle made this observation. It was in an early episode, but it might have been said several days in.

It might have been, but I don't think several days in, one of Kyle's new roommates would have been saying, "And then there's Chris. What do you think of him?" and so on, going down the list. It sounded like a first- or second-day powwow. 

Maybe Tonya was on the phone a lot from the jump and also dropping Justin's name all the time. Those behaviors would fit what we saw. And Kyle seemed pretty familiar with the show and its standard types. It does seem there's always at least one person whose preexisting relationship becomes a big story. Joe and Nic. Montana and Vaj. Nathan and Stephanie. Danny and Paul. Kyle himself and Nicole were a topic I heard much more about than I needed to. 

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

5 hours ago, choclatechip45 said:

Did it ever come out what Kyle's political sutff was a code word for?

Here's a quote from Keri: 

By the end of the season, I just didn't want to worry about my relationship with him anymore. I accused him of being phony and it was a disaster. I should have said stuff in a more sugarcoated way. The truth was, I'd been meaning to talk to him for a while. I wanted to know if he thought we'd be friends after the fact. And I wanted to find out if he'd done stuff for the cameras. I was absolutely wasted and ended up blurting out accusations and being tactless. Everything I wanted to say came out in five minutes of insults. Tonya said that Kyle told her he'd invited his little brother over so the cameras could see the brotherly side of Kyle. I'd also heard he applied to be a substitute teacher so it could get on camera. I ended up telling Kyle that he was fake. There's definitely an element of politician in him. I think Kyle was working on his political career the whole time he was in the house. Anyway, it ended up being a crazy conversation. I fumbled everything I'd thought about saying. I ended up hurting Kyle's feelings very badly, then feeling really guilty. It was just awful. 

So I think "political career" was partly meant at face value (maybe he'd mentioned that running for office was one of the things he might do someday) and partly just meaning he tried to control his image on the show with the intention of using it as a stepping stone for other things.

He definitely is in the right lane now as a sports media bro. Surely a better fit than acting. 

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

Aneesa said in the book for that season that she had no idea why Tonya did the show. Then she speculated on her own question, "Yeah, 'exposure'...for God knows what." It is a bit of a mystery. The Challenge was going on then, but it was smaller and lower-key than it would become, so I don't think anyone was yet doing Real World or Road Rules just to get into the contestant pool. They hadn't adopted the Survivor-influenced format yet.

Maybe she thought she would like and connect with her roommates more than she did, but honestly, I think if you had put her in any of Hawaii, New Orleans, or Back to New York, she'd have been exactly the same: complaining about other people in the cast being exhibitionistic and crass, complaining that the black guy made her feel scared, using a fake-sounding sick voice to get out of work assignments, wanting to go home, and constantly talking on the phone with her boyfriend, How did she watch any of the then-recent seasons and think this would go well?

I couldn't stand Kyle, but he reminded me occasionally that he wasn't dumb. In one of the earliest episodes, one of the women was going down the list of their new roommates with him and they were comparing notes. I can't remember whether it was Keri, Aneesa, or Cara, but when she mentioned Tonya, Kyle said he thought she was going to be wrapped up in her boyfriend the whole time they were there.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

I looked it up, and Maxie was in the "I feel lightheaded" phase on May 21 of last year. That was the last week of completed episodes before the pandemic preemption.

The first week of new episodes after that (August) had her finding out she was pregnant and however far along.  

I think if it had been a normal year, this pregnancy wouldn't have felt so distended. What's going on now might have been in February. But they've included a bunch of calendar markers like Halloween, Election Day, Christmas, and Valentine's Day, so it's seemed comically drawn out. Given that she was several weeks along when she was feeling lightheaded, it's really more like a 14-month gestation. We're blowing past sea cows and into the realm of giraffes!

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

Aw, Braising are getting a Liason club remix. Jason's going to ease Britt's troubles by helping her paint uh, examine the wind? Diagnose the wind? Consult on the wind?

In spite of myself, I do still find them sweet.   

I've been told so many times that Phyllis and Lenny are wonderful, good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth people that I'm wondering if they qualify as Mary Sues.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

8 hours ago, Bastet said:

I'd forgotten how homophobic Theo and Tonya were; I guess it makes a sad sort of sense given how insular the environments whence they c ame, so it will be interesting to re-visit how they do or do not evolve over the course of their time here.

Oh, Cara.  At least she freely owns up to being "that girl" who has never been without a boyfriend and gets her validation from men wanting her sexually and acknowledges that's not healthy, and I do remember resenting how the show chose to focus on her sex life, but she's hard to take.

Theo surprised me over the course of the season. I liked him much better by the end than I thought I was going to, because he said some things in the early episodes that made me think "They still make you in 2002?"

I think he changes in a realistic way, a matter of degrees. He did seem genuine, I'll give him that. Considering he came in with the whole "playa" thing going on besides being from a very religious background, I give him credit for broadening his horizons a little.  

Cara, though...ugh. She struck me as one of those people who are always "confessing" and "analyzing" and never actually doing anything to improve themselves, but expecting gold stars for their "insight." It wears thin quickly.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

29 minutes ago, choclatechip45 said:

Do you remember what Kelley/David audition tapes were?

David was charming and intentionally funny in his. He did sing a little bit in it, but otherwise he was nothing like he was in RWNO itself. You'd never have watched his casting tape and expected him to be standoffish, aloof, argumentative, and only interested in hooking up with women from outside the house and going to the gym. Melissa (who had even more friction with him than the others did) said that if she had seen that casting special beforehand, she'd have asked him where that guy was.  

Kelley gave a lot of dish about her past boyfriends and sexual experiences, mocked the sexual technique of one boyfriend in particular, and in general seemed to be trying to get cast by being "wilder" than she was. On the actual shows, she was cautious and controlled and avoided drama. In fact, she started evading the cameras a lot once she met Peter, although her friendship with Danny was a memorable element of the season.

[GH History Lessons: Because History is Always Repeating Itself]

The Sopranos first aired in 1999, and it wasn't huge right out of the gate. The first season averaged about 3.5 million viewers per episode, which was impressive for pay cable but not close to the numbers of big network series like ER. Concurrent with that first season, before The Sopranos could have been influencing GH's direction, GH had quite a bit of organized crime story. There had also been quite a bit before 1999:  Sonny and Stone, Brenda and the wire, Jason reborn as holy hitman. 

However, a little later in '99, The Sopranos was nominated for and won a number of Emmys for that first season (a shock at the time). Then it became a smash. The return of Guza and Pratt in 2002 coincided with The Sopranos' peak of popularity. 

So I think it's a little of "A and a little of "B." There were already mob elements in place, and Guza liked telling those stories, and this other show's zeitgeist moment emboldened him and other writers to devote more and more of the show to the mob. I think it also influenced the direction of Carly, who really turned into a Carmela type in the Tamara Braun years. 

When I look at the GH episode summaries from 1999, there was more of a mix. There was mob, but there were other things that didn't have anything to do with it. 

Now The Sopranos is long gone, but unfortunately, to a lot of remaining viewers, Sonny and the mob are the GH they know and expect.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

I always thought Tonya was trying too hard to have a "thing" that would give her the starring role. In the early episodes of Chicago, every other sentence was about her being a foster child and how deprived it had made her. She didn't have a birth certificate, she couldn't use an ATM, on and on ad nauseum. That fell flat in terms of making her more interesting to others, and then her focus shifted to her kidney stones and other medical problems. When she started coming back for Challenge after Challenge, we didn't hear any more about health problems. Instead, she got a lot more sexualized than she had ever been in Chicago, where she had been downright prudish for a Real World girl. (On Real World Chicago, she had a boyfriend and presented as a conservative Christian.) Then she started giving Paula of Key West a run for her money with the binge drinking.  

I think she had a lot of unmet emotional needs and she flailed around trying out new personalities, all of them bad in their own way. I hope she's healthier now and staying away from cameras. I had long stopped watching the Challenge at the time of her horrific final season, but I have read about it.  

Re: Keri and drinking. She is someone (Kelley and David of Real World New Orleans were others) whose audition tape in the casting special was misleading for the kind of person she turned out to be. I suspect Keri was angling for a "Ruthie slot." She made B/M expect a blackout drunk, but she really didn't drink all that much for a person of her age. All I really remember in the way of heavy drinking on her part is the one time she went out with Kyle and was yell-asking him on the way home if the street was named after Ryne Sandberg. And that was, like, episode two.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

7 hours ago, Winston Wolfe said:

For the life of me, I'll never understand exactly what Geary did to generate such hate on these boards.

I was on the barge during Geary's farewell/retirement lap, so I'm probably not the best person to dig into the topic, but...

I have mixed feelings about him. I think some of the resentment of him is about his becoming an 800-pound gorilla in daytime. Luke's stories in his last 20 years or so could be indulgent...all that caper stuff with the disguises and accents. Producers catered to his whims on when he would work, what he would do, with whom he would be paired, because he was Daytime Legend Tony Geary.

I do believe he really was one of the best actors to be primarily associated with daytime. Maybe because he was talented and highly skilled, he came to resent this "ghetto" he became trapped in. Of course, when he wasn't doing soaps, he was ending up in things like a villain role in a direct-to-video action film co-starring Lorenzo Lamas. He didn't have a conventional leading man's good looks, and that passionate Luke Spencer fanbase failed even to carry over to a different character on the same soap, let alone completely unrelated projects. 

But I feel he lived up to the hype more than some other daytime lifers who have become legends in their own minds. "When he was good," etc. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

On 5/20/2021 at 2:17 PM, ciarra said:

Micheal and Chase have better chemistry than Millow.   When Michael said Chase could stay with him, they both lit up.  Hoyay!

Same. I'm not the type to see slash fanfic possibilities with any two male characters who have a friendly relationship, but the Willow actress has less chemistry with either of them than they have with each other. I'd take wild, slamming-into-the-lockers man/man action any day over love among the drop cloths.  

"Poor Dante" is all I've got about him and Sam. Writing is clearly trying to make them happen, and it's so flat. I know we rag on Burton, but Britt/Jason is much better as the post-JaSam couplings go. All I'm seeing from Monaco is unmotivated bitchiness. 

The woman Alexis is helping with her parole reminds me a little of Cassandra the drug queenpin. I know it's not the same character. 

Shawn's return has been even duller than I dreaded. I never really wanted to see him again, but the way they wrote him out, I knew this day was coming.  

Nava are still cute.

[Unpopular Opinions: "I hate BLTs from Kelly's!"]

I'm well over Jax, but I think Carly gets most of the blame not just because she's a less popular character in these parts but because she's been the constant presence and influence. IR comes and goes, and at least once when he had a protracted absence, they wrote Jax as having to be away against his will (when Sonny got him deported). 

Also, the show doesn't just show us Joss being a lot like Carly, it's also telling us that all the time in the dialogue, and presenting it as a great thing, because Carly is brave and strong, and when she loves, she loves with her whole heart.

(...not just a part of it.)

My own unpopular opinion: This "Chase at death's story/frantic search for the antidote" storyline is shitting the bed in large part because Josh Swickard isn't getting the job done. It takes more than putting someone in a hospital gown. Except when he was having the seizure, he hasn't seemed sick at all. Everything about it reeks of minimal effort except for the love-triangle dramatics. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

11 hours ago, Cheyanne11 said:

That's the town where "Loving" took place.

Yes, and I think it was last visited on GH in 2013, when Luke and Holly were tracking Jerry Jacks. They stayed at the Alden mansion, which was one of the Loving sites. 

I guess 2013 was before Elijah and his sinister strip mall ruined the town. I'm just barely able to pay enough attention to this story to get the essentials. What was up with that day player whose name tag Sonny read, who then gave him and Nina background information? She sounded so uncertain with the lines that it was as if she were doing improv. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

Ha. MB pronounces "ruse" to rhyme with "noose" -- like the dessert Charlotte russe. "What if Elijah figures out that this date is a russe?" We won't get the same mileage out of it that we have out of "muh-nipple-ate," but it provided me one moment of amusement, which is more than I've had in a month of the Nixon Falls story. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

6 hours ago, lala2 said:

I'm against pointless babies on GH, and this soap is full of them. In MY opinion, the last baby born that made sense and had an actual purpose was probably Scout.

Donna started important conversations about spina bifida.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

4 hours ago, Gigi43 said:

But for whatever reason, I'm good with Britt/Jason.

 

2 hours ago, perkie1968 said:

I hate Jason, but I'm not hating Jason/Britt.  What's wrong with me.  

I think it's because the personalities are nicely balanced and it's not a pairing we saw coming from the Pennsylvania side of the river. She's neither a mob apologist nor a fawning goody-goody. She's a healthcare professional, but otherwise she doesn't have much in common with his previous types. The connection developed naturally and grew out of an ongoing story, so it didn't feel like "Jason needs someone new. Throw a dart at the board." And they look good together. 

Something else that makes it work for me is that she has her own major issues on her mind, and Burton is best when Jason is shown to care about people and things outside his usual narrow range (as was the case with very early Liason).

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

1 minute ago, sppa125 said:

It's funny how a conversation about the police and racism gets people triggered, but when it comes to stuff like: Laura falling in love with her rapist, and murderers as the heroes of the show that skate etc. Those things are are somehow more permissible.

Thank you for this. 

The show could also have given us a complete break from reality by pretending that HIV/AIDS isn't really a thing, that there aren't gay people, that women don't have careers, etc. It didn't. It's always had at least a foot in the real world and has reflected present-day concerns and changes. 

I enjoyed the scenes for Jordan/Portia and Cameron/Trina. I hadn't really thought about how fortunate Cameron was in that standoff, but it's true. In a real-world situation, a non-white kid might not have come out of that scene alive. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

20 minutes ago, TVbitch said:

I can't believe I'm saying this, but, if Carly truly steps into the role of a proper villain and embraces the mob and goes power mad.. I might actually be into it. 

They could do something interesting here if they really commit to the long term. A power-mad Carly refusing to cede control when Sonny eventually returns. (I see that @perkie1968 and I are on the same wavelength on that part.) Sonny only gradually remembering Carly and Jason and still not having any feeling for them...while connecting immediately with his kids. Sonny, Nina, and Ava as Avery's parents, shutting out Carly. A crime rivalry between Sonny and Carly, with the other characters taking sides.

I've thrown in the towel on it ever not being Mob Hospital. At least it can be a more dynamic and less stale version.

[GH History Lessons: Because History is Always Repeating Itself]

19 hours ago, tessaray said:

could someone fill me in on how Laura connected with her biological brothers?

Some of the show's law-abiding types (Jordan, Curtis, Laura, etc.) were digging into Cyrus's past and found out he had an account with a medical supply company and was paying for the upkeep of a person named "Grey" (or "Gray") who was in a long-term facility in Vermont.

Around the same time, Cyrus was doing his usual thing of publicly approaching Laura and being all solicitous, offering any help he could provide re: Lulu. Lulu had been injured by a bomb Cyrus had ordered planted in a public place, but he genuinely seemed not to have wanted Lulu to be one of the casualties.

Cyrus's comments showed suspiciously deep knowledge of Laura's background. At first, she thought he had just been looking for blackmail info on her. 

Long story short, Laura discovered that the "Grey" person was Florence Grey, a bedridden elderly woman who is the widow of Laura's biological father, Gordon Grey. Martin was visiting Florence at The Facility that Cyrus Found, and Laura was there at the same time. Laura learned that Martin was her half brother. Then Cyrus walked in and made some remark about how he knew Laura would follow the trail of crumbs he had left for her, and "Welcome to the family." She's been dealing with her good and bad half brothers ever since. 

[Spoilers and Speculation: Clink Boom and Cheese Fondue]

11 hours ago, Cheyanne11 said:

They ignored it with Michael Easton, right?  Yeah, that's my vote/bet, too.

They lampshaded with Michael Easton ("passing remark," as dubbel zout put it). In Finn's early days, I recall at least two instances of "I don't mean to stare, but you look so much like this other guy who used to be a doctor here." Sam and someone else. 

With Howarth Mark III, they'll either do that or ignore it. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

I wonder if Joss will try to play on her injured ankle, injure herself so badly that she can never play again, develop an opiate addiction, and get more and more out of control in her behavior. Like Kelvin Harrison Jr.  in the recent movie Waves, but without the good acting.  

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

Of course Wiley dumped his cereal all over his head. What a privilege flex. Meanwhile, in economically depressed Nixon Falls, children his age go days without a bowl of cereal, and when they try to hold a charitable event, it gets robbed by bandits. Do the writers think this pampered little asshole is likable? 

[GH History Lessons: Because History is Always Repeating Itself]

It was mercifully kept offscreen this time, but Nikolas's strike force invading the safe house where Florence was being held -- and the way he was getting progress reports on it via phone -- reminded me of the unintentionally funniest thing I've ever seen on GH. Remember the time Sonny sent ninjas to kill AJ? Alexis appealed to Sonny's better nature and got him to call them off at the last minute. They tried to make it suspenseful by showing the ninjas advancing on the Quartermaine house and getting as far as a window (or maybe a door with glass panes) while Alexis pleaded and Sonny dithered back at the penthouse. "Good" times.  

It was funny because it was so un-mob-like. When I think of contract killing, I usually think of one guy in a suit with a gun, not a team of assassins clad head to toe in black. I know Jason was off the show at that point, but did it need to be a group undertaking? Had they made it into the house, were they going to take him out with samurai swords and nunchakus?

[Spoilers and Speculation: Clink Boom and Cheese Fondue]

20 hours ago, ByaNose said:

Well, they (Scotty & Elizabeth) were talking about Jeff Webber today. So either Roger Howarth or Cameron Mathewson are playing him. LOL!!!

If it's Mathison, he'll be Rebecca Budig's dad too, right? That will be...something, if he's still there when she inevitably comes back.