Asp Burger
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Posts posted by Asp Burger
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On 1/12/2021 at 2:54 PM, lala2 said:
GO NIKOLAS!!!! I loved everything Nikolas said to Carly. He really put her in her place! She has a lot of nerve!! I love that he stood up for Ava and their relationship
Carly was totally trying the "splitting" tactic, too, getting Nikolas by himself and saying she was shocked he was going along with this. I was surprised Carly was made to look so bad in those scenes. I mean...I always think she looks bad, but this was more overt than it usually is, and everything she said was easily shut down. Someone would really have to be the biggest Carly stan around to think she had a leg to stand on.
On 1/12/2021 at 3:04 PM, dubbel zout said:That punch was completely uncalled for. I don't care who your girlfriend slept with, TJ. Don't be an asshole. Use your words.
Also, I call bullshit on "TJ's never been violent!" There was a whole story with him attacking Rafe (back when Rafe as a sympathetic character was still happening), and Molly getting spooked by it because of her sister's experience with Kiefer. True, people on soaps are always slugging or slapping their rivals and it's usually treated fairly lightly, but Molly made it sound as if this were shocking from TJ in particular, and it wasn't.
On 1/12/2021 at 5:24 PM, Daisy said:To be fair - how would Ava (or anyone) know that? Mike wouldn't intentionally want to hurt Avery but if he had an episode.... I wouldn't risk it
Yeah. Sonny and Carly can say as many times as they want that Mike never would have hurt Avery, but then, how many times did they ever let him babysit Avery? Or, would they have left Bifida in his care even if they were going to be back in a half hour? All right then.
On 1/12/2021 at 5:50 PM, statsgirl said:I'm trying to remember back to the days when I thought that Jax was a dashing hero. But with Nina and even more with Carly, he's just a guy who is there to prop the bad decisions of his women.
I don't root for Jax to leave, but he adds nothing anymore. He seems more watered down every time IR returns after a period away. What a fall for that character. They could replace him with a neutered tomcat that just comes into the occasional scene and winds around the legs of Nina or Carly, and the cat would have as much effect on the stories.
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1 hour ago, statsgirl said:
To me it looks like they're looking for someone for Sam to get involved with so that Jason can 1. start a relationship of his own or 2. look constipated .. I mean in pain to see Sam moving on.
I'll guess both (1) and (2), but in reverse order. We should always proceed from the assumption that Jason will be protected above all other characters, even Sonny and Carly. My suspicion is that they're more excited to do Jason/Britt (or similar) than anything new involving Sam. But Sam has to be the one to move on first and nail the coffin shut on Jasam. She will have both initiated the breakup and begun a new relationship first, so it won't be Jason's fault that we no longer hear that plaintive piano-and-cello theme while
he looks blank and she looks exhaustedthey gaze lovingly at each other. They'll still probably write Jason as not over Sam until the new woman pursues and begs for a while.-
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I think the way they're going to play it is that TJ is mad because Brando was his "friend" and kept it quiet that he had the history with Molly. They really haven't had all that much of a friendship, but it makes more sense than TJ being mad because Brando hooked up with someone he knew nothing about.
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Julian as Leo's father could be good if they SORAS'd Leo to late teens and went somewhere with it. A Corinthos-hating bad-boy nephew for Ava, say.
I finally got to see Friday's show. It was hard to enjoy Denise Alexander's scenes. Besides being frail, she seemed rusty.
Ugh. Carly says "second of all" when she's enumerating points. Stop giving me additional reasons to hate her, writers; I already have enough. At least she only had two points to make to Sasha, so I didn't have to wince through "third of all" and "fourth of all."
I did like Dante and Chase.
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On 1/8/2021 at 8:58 PM, dubbel zout said:
"I have no interest in dragging Mr. Morgan through a pointless interrogation unless it's absolutely necessary." If it's necessary, then it wouldn't be a pointless interrogation, would it, Jordan? Oof.
No, it's a revealing line. Since Jordan never accomplishes anything, and knows she never accomplishes anything, any interrogation she conducts is pointless by definition. But sometimes her pointless interrogations are necessary. This would have been one of her unnecessary pointless interrogations.
Who is she to decide for Leo that he won't hear anything about Julian anyway? Ugh.
I haven't seen the Friday show yet, but the idea of Sam calling the shots re: Leo is pretty laughable. Olivia's not exactly a shrinking violet. If she wanted to construct a shrine to Julian, she'd probably put it in the Quartermaine foyer and then wonder why Monica and Ned have a problem with it.
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If de Vry had simply quoted Howarth as "I was shocked when I found out they’re writing Julian off," it would have been better. I think I know what Howarth meant. He's been around daytime long enough to know when cast cuts are likely, and he thought some people at GH were relatively safe and others were not. He figured Julian was on the safe list because he had a lot of character connections: a sister, three children, an ex-wife, a couple of ex-hook-ups, et cetera.
But the way de Vry quoted him makes him sound as though he were rating the cast in how much they add, for which I have to say WdV didn't speak thoughtfully.
I wouldn't especially miss Howarth's Franco. I like that Liz has a guy who's crazy about her and her sons, but there's a lot on the other side of the scale.
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DeVry interview:
I’m kind of going with the flow, to be honest. I never get too high or low about anything.
That, unfortunately, describes his on-camera style too, and it is something that dulled my interest in the character over time.
Roger Howarth (Franco), who doesn’t do a lot of talking, said to me on the set one day: “I was shocked when I found out they’re writing Julian off. I have to say, you were not on my list of expendable actors.”
Howarth has a "list of expendable actors"? I mean, I do too, but I'm not their coworker.
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On 1/1/2021 at 5:49 PM, Winston Wolfe said:
I'm meh on the latest Alexis "off-the-wagon" S/L, seems like we've done this a few times now.
That's the worst thing about an alcoholism story on a soap. You know that "off the wagon" will be the go-to from then on, whenever the writers don't have anything else to do with the character. Sue Ellen Ewing's syndrome.
On 1/2/2021 at 7:08 PM, Laur said:Finn's 100% going to be Chase's father, so they also could play that out and then just send Finn and Jackie off together into the sunset. I wouldn't miss either of them.
I'd rather take my chances hanging on to Finn than risk a sixth Michael Easton GH character two years down the line, who could be worse. He's already done doctor x2, cop, and vampire. Next time he'd probably be the new mobster.
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Ha! Done with style, and I can just hear it in the Alexis voice.
I'll say here that I've known my share of heavy drinkers, and NLG is nailing a specific kind of alcoholic. You just know instantly that it's one of those days/nights. And she isn't doing the easy stuff, the typical soap-actor slurring and incoherence, which I don't think would have been the right choice for Alexis. It's more a liberated, carefree, "loose" quality to the way they talk and move...which is never how they are when they're in control of themselves. There was a good example of this "party of one" quality when she approached Finn and his father in a recent episode.
Edit: I really meant this to be in the News/Media thread, but I guess it works here too, since that scene was in one of the most recent episodes.
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11 minutes ago, statsgirl said:
For all the writing tries to push him as a big, bad mob boss, I don't think that Sonny does a good job of it. He's all bluster and wind. Jason is really the cool head and foresight it takes to run an organization that size.
Yes. And if I recall correctly, the one time Sonny and Jason went head to head, Jason crushed Sonny. I can't remember what the cause of the rift was (Emily? Or just Sonny's erratic decision-making when in denial of his bipolar illness?); I just remember Jason taking away the vaunted "territory" within about a week, completely neutralizing Sonny. Sonny was impotently raging over being in a position where he would be "given" his power back at Jason's whim.
Jason has always been more of a pet than Sonny. No matter who's producing or writing, if one of them is supposed to look better than the other, Jason will be given the higher cards. And he's definitely been written as the more effective gangster.
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I've noticed that since they've taken over, we're more likely to get deep-dives into history that are surprising and interesting. Laura's past with the Greys, obviously. Jackie Templeton. Taggert's return, with even some mentions of Gia. And the facts generally line up if you're a long-time viewer.
It's been better use of history than, you know, "Kiefer had a sister, and now she's Alexis's trainer and she's poisoning her." That one was when Shelly was still the senior HW, although I have no idea whether Kendra was her brainstorm or CVE's.
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19 minutes ago, dubbel zout said:
When did Dan O'Connor become a co-HW?
Summer 2019, when Shelly Altman retired. What he was contributing as co-head writer started airing in October of that year.
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Multiple-choice fun:
"I think that once we saw the chemistry between the two actors, we knew we had gold. So, we wanted to take our time, especially the way that it was constructed."
Is Chris Van Etten talking about: (A) Chad Duell and Katelyn MacMullen, (B) Steve Burton and Kelly Thiebaud, (C) Marcus Coloma and Maura West. or (D) Johnny Wactor and Sofia Mattsson?
Answer within. An end-of-2020 interview with the two current HWs.
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9 hours ago, Melgaypet said:
Remember, eons ago, when Sarah Brown's Carly went into a mob meeting of the Five Families swinging a baseball bat around or some shit?
That was Tams's Carly, 2002.
The Sarah Brown version did try to get involved in business things (leading to peril from which Jason had to rescue her), but she wasn't the mob queen the recasts became. She was more under Sonny's thumb.
11 hours ago, threebluestars said:I, personally, would welcome Sonny gets a brain injury a la Jason, but decides to become an upstanding citizen who thinks Carly is off her rocker and Jason is a thug lol. Only because it would drive those characters CRAZY.
That might be fun, but I'm kind of over these "identity" stories in which characters think they're someone else. The last few writing regimes have gone to that well too often with the brain mapping, flash drives, and amnesia.
ETA: Elizabeth Korte, the world's highest-paid writer of Carly fanfic for two decades now, did in fact script the Wednesday episode, as someone on the previous page guessed.
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Who would have guessed that 20+ years later, the "gold-digging psychotic" who "give(s) women a bad name" would be the pillar of the community, and the one reading her for filth would be a disbarred alcoholic pariah?
One of NLG's great scenes, though.
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No pairing. Chloe was bucking up AJ's spirits about his standing with the Quartermaine family. He was down because Emily had nearly died in the PCPD shooting, and he talked with Chloe about how he and Emily had been so close, but then she had sided with Jason in the Michael saga and it was never the same between them. And I think there was other Quartermaine stuff going on that had him down -- Edward being Edward.
I too found Chloe boring. The do-no-wrong girl everyone loves. Chloe...Sabrina...Willow.
While we're reminiscing on an awful period in GH history, the spring 2001 to spring 2002 McTavish/JFP era, I'll say something I've said before. You know that saying about even a blind squirrel managing to find a nut once in a while? McTavish, oddly, wrote the best Zander. She was clearly fonder of that character than the Gooze was.
There were negatives, sure. He was all about Sonny; he turned down a good legit job offer from Ned because of his mob loyalty; he played a role in Sonny's imprisonment/coercion of AJ. But he had a lot of characters around him who were really fond and supportive of him -- characters on both sides of the law -- and he was shown maturing. He did heroic things and got credit for them. He was on the way up.
Part of it, surely, was that we were in a Jason hiatus and there was a vacant spot for "Sonny's most loyal guy, contract player" he could slide right into.
When Pratt/Guza took over and Burton returned and TC and an Emily recast were there to do Nem, Zander got a brutal nuking. He lost everything and backslid into being a whiny, immature perpetual loser. He became the AJ of the youth set.
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2 hours ago, sacrebleu said:
Honestly, is anyone rooting for Michael in this situation?
Not so many here, but when I look at places like the GH page on Facebook, it seems about 50/50. Lots of voices in favor of a Chase/Willow reunion, but just as many who say Willow and Michael "belong together," are so sweet, ideally suited, have a special connection now, etc.
Generally the Willow/Michael shippers seem to be the fans who respond across the board with "orthodox" readings of the show. They think Carly is an admirable Strong Woman; they think Sonny is a flawed but decent man who is a bulwark against the true evils of PC; they think Jason is a loyal truth-teller; they hate the law-enforcement characters unless they're in an alliance with Sonny and Jason, etc.
I like Willow less than I like either Chase or Michael, personally. There's no there there, and it's hard for me to put my finger on. It's as if she was a thinly written character brought on to be a DoD victim/witness and to push some plot points involving Charlotte and Aiden when she was teaching them, and now she's become bigger and more important, but no fuller a character. The role has become bigger, but the character is still small.
However, Josh Swickard is better in romantic story than Duelly is. I wish I could see him with a more interesting partner. Sasha would not have been an upgrade.
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Yeah, I'd never heard about any problems or special accommodations at GH with Buchanan. I think 2002 was just a year of a lot of change. Characters who were perceived as not working out were scrapped, actors were let go, and there were some returns and new people to fill the void. This accelerated when Pruza took over the writing reins, but there was already a lot of scrambling going on in the first several months.
I don't remember much about the ratings, but it wouldn't surprise me if they'd fallen quite a bit when McTavish was writing in '01. She actually had earned the nickname "The Destroyer" before she started.
I do recall that Melissa's write-out was quick and weird. She was revealed to be a mercy killer of the terminally ill, and she got this big "mad scene" at GH when the authorities came for her, concluding with her holding out her wrists to be handcuffed. Completely out of sync with the way the character had been written (such as it was) for the prior year.
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The McTavish year had so many large and small dumpster fires that I didn't mind Melissa so much. But yeah, she was a textbook example of overselling a new character because the actor is a producer's favorite. They introduced her as if it settling up a triangle with Bobbie and Roy. Of those three, Bobbie was certainly the character with the most fans (even though JZ was already at that point overdoing the face work, and it was getting distracting and limiting her expression). But then the triangle was over in the blink of an eye, Bobbie graciously lost, and it just became MelRoy's Place.
Then, apart from Melissa's airtime-consuming relationship with Roy, and those two constantly talking about their past history offscreen and things we had never seen, they started integrating her with the rest of the cast. She was friends with Liz, she was friends with Luke, she wanted to be involved in fighting Stavros, she was the nurse working at GH whenever a patient was brought in. Connecting a new character to others on the canvas is fine and necessary, but her case was all kinds of too much too soon.
I thought the saving grace was that Buchanan acted the part well and did have chemistry with the other GH actors. In other circumstances, she might even have made a good pairing for Geary. Another World had never been my jam, so I'd only seen a little of her work there, but I could see why she had a lot of fans and had won awards.
Linda Dano, on the other hand, who kept showing up to chew scenery as Rae that year, I didn't get at all.
Edit: No, "Faye" as Lucy's middle name was just my for-instance.
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Twenty years ago this week! Here's what was happening in the last week of 2000, with help from Soap Central's recaps.
Bobbie and Roy confronted a fresh mystery involving a letter from a woman named Melissa.
Laura had to explain to little Lulu that Daddy would not be home for Christmas.
Liz and Lucky shared a romantic Christmas with gifts of paintings (for him) and a necklace (for her). He picked up the guitar for the first time in more than a year to serenade her with their song.
Florence invited Gia and Nikolas over for Christmas dinner. Gia was upset with Nikolas for accepting.
Sorel's men fired on Sonny, Alexis, Zander, and Emily as they were leaving the PCPD. Zander and Sonny shielded the women. Zander sustained minor injuries, but Sonny was left in critical condition. Alexis was traumatized.
After her brush with death, Alexis and Ned reaffirmed their love for one another.
Taggert launched an investigation into the attempted murder of his sworn enemy, concluding that it had been professional and well planned.
Felicia nagged Mac to allow her to put her investigative powers toward finding the cop on Sorel's payroll.
Monica tried to make Emily see that Zander was no good for her, while Alan took a sterner approach, telling a bedridden Zander to get out of Emily's life immediately.
Juan's visit to Zander was no more encouraging.
Chloe told AJ not to sell himself short, and they grew closer.
Alexis assured Zander he had a place to stay -- with her -- following his discharge from the hospital.
Sonny responded slightly to the touch of Michael's tiny hand, giving the frantic Carly new hope as the year closed.
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Actors still on the show today, some returning after absences or dropped to recurring: Réal Andrews, Maurice Benard, Leslie Charleson, Genie Francis, Nancy Lee Grahn, Rebecca Herbst, Wally Kurth, Kristina Wagner (?), John J. York, Jackie Zeman.
Only MB, NLG, and RH have been consistently on contract status for all of the following 20 years, although RH did have that notorious firing/unfiring at the start of this decade.
For newer viewers: Florence (Campbell) was the mother of Marcus Taggert and his sister Gia, and was employed at the hospital as an administration bigwig at the time. Sorel was just mob rival du jour. Melissa, ultimately played by Jensen Buchanan, would become a major character over the next year, her main connection being A Martinez's Roy (love interests).
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12 minutes ago, lala2 said:
I admittedly wasn't watching GH regularly then so really had no opinion. I don't even remember how Chase was introduced
He was hired as the replacement for Nathan, both in the show's world and in real life. He was shown settling in at Nathan's old desk in the PCPD, and Dante was determined not to like him because he wasn't ready for a new partner. And this guy was a Red Sox fan on top of it. Horrors!
Then he started winning over our established characters, including Dante, at the same time as we learned of his connections to Finn (family) and "Janelle" (ex-lover/quarry).
Some of Chase's best scenes were early on. His initial read on Carly -- when he responded to more than one police call involving her -- seemed to be that she was crazy.
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I laughed when TJ said it was impossible that Molly could have cheated on him, because they'd been together every night for months. Yeah, TJ, daytime sex is impossible. He must have received an interesting version of the birds-and-bees talk, although I wouldn't want to try to untangle his convoluted family history enough to figure out who would have given it to him. Maybe Rafe, considering the vampire logic.
If he meant that he and Molly have been together every second of the day and night for months, seven days a week, that's kind of creepy.
I can't care about those two. I get that they have a fan corner because they're a relatively realistic, relatively mature couple, but my heart sinks a little when I see they're getting screen time, because I don't like them and they're not fun to hate either. And I can't stand the sound of HP's voice, especially when Molly is overcome by emotion.
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One of my favorite conventions in television is when we casually learn a character's middle name after years, often because of some legal proceeding. Like, a character will be on the stand and the attorney will say, "And if she is sitting in the courtroom today, would you point out to the members of the jury Ms. Lucille Faye Coe," or whatever.
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3 hours ago, TeeVee329 said:
Terry hasn't had even the hint of a romance and it's been, what, two years since she arrived?
I was thinking even longer, because I knew she had been in a scene with the first Cameron recast, the one who looked like Zander and was gone within a month. Cam was leaving the Webberhaus while Liz and Terry were catching up on the couch, and he talked to them for a few minutes.
So I looked it up. Terry first appeared on June 29, 2018. Two and a half years to the day.
If she dates anyone, I think it's a safe bet it will be some character we only see once or only hear her talk about, and the relationship will be offscreen.
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Episode Discussion II: The TFGH
in General Hospital
You never forget a day you rolled around in cat feces down by the river and gave birth through your jeans.