Where Have All the Subplots Gone?

September 2, 2011

Just when I thought the Y&R had run out of ideas and was banking on a lame, lame, totally lame story line involving a rivalry between Jill and Genevieve at Jabot (Show of hands: how many of you care? I didn’t think so.), they come up with a master stroke of a plot twist: Devon is Tucker’s son and KATHERINE’S grandson. Sheer genius!

There’s only one problem: such an issue was made, when Yolanda’s and Ana’s characters were introduced, of Yolanda having given up her youth to be a mother to Ana. So…exactly when was she supposed to be out groupie-ing with Tucker and his bands? On a show that seems to bank so much on long-time viewers remembering ALL the history of these characters that have been on forever, aren’t they asking a bit much here for us to FORGET Yolanda’s back story? Perhaps that’s one of those little details—like who was buried in Victor’s stables—that they’re hoping you won’t remember or won’t ask questions about.

There is also the added twist (if they remember) that Neil had sex with Yolanda…who had sex with Tucker. Neil had sex with Ashley…who is married to Tucker. Neil had sex with Sofia (and possibly impregnated her)…who is Tucker’s right-hand-man AND his brother’s wife. Word of warning, ladies: when Neil has sex, bad things happen. Better run the other way, Leslie!

But of course, they did take a very good idea (improbable as it is that Katherine’s grandson should have been living in the same city all these years—a plot twist straight out of Jane Eyre) and render it somewhat ridiculous, even by soap opera standards, by having Katherine hire him for a job for which he has virtually no qualifications and no experience in. Why have her make such a grandiose gesture? Where does that lead? Tucker sabotaging his own son’s business? More than likely. But still ridiculous.

No smooth transition here, but if you can indulge me once more on the hair thing (anything that distracts me from the story is annoying, and bad hair is distracting…so this may turn out to be an ongoing rant for me), can they not do something about Chloe’s and Heather’s hair? When Chloe first came on the show, she had that cute little short ’do. Now it’s long and shapeless and gangly-looking. Elizabeth Hendrickson is so pretty. The short hair seemed to match the feistiness of her character. Her current style does NOTHING for her. Real shame.

I almost don’t care about Heather’s hair, because I think Eden Riegel so inferior to the actress she replaced (Vail Bloom) for the part. But it, too, is straggly and shapeless. Are the Y&R hairdressers on strike?

Not likely. Mrs. Chancellor, Nina, Phyllis—all are perfectly coiffed, as usual. Abby always looks fabulous (her main job, I guess), and the new Eden is a real looker. So, Chloe and Heather need to get with the glam program.

Getting back to the Genevieve/Jill feud: it was much more realistic (and interesting) when they were fighting over Colin. I mean, what a triangle: Genevieve hates him, but is driven mad at the thought of him being with Jill; he is desperate to reunite with Jill but can’t stay out of Genevieve’s bed; Jill knows she should kick him where it hurts, but can’t stay out of HIS bed. They could go with that one for a while, even as they keep that soap opera over-the-top plotting, and, if they’re really serious about this Jack thing with Genevieve (puh-lease!), keep Jack unlucky in love.

But to pit these two women against each other, having them competing for a job neither of them is qualified for nor actually wanted in the first place, and having Jack, of all things, TALK DOWN to them as if they were misbehaving children (which, actually, they are) is really a stretch. And, as I said before, really not interesting. I mean, who cares who does Jabot’s marketing? And more to the point, perhaps, why would a guy so intent on the success of his father’s company, put two rank amateurs in charge of marketing? None of it is believable, none of it is interesting. Why do we have to endure this story line?

Story lines I want to see more of:

• ·         Kevin’s new dating life. Just once, I’d like to see singles from Genoa City date like the rest of the world: meet random strangers in bars, have awkward first dates, find out that the new love interest is either a) on a break from someone she’s still in love with, b) a dweeb with ten cats, or c) actually married. Why do characters always have to date people we already know?
• ·         Now that Chloe and Ronan have hooked up again, I want to Chance to show up and throw a wrench in things. But I have a sick feeling that Ronan is going to be torn between Chloe and Heather and—gag—how could he? Heather is such a mincing little prig! (Now, if it were Vail Bloom, that would be a different story.)

• ·         What happened to the Diane murder investigation?? Story juggling is one thing, but hey! It’s been a week!
• ·         When Billy Miller gets back from vacation, I want to see him and Victoria try to work things out. It should take them a while, and maybe Victoria has to do her rescuing thing again with him, but really, why should Lauren and Michael be the only happy couple on the show? And don’t you like to see Victor grind his teeth at the thought of Vicki being married to an Abbott?
• ·         Phyllis being threatened with losing Lucy. I mean, what happened to THAT story?? Daisy is still languishing in jail without a trial—haven’t seen HER in an eon—and Phyllis was supposed to be her ace in the hole. Daniel was supposed to be constantly pained by Lucy’s being with Phyllis. Nick was supposed to hate Phyllis for taking away his sister’s child, but they’ve been getting it on pretty regularly. That whole story line seems to have been dropped! Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
• ·         Who will be Eden’s new love interest? Please tell me she will have a new love interest! Noah is not exactly Mr. Excitement. She’s a barista in a coffee bar; surely she must meet a lot of hunky yuppie types that she could be attracted to but still have an ethical aversion to. But GC doesn’t seem to have too many singles we don’t already know (see Kevin, above).
• ·         Are they ever going to do anything with Hunter’s character? She seems kind of mousy; I’d just as soon she went back to New York.

I do believe, though, that we are about to embark on a story line in which we get to see little Delia become truly ill. Perhaps it’s really tough for a soap to do a story line like that—for a lot reasons.  Perhaps in escapist television, viewers don’t want to see children suffer, even if it’s only make-believe.

I, for one, would really welcome that kind of story. Soaps tend to pride themselves on dealing with “real life” issues like AIDS (although no one ever gets herpes!), homosexuality, cancer, drunk driving, etc.—anything they can make a Public Service announcement about and look CONCERNED. 

But if you think about all the children who are born prematurely and in such unsanitary conditions on the show (Summer in an elevator? Reed being delivered a couple of months prematurely?)—and none of them ever suffers any permanent brain damage or learning disabilities, none of the things that almost always come with such births.

So why not have a parent suffer the anguish of losing a child, as so many unfortunate parents do (not like Billy and Victoria, who bought a baby on the black market): childhood leukemia or meningitis. Whether they ultimately allow Delia to recover, I can’t speculate on at this point. The previews today showed Chloe railing at Billy for abandoning Delia, so perhaps that will be the way they bring him back to GC, to be with his ailing daughter. Perhaps Delia will recover when Billy returns. That’s the kind of corny outcome Y&R usually produces. (I’m not talking like much of a fan, now, am I? I truly am; I’m just venting a bit.) But, just once, I’d like to see them get real about something.

Of course, Ronan wouldn’t find a grieving mother very sexy, so…never mind, I guess.

As always, I’d love to hear what YOU’D like to talk about. Drop me a line, Genoa City Fans! Write me at lisalea10@yahoo.com

Texas Missy, the 35-Year Fan

A Tale of Too Many Genoa Cities

A Tale of Too Many Genoa Cities

September 1, 2011

Sorry…had to skip a couple of days. Tuesday, I went to the dentist, and yesterday I had the headache from hell. I did manage to watch two days worth of episodes through the haze of my pain, and, as usual, a couple of thoughts kept running through my head.

The Y&R has always been a little clumsy about juggling story lines. It doesn’t help, perhaps, that the cast is so big and there are so MANY story lines, but still. You would think that with a stable of, what, six, eight writers (I’ll have to count next time the credits come on), one of them could be in charge of assigning different plots to different days, and maybe mixing it up a little so that that doesn’t get to be too predictable.

But no. One week, it’s all about Diane’s murder and all the suspects skulking about, trying to avoid suspicion, and the next week we’re back to Noah and Devon and their music deal with Tucker, which, frankly, I had forgotten about and which, frankly, is not nearly so interesting or exciting.

And, speaking of plot management, to go off on a tangent, there were a couple of plots that never seemed to get off the ground that, I would have thought, would have made great story lines for luring in younger viewers over the summer.

Who is this mousy little girl named Hunter, other than someone Noah apparently rescued from the streets of New York? What ever happened to her getting an internship at Restless Style? That could have been a great tie-in to the murder plot if she was somehow privy to conversations (and other activities) between Nick and Phyllis. Or what about a romance with someone? Devon comes to mind as a likely candidate. Although, speaking of Devon, whatever happened to Roxanne? Is she out working on a Ph.D. at GCU?

Or what about the rehab thing? In retrospect, it was obviously just a plot device to bring Eden back into the story, but they could have done so much more with it! Abby spending the summer in rehab hating Eden would have been a great story to attract a young audience.

So, as I said, this week Y&R seems to be picking up old story lines that were almost forgotten: Noah’s music (with Hunter appended to scenes like a coffee cup at Crimson Lights), Sofia’s pregnancy and the baby-daddy drama, the Cane and Lily saga, the search for Tucker’s long-lost son.

In the meantime, Diane’s murder is still unsolved, Chance is still missing somewhere in the Middle East (we must be really worried about him!), Chloe and Kevin have broken up and there’s been nary an awkward meeting between the two, and Eden is suddenly a barista quietly serving coffee? What was the point of bringing HER back to Genoa City?

It’s as if a lot of people finished their vacations or semesters at school and headed back to do some filming over the summer. But it’s fall now, and everyone should be headed BACK to school, not re-settling into old story lines.

Again, a lot of clumsiness with the juggling of story lines.

Which brings me, tangentially enough, to the subject of the opening credits.

Have you ever wondered why certain players, who have only the most minor of roles, like Devon and Kevin and even, to a certain extent, Paul, are featured in the opening, and others, like Lily and Adam and Lauren, are not?

It makes me think that some of those young actors must have really good agents who were able to broker that kind of prominence.

I don’t watch The Bold and the Beautiful, but I’ve occasionally watched their opening credits. It seems to me that they do a much better job of featuring everyone in the cast (it must be pretty close to everyone—there are so many, and they go by so fast). One cannot escape the impression that Y&R has been contractually obligated to highlight the REALLY BIG players in the opening  (and by big, I  mean the actors, not the characters), while conveniently neglecting the other actors who, perhaps, do not have such persuasive agents.

If you’ve noticed, there are about six actors who almost always figure prominently in the opening, no matter who else comes next. Eric Braeden and Melody Thomas Scott, who have been on the show since the 70s and were movies actors in their own right before the Y&R, might rightfully be considered heavy hitters. But then, so was Jeanne Cooper, and she doesn’t get nearly the prominence of the other two—and SHE has been on the show since it’s very beginning (you know all those allusions to Jill being a manicurist; she was Kay’s personal manicurist who got pregnant by Philip Chancellor III—and they’ve been hanging tenaciously to those plot threads for almost 40 years).

But Greg Rikaart? Michael Graziadei? Bryton? (By the way, Bryton, what are you? A male Beyonce? You have a perfectly good last name—I’ve seen it in the closing credits—USE IT.) Who are these guys, that they should figure in the opening credits to the exclusion of people like Michael Muhney or Daniel Goddard?

The Y&R theme song, which belongs to the ages since Nadia Comaneci took it to the Olympics, is slow and contemplative, and does not lend itself to the fly-by credits of B&B, but it does seem that they could put a little more work into changing them up to highlight ALL of the key players (it might even take a couple of weeks of cycling through) instead of showing Eric and Melody and Sharon and Joshua (even when he was supposed to be dead) and Michelle EVERY SINGLE TIME and allotting the little time left to players who often aren’t seen for weeks at a time. For instance, I know that Doug Davidson has also been with the show almost since the beginning, but his character, too, is often plotless for weeks at a time. Yet he still makes the cut for the opening credits. (And I still want to know what happened to Maggie Sullivan…)

And speaking of doing a little more work, some of those opening pictures need some serious updating. I mean, how many years ago was Paul involved with that Leana Love character? Yet they still show Doug Davidson taking his clothes off with her on the beach. And Peter Bergman—the 80s called; they want their hairstyle back. Melody Thomas Scott had that cute pixie hairdo for about ten minutes, but we keep seeing it in the credits. And how many relationships ago was Phyllis involved with Jack?

HERE’s an idea: Why not take all of those wonderful headshots that appear on the Y&R website and float them dreamily across the screen during the theme song? That would be more fair and more CURRENT and more reflective of the various story lines. And don’t even get me started on the balance of black to white actors in the opening credits…

As with the topic above of juggling plot lines, it seems to me that a soap with the moniker the YOUNG and the Restless, almost belies itself by giving such strong press (and story lines, truth be told) to its stable of older (and I do mean OLDER) characters. Let the older characters be the schemers, the bosses, the wise counseling figures, and leave the sexy romancing to Chloe and Ronan or Chance and that hunky new vet character and the feisty black lawyer Leslie Michaelson (and whatever happened to HER?).

Yes, I suppose the romance between Jill and Colin was nice (however implausible), and perhaps it was a bit of a bone thrown to the ego of a long-time player (Jess Walton)—and Tristan Rogers still has it going on, despite his age. But is anybody buying this romance between Jack and Genevieve?? I mean, he goes from the likes of Sharon, Diane and Phyllis to…Genevieve? I don’t think so.

I’ve got to get going; I’ll save my rant about why is Y&R trying to revive Genie Francis’ career for perhaps my next. Maybe I’ll be up to another entry tonight, after I see today’s episode (always DVRed—the sponsors are making next to no money off of me!).

In the meantime, I’d love to hear what YOU’D like to talk about. Drop me a line, Genoa City Fans! Write me at lisalea10@yahoo.com

Texas Missy, the 35-Year Fan