Asp Burger
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The last chapter of a sad story that goes back a while. I didn't have any expectation that TC would be back on GH or one of the other surviving daytime soaps, with his history, but I hoped he'd find something, in or out of the entertainment business, that would give him a fresh start.
One of the first things to come to mind when I heard the news was Nancy Lee Grahn's scolding of the TMZ people for their lighthearted reporting on TC's 2019 bender. She wrote, "I say this with love but I can assure you that Tyler wasn't out having 'birthday fun'. He has a horrible disease. Tyler is at risk of losing his life if he doesn't get help, maintain treatment & work a program and there's nothing fun about it. He needs help not exposure."
I'm sure she wishes she hadn't been so right.
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I watched Minority Report yesterday. I hadn't seen it since it was new. Its worst futuristic prediction is that people would still be reading newspapers in 2054. Yes, I know they were futuristic newspapers that looked just like the old kind but auto-updated, but still. Print has been on the terminal list for more than 15 years.
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Fun with random screen freezes. Could any shot better sum up the GH experience in the 2020s?
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11 hours ago, mbluecpa said:
Friday had promise since it was devoid of Carlys, though not sure if Drew is a true Carly or just adjacent.
He's only a spare. If Jason ever showed up in town alive again, Drew would go back in their trunk. Mathison would express Drew's pain over losing Carly by doing the thing he did on AMC to show angst, where he scrunches up his face and puts both hands behind his head. Once the dust had settled, he'd be in "B" and "C" plots with the Quartermaines and other non-Carly characters.
About that, I have no doubt. I do wonder what would happen to Dex. Would he immediately get the "Zander in 2002" treatment? Possibly not, given that he's so much younger and paired with Josslyn.
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8 hours ago, mostlylurking said:
I’m glad Nina and Sonny actually got married. I’m kind of surprised they actually got there. This is giving me a sliver of hope that they may actually stay together once the truth comes out. I think if Mo gets his way they will. Here’s hoping he can actually use his clout for good.
Yes, generally, if the marriage actually happens on a soap, the story is going to be more complicated than a simple severance (see Portia and Curtis, recently). If they'd done Carly dramatically entering to spill the beans when the officiant asked if anyone had any objections, and then Sonny calling Nina a bitch and ordering her out of his life, I'd be more likely to predict that Sonny and Nina really were done. At least they're setting it up for characters to be torn. I'd include Willow there as well.
However, I have no illusions: this is going to be the pile-on to end all pile-ons. The viciousness will rival that when Elizabeth's affair with Nikolas became public. Nina will eventually get blamed for Ned's accident and his alienation from Olivia, because if he hadn't been rushing to the pool to break the news, blah blah blah. And of course she'll be held 100 percent responsible for Drew's imprisonment, prison beating, and ICU stay. It won't be like when Carly was outed for concealing Willow's maternity, and a couple people were mad for about a day and a half.
At least Watros does angst well.
I already had a brief summer barge stay, but curiosity about the replacement writers got me to look in again.
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13 hours ago, dubbel zout said:
I really don't like how they're writing this trip: Trina is the wide-eyed newbie and Spencer is the experienced man-about-town. More ugh. Trina, get impressed when Spencer has arranged a behind-the-scenes tour of the Met, not when he had rose petals strewn over the bed. Good grief.
I haven't seen it yet—I'm waiting for a 45-minute period over the weekend when there's Absolutely Nothing Better to Do—but that's about what I was expecting. I know Trina is a college student, but as currently portrayed by TA, she seems about 15, and it's influencing every decision made. I just can't.
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12 hours ago, mbluecpa said:
Agree 100%. I’m glad the writers offered something up to EM other than being a snot or screwing Dex. She nailed that cautious burying-the-hatchet vibe in those scenes.
I'm not a fan of the character—or of the actress, most of the time—but once in a while EM does something for which I have to give her credit.
Something that went by quickly but lingers in my mind is her facial reaction when Dex beat up Spencer at that bar a few months ago. She was very authentic and clear in Josslyn's POV, without words. She doesn't always get along with Spencer, but even if he was asking for it on that occasion, she didn't want him to get seriously hurt. I remember her looking horrified and covering her mouth. Like if it hadn't escalated with such speed, she would have tried to restrain Dex or get between them. I liked Josslyn just slightly more than usual that day.
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10 minutes ago, YaddaYadda said:
So the Molly role is now an ejectable seat. Must suck for the actresses coming in.
And still more for the actresses going out!
Re: ages of related soap characters. I remember on DOOL in the '90s when they kept flipping Austin and Billie Reed. Austin was the older sibling at first (backed up by childhood flashbacks with two kids, et cetera), but then when he was recast with an actor about eight years younger than the original Billie, the whole dynamic between them changed, and she was even saying "my little brother" like a proto-Spencer Cassadine. A few years later, a younger Billie actress took over and they reverted.
At least GH kept consistent, even though it wasn't believable on the visual evidence. We didn't have NuKristina telling NuMolly, "You're my big sister and I love you!"
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It was telling that the second or third thing out of Carly's mouth was "I know you blame me" (to Elizabeth, re: Drew's beating). That's what she would do in Elizabeth's position. She always has to find someone to make into a convenient punching bag (verbal or otherwise) in situations like this one, even if their responsibility is indirect by two or three levels. Recall how she went off on Britt a while back, because if Jason hadn't gone overseas to help Britt, he'd still be alive, etc.
She should know by now that Elizabeth, for all her own faults, is a better person than that. That was apparent as far back as their conversation when the Dylan Cash Michael was shot.
With regard to the whole Drew/insider trading story, I salute the show for delving into the underexplored topic of excessive punishment of wealthy white-collar criminals who plead guilty. What social-justice warriors.
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7 hours ago, TVbitch said:
Don't forget the other HUGE reveal today!!!! When Dex first entered Sonny's office he said that their shipment of "knock-off shoes" had been delivered. Okay, seriously?! Are we really to believe that all this time Sonny has been dealing in fake desiger footwear?! 😂 I can't!!! 🤣🤣
If Quentin Tarantino is a GH fan, he must be kicking himself that he never thought of a mobster who deals in fake designer footwear. With his well-documented fetishes, that scenario practically writes (and shoots) itself!
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5 hours ago, statsgirl said:
Yes, she bullied his brother but she was 9 years old at the time, I don't think that we should have to be responsible all our lives for what we did when we were 9.
Same. I'm not sure if the two kids' ages have been kept consistent, but even in our world, it was almost five years ago. Soap opera little-kid (mis)behavior is only a strike against them to me if it carries over and tells us something about the character when older.
Plus, I think 9-year-old Charlotte thought she had good intentions, didn't she? I remember her saying something like she tries to get Aiden to act the "right" way. I'm not disputing that it was bullying, but I don't think she really was trying to hurt him. Now, her behavior toward Ava (planting the snake and all that) was malicious...but, again, soap little-kid stuff.
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Did Trina say "exspecially" when she was talking to Joss about Spencer and Esme?
Okay, I was on the bubble before, but I'm done with her now.
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15 hours ago, Artsda said:
Michael suddenly cares about Sonny going to jail. Dante I bought his concern, not Michael suddenly caring.
The problem, I think, is that Duelly can't play more than one thing at a time, which sapped interest in the whole "Michael's vendetta against Dad" plot. When Michael is angry, he's just angry. A stronger actor could have done the anger as the top layer and other tones underneath it, so we would see he really still loved Sonny deep down, et cetera. Then what's going on presently would work better.
CD was similarly one-note when he turned on both Sonny and Carly after AJ's death, but that was a more entertaining story.
9 hours ago, 30 Helens said:But certainly Carly has enough heart and courage to play ALL the positions! I believe I just heard that she’s one “wild” pitcher. And now I want to see one of these games, because I’m imagining Carly on the pitcher’s mound in a fitted silk jacket and high heels.
Carly in the world of sports has so much comedy potential. She'd probably cheat, get penalized, and try to turn the whole situation into a manhunt for the person who alerted the umpire/referee that she had cheated. Or else claim the umpire/referee was out to get her, and she wants to play the game over again with a different one. "I didn't benefit from that cheating! We lost the game anyway!"
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On 9/1/2023 at 9:32 PM, Cheyanne11 said:
I liked MC well enough as Nikolas--and thought he had great chemistry with MW--but he didn't scream 'well bred European' to me.
On 9/2/2023 at 7:15 AM, CeChase said:Agreed. It was only Tyler who had that air. I never saw a hint of it in MC. It's true Huss doesn't have it either. And Tyler's never coming back anymore than Billy Miller is, so I've learned to live with it.
And Coltin Scott/Stephen Martines definitely didn't have it. Nor did Nick Stabile, who finished out TC's final storyline.
However, even with Tyler in the role, the actor needs guidance from the writing. The various regimes often haven't written Nikolas as well bred, sophisticated, and of an aristocratic background. It's as though they only remember this occasionally. Sometimes even his grammar has been substandard ("If I would've known..." instead of "If I had known..." or "Had I known...").
Mileage will vary on this part, but getting an actor who strongly conveys being descended from old-world aristocracy is not the all-important factor to me. Nikolas has spent more years in Port Charles than not since he was 15 years old (though played by a 23-year-old), and so it makes sense for him to seem more modern and assimilated than his relatives of earlier generations such as Stefan, Victor, and Helena. Certainly, we don't need to look far in the real world to find princes who are not exactly dignified and aloof in the way they carry themselves.
So, if I like the actor otherwise, I'll give some ground on that. I just wish Nikolas were written with more consistency and as a valued character. I've said it before, but the last time it seemed he was on a writing regime's favored list was the Nem era (with Natalia Livingston's Emily). Since then, he's mostly schemed ineffectually and had things blow up in his face.
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Yeah, I hate to be unkind, but Huss's fill-in Nikolas didn't make it shocking to me that he had failed to get both Shiloh and Nikolas when he auditioned for them. I think TPTB made the right call in both cases, and I hope "fill-in Nikolas" is what's still going on.
But I accept that others see something I don't see. I saw a lot of whooping and celebrating in various soap-talk places yesterday from the "Hussies."
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16 hours ago, ffwbe said:
The way this show is going, they’re going to have Spencer team up with Esme to keep Nik away from Ace. They’ve made it very clear that Spencer wants to stay actively involved and thinks Nikolas was a crappy father. Plus Esme seems infatuated with Spencer so she’d be all for it
That sounds to me like a good guess. They'll probably have Spencer and Esme scheme up a marriage of convenience to strengthen his position. "My baby brother" will become "my baby brother and stepson!" Trina will be heartbroken. Stella and Curtis will hate Spencer. Portia will hate Spencer even more. Josslyn will hate Spencer even more. Sonny will approve, because Spencer stepped up and did a difficult thing for the good of his fambly. Laura will make her concerned eyes and repeatedly say, "Oh, honey," in couch scenes with Spencer.
Trina and Spencer will still get the occasional scene to remind viewers that she's the one he would prefer to be with, but he'll continue to have increasingly pro-Esme feelings too. Then, with his contract up, NAC will hand off the role to a twentysomething equivalent of Adam Huss.
I'm not a disgruntled Sprina rooter (I lost interest in them post recast), just trying to think like the trend. And the trend has been "obstacles, obstacles, everywhere."
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3 hours ago, dubbel zout said:
show refuses to let the men show any sort of sexual problems.
I think they would, theoretically...but definitely not with Curtis, because he and Donnell are on the favored/protected list. The present kind of narcissistic "suffering" is as bad as it will get for Curtis.
A sexual problem would be writing they'd only give a male character who's in the AJ Quartermaine Memorial Wing of Losers. (To enter that wing, you have to walk around a really fat statue.) They'd give that to the kind of male character who comes out as the loser in romantic triangles and gets punched out when there's a fight. A Chase impotence story wouldn't shock me a bit. Especially if it were part of the groundwork for turning him into a jerk to drive his love interest into the arms of some guy they like more.
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10 hours ago, Urban Shoe Myth said:
As a fan, I was offended when Jackie referred to himself, Che and Carrie, even facetiously, as The Beatles getting back together.
Seriously. Those three aren't even a Glass Tiger reunion with Stacey Q as the opening act.
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On 8/13/2023 at 8:04 PM, YaddaYadda said:
Dante and Lulu had been divorced for a while before the whole Floating Rib bomb. And Dustin was about to or had proposed to her before the explosion.
Him being emotionally distant makes sense. They haven't been a couple in years.
On 8/13/2023 at 8:29 PM, JMO said:Good point. I think that whole storyline might have been during the year of episodes I deleted unwatched. Still snooze material for me, though.
Dante came back to Port Charles after being held captive and tortured in Turkey, and he was having episodes where he was, for example, approaching a sleeping Lulu with a gun and repeating "I will complete the mission" (sounding not unlike Reggie Jackson trying to assassinate the queen in The Naked Gun). Anna arranged for him to go to some WSB center to be de-brainwashed. When Peter and Maxie found out where he was and went there for some reason, Dante somehow got a gun and shot Peter. (At this point in the story, we were supposed to think that was bad. Now, I just think about what everyone would have been spared if Dante's aim had been better.)
A few episodes later, Dante filed for divorce from afar. In show, this was because he didn't know when or if he would be better and he didn't want Lulu to wait for him. In our world, it was because DZ was still trying his luck outside daytime, and Frank preferred to see how that worked out before giving us a NuDante, and he didn't want to strand Lulu.
I guess all of that is why that Lulu/Dante divorce has never felt "real" to me. It wasn't because of problems between them or one of them falling out of love, or in love with someone else. They had weathered his affair with Valerie. And the version of Dante that came back to Port Charles when DZ signed a new contract was just absurdly "all better." It was as if the Turkey trauma (which will be the name of my dark-comedic novel about a dysfunctional family's Thanksgiving) had never happened. Even the heavily, deeply scarred back he had when he was PTSDante had been fixed, although no one ever commented on that onscreen.
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11 hours ago, luna1122again said:
Toby is who you'd expect Che to be attracted to, which makes the whole Miranda thing even more inexplicable
I have a feeling Che would respond to that with a lecture ("woke moment" sound effect!) about how there isn't any type they're attracted to; they're "pan-attracted," and limiting oneself to particular types propagates a regressive binary.
I would totally have kept that kitten. I'm a soft touch.
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I don't like some of the things Brady has been written to do—mostly season 1 Brady, having sex with Luisa all over his parents' place and leaving a trail of condoms—but I actually enjoy his dynamic with Miranda. I don't see him as Superbrat, although he's had a very comfortable and secure life and takes that for granted, as well-off young people do.
I think the idea they're going for is that he's a lot like Miranda, with less ambition and drive, so the two of them often have this verbal cribbage game going on. He feels she's nagging him; he brings up that she only recently found her own "path"; she immediately pivots to "Look how fast you did that! Math was always your best subject," using flattery and keeping the focus on academic pursuits. They're both always looking for loopholes and weak spots to make their points.
I'll admit that I thought the young man playing Brady was a casting miss in season 1, but he's grown on me a little as we've seen him in other contexts.
Nice casting of Rosemarie DeWitt as Aidan's ex, and nice performance too. Still not into Carrie/Aidan 3.0, or whichever release this is.
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It is puzzling that they have trouble dressing Michael. Chad Duell doesn't look to me as if he would be at all challenging to dress in a flattering way, but when they have him in dress shirts (which is often), the shirts usually look as though they shrank in the laundry or else they fit the character well at an earlier point in his life and he's in denial about that point having passed. I don't think that's the intent, because GH dresses some other people badly on the regular too. Michael/Duell is just a stranger example than some.
So, the scuttlebutt I'm seeing in various places on the internet is that the replacement writers are doing a better job than the official crew, but it sounds here as though the insufferable characters are no easier to suffer.
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22 minutes ago, Roccos Brother said:
Although having one of the hot fellas just casually inject himself out in the open like that in the middle of a job was a pretty ridiculous bit of staging.
Yes. That was a good example of my problem with this episode and with AJLT at its baseline level: it's lazy to a degree that it's not believable even for a quasi-comedy. The scene needs Anthony to discover that his employees are using HGH, so one of them just whips out a syringe while Anthony is addressing him and three other employees. I doubt even disgraced baseball player José Canseco was ever that brazen with it.
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6 hours ago, Lola82 said:
Miranda’s disaster date was done much better on Friends when Ross dated the messy woman.
And Carrie's waiting and waiting at a restaurant, expecting to reconnect with an ex she hadn't seen in years, was done better in Nocturnal Animals.
I'd enjoyed the last couple episodes, but this one was pretty bad. Illogical set-ups, silly dialogue (these AJLT neologisms like "me-evening" are cloying), ancient plot devices, characters making appearances seemingly just so we wouldn't forget they're on the show, and overacting from about three-fourths of the cast to try to sell it all.
As an example of "ancient," do people still go up to a maitre'd and yell "Call an ambulance!" in such situations in 2023? Neither Charlotte nor Harry was carrying a phone of their own?
I love @greekmom's idea of Berger in a Miranda AA group. It would be an especially good way to work him in because Miranda had been a Berger fan when he and Carrie were dating.
Yeah, when Charlotte expressed that she thought she was having a heart attack, I wondered if we were going to get a very well-concealed Kyle MacLachlan cameo. The eventual explanation for Charlotte's distress was a big shrug, because what she was complaining about and how she was acting didn't seem like a plausible effect of THC.
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GH In The News: The PC Press Club
in General Hospital
· Edited by Asp Burger
While that may be true, I wonder if he thinks Jill Farren Phelps and Megan McTavish were doing a fantastic job with GH when he was there. He might, but that would be the only reason: because he was there. Those two were the regime that seemed fondest of him and featured him the most. Most long-time fans consider that one of the worst-written periods of the show's history.
He got broomed out when Guza and Pratt took over the writing and they were able to get Tyler Christopher back. Normally, I have sympathy for recast actors who get tossed aside when the original or most popular actor is willing to come back, even if I wasn't wild about them (Greg Vaughan, Billy Miller—although in Miller's case they did create the Drew character for him, which presently seems a mixed blessing), but I shared your distaste for Coltin Scott/Stephen Martines from his first day, and he never grew on me even a little. And that was before the revelations about his character and activities.
Back in the day, Martines was politically astute enough to say nice things about Tyler Christopher in interviews (in the vein of "I know I have big shoes to fill," etc.), but I also remember a time when he ruffled feathers of TC's fans by saying he hoped to play a Nikolas Cassadine with emotions instead of an emotionless robot, or words to that effect.