ZaleaBloom

Tamara graduated from Carnegie, is a former Broadway star and has a Tony Award. She played Cissy Houston a couple of years ago in the latest Whitney Houston biopic. She can absolutely sing, I also hope we get to hear her at some point.

Just caught up on a week's worth of episodes. The Leslie/Eva/Richardsons plotline needs to take over as A and they need to either move Dani/Bill/Haley back to B or get it over with. The emotional richness that has developed with Eva becoming more attached to Nicole and Ted everyday and just wanting to be liked by Kat and Martin to the point she is now actively sabotaging the scheme Leslie put her in place for is why I watch soaps. It puts me in mind of Blair's introduction into the Cramer family on OLTL. The revenge plot on Dorian that turned into a deep bond between them because she just wanted to be apart of a family. Eva is growing into genuine love and admiration for Nicole but I do see Ted's eyes starting to wander and I hope he and Leslie don't ruin Eva's chances of having a relationship with her. Nicole is really coming into her own as a character, she's kind, empathetic and nurturing. Daphne is a great scene partner with everyone, I love her scenes with Andre, Kat, and Eva. She's got all the makings of a classic soap heroine. I need more of her emotional intelligence in Dani's life. Dani needs something else to do. She needs to take that vacation to Paris and decide to revive her modeling career, something, ANYTHING. I enjoy the hell out of Karla Mosley but give her a trajectory, give her an arc aside from Hamilton business. I have no problem with her and Haley going nine rounds when it comes to business or high society antics but it needs to be about something other than Bill. Haley is actually a pleasure to watch when she has some fire in her personality versus that confused little girl begging to get back into the Duprees' inner circle routine. But please, for the love of god, do not recreate the Brooke/Ridge/Taylor triangle with these three. This is stale three weeks in, please don't go the next two years like this. They need to take that natural animosity and channel it into something else. Chelsea has still not have the very necessary conversation with Dani regarding her wanting to quit modeling, you can get a lot of mileage out of that given she's just as fearful of disappointing Dani as Dani is Anita. And then there's the stage parenting of it all. Draw those connections. It makes the family real to life. I love Kat and Tomas. I was pleasantly surprised by her being a virgin. I haven't seen that storyline with a young adult versus a teenager on daytime or primetime in quite some time and with an interracial couple who already have conflicting loyalties across professional and familial lines that can pull them apart, to boot? And they have lovely chemistry? That is indeed potential supercouple material that I hope the show doesn't waste. In the first week of the show, I did not buy into Anita and Vernon having a loving marriage versus just a business partnership and family but the writing and Tamara and Clifton have made a believer out of me. Their scenes have become quite charming. I like Jen Jacob a lot, she's pretty, she's charismatic, she's a decent actress. I need something else for her to do too because Super Nurse that is stuck between a wet piece of bread and Andre only wanting her because he can't have her ain't it. Ashley doesn't have any chemistry with Derek OR Andre. We are not rooting for any angle of this triangle, lol. It's bad enough the actor playing Derek can't emote. Keep Andre in scenes with his family and Dani. That works well. Ashley needs some development, her mother is on canvas, what about a family secret or trauma that needs sorting out? I adore Tyrell and Samantha and the family scenes we are now getting, but I'm sick of pretending Smitty and Martin aren't in an abusive marriage. I was blown away by the scene where he 'let' Smitty take a single work assignment. The kids let their two cents be known on the subject because they were the excuse being given from Martin on why Smitty had to stay a kept 1950s housewife and Martin had the nerve to respond that the kids were biased toward Smitty's point of view. Well, whose fault is that, Martin?! Martin wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be apart of a family unit where there are no secrets from him and he is the last and final say on all decisions but doesn't want to share his own secrets or have any (huge life-altering) decisions he makes up for vote from his husband or his children. He wants to be a weekend/after 5 during the week dad but have default parent/primary caregiver privileges? At this point, I hate Martin more than Bill and Ted put together. Smitty needs a divorce and an exposé with Martin's career-ruining secret as the headliner yesterday. I have to give Jeresa Featherstone her flowers, she dresses the hell out of the women on this show. I was absolutely delighted by the title sequence switchup with the actors wearing the same formal wear as Nicole's award ceremony the day it aired. I've never seen anything like that before. I hope we see it again. I love that the show has gone full tilt into fantasy and nightmare sequences, you can't get any soapier than that.

Ah, come on, what's Heather done besides be a good therapist? I've actually decided I quite like her based off of how she responded to Matt bringing up his and Foggy's case win tradition. She noted it was the first time Matt had brought him up to her, clearly knew what had happened to Foggy, and understood Matt's grief over his death must have been complex so she didn't attempt to force him to talk about Foggy with her before he was ready. It was a subtle but great representation of how emotionally intelligent she is (I mean, yes, you would hope so, right, she *is* a psychiatrist but a surprisingly large amount of people are not able to use their work skills to inform their behavior in their personal lives, lol).

Right, right, I forgot. This is mildly hilarious because I assume Martin and Smitty's teenagers were adopted late while others are now assuming Martin was adopted late. In my defense, we know for a fact that the twins are adopted and Martin/Brandon actually favors Nicole/Daphne, not that that means anything definitively on a soap opera. It's still early but they really need to clean their timeline continuity up. They're getting full mileage out of the fact that Black people never look their ages right now, lol.

Nicole and Ted can only have a biological son that is 34-35 years old if they are 52-53 and had him at 18. It's not an impossible timeline, it's just tight with no room for error.

I've just realized you're right about that. Eva is definitely younger than Martin and probably younger than Kat by a little in which case Ted has been hiding a secret love child for twenty years. So much for the 'perfect' marriage. Nicole and Dani are about to have a whole lot more in common, except her husband's misdeeds are about to come with much more baggage. Somewhat related note: I have decided that Martin and Smitty married young and adopted their children when they were mid to upper single digits because neither one of them look older than their early thirties and Nicole has to be in her early fifties at best. I still can't figure out old Dani is. Karla is forty three and Naomi is clearly mid to late twenties which is why weirdly enough Dani would have to be at least 46-47 (really going against the habit of actors playing younger versus older but not by much) for the timeline of her and Bill being married thirty years without it being a underage teenage bride/shotgun wedding situation to work.

So Ted has now confirmed that he and Dana/Leslie/Sherry (it's been a week and some change since her intro and this woman already has three aliases, what in the hell, lol) had an affair but what kind of affair is he talking about? The kind that means infidelity affair or a love affair? Leslie claims he left her for Nicole but if it was an actual affair, doesn't that mean he was cheating on Leslie with Nicole? Even Leslie threatening to tell Nicole confused me because if you were in front of her, and not after, then what is the threat here? Cheating on someone and breaking up with them and then getting with someone else is two different things. I would simply put it down to Dana aka Leslie aka Sheila-I mean-Sherry Carter (Show got jokes) being batshit crazy but Ted has already paid off her off once and is now offering to again- why? Now, I'm thinking he does know about Eva. Jacob should not have volunteered to arrest Dani. He could have been entirely uninvolved in that situation. He should know his wife and her family better than that for how they would have felt and responded. I feel little sympathy for him sleeping on the couch, he was so hell-bent on helping fix it that he did the exact opposite. Also yes, plot hole a MILE wild having him and his father work for the DC police when Fairmont Crest and any crimes that happen there are in Maryland. There's still time to change out the signage and words to say/read Fairmont Crest PD, Show, we won't say anything. It's been said more than once but Martin is an asshole and a terrible husband. There's been some discussion of Nicole being naive re: Kat's warnings about Eva but I can't even blame her for swallowing Sherry's traumatic backstory, she was that good of an actress, lol. We're gonna need some fleshing out of Derek and Ashley because I am also sick of hearing about the damn elevator baby. Haley was right, Bill is still caught up in having Dani's attention. The problem with men like Bill is that they always want what they can't have, it's not love, it's ego. Now that he has Haley, you can bet that Dani is going to look enticing to him again. I would enjoy Haley getting her just desserts but I hate that Dani doesn't want better for herself than a man who left her for a woman half her age who was their daughter's best friend, twenty-five year marriage or not. She needs some of those psychiatrist references her sister was handing out earlier. Her "mugshots" had me cackling, though. Also good god, every second of Bill's interactions with Naomi and Chelsea continue to be wildly narcissistic, it was nice of Dani to encourage Chelsea to not feel bad about maintaining a relationship with her father, but he's earned all their disrespect and disgust. I'd say Doug was a complete moron but addiction really does hijack folks' cognitive reasoning abilities. It's only a matter of time before Joey asks/orders him to kill someone on the surgical table.