Daytime’s Most Famous “Love to Hate” Characters

By Marlena Delacroix a.k.a. Connie Passalacqua Hayman For any soap opera, a “love to hate” character is money in the bank.  Fascinated by their endless power to manipulate other characters and instigate interesting plots, these diabolical characters are adored by audiences who avidly follow all that they do.  “Love to hate” characters … [Read more...]

Young and Restless’ Missing Links and One Live To Live (Apparently) Rises From the Ashes

By Marlena De Lacroix a.k.a. Connie Passalacqua Hayman I’ve basically cheered on most of the changes made in The Young and the Restless these past three months.  Characters like Nick, Phyllis and even Sharon have been fixed by giving them more clarity and strength. The new sets, like Avery’s living room/kitchen and Nick’s bar, are awesome.  … [Read more...]

B&B: Does One Show-Eating Storyline Work?

By Marlena De Lacroix a.k.a. Connie Passalacqua Hayman Bradley Bell has been trying a bold soap experiment the last three quarters of a year on The Bold and Beautiful, featuring one storyline, the Hope-Liam-Steffy triangle, almost to the exclusion of most others.  And he's been succeeding -- the ratings are still comparatively healthy. So I ask … [Read more...]

All My Children: Daytime’s Brigadoon (But What Happens Next?) Part 1

  By Marlena De Lacroix When I was a young girl my mother took me to City Center in Manhattan to see a revival of the 1947 Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon.  In it, two American men on a trip to Scotland stumble upon a strange town, the Brigadoon of the title, from a Can Agnes Nixon, who brought us this revival of Pine Valley as … [Read more...]

Who Created All My Children’s Erica and Sugar on the Run?

By Marlena De Lacroix You ever think you're going to hate something and you wind up liking it?  I certainly chortled when I heard jail-bound Erica Kane on All My Children was going to escape  from the cops during a  police van crash and go on the run handcuffed to a  bank robber named ... Sugar. Some AMC writer has to be an old movie fan, I … [Read more...]

The Daring and the Cowardly: Four Sweeps Surprises

By Marlena De Lacroix With spoilers, there are no storyline surprises on soaps anymore.  That's not to say that the ways in which storylines are presented can really come as shockers -- especially in the February sweeps that just wrapped up, the sweeps in which we expected little to nothing interesting because of the Writers Strike.  So here are … [Read more...]

The Young and the Restless: Katherine Chancellor, Always!

By Patrick Erwin The Young and the Restless has a long history of being a solid hour of soap, mostly unmoved by trends or the fleeting fancies that other shows have lived (or died) by. But in the last few years, Y&R has undergone some substantial changes -- changes in writers, in producers, and in the pace the story unfolds on screen. Fans … [Read more...]