Written by Alan Sarapa
Complaining about which characters are terrible is the pastime of soap fans. We all have our particular characters that we think are a blight on the series and should fall into a paper mache volcano like Skye did on Y&R. Let’s get right to my picks.
10. Brando, GH
Why should I care about Brando? He came on as the rando cousin of Sonny’s, pretended to be Dev’s father until that character was blown up, and has been meandering as a mole spying on Cyrus for months. Being cute isn’t enough. Now we are being expected to care about Sasha being pregnant with his baby and Cyrus wanting her out of nowhere. If you are going to have a new character knocking up a woman with no connection to the canvas, you need a narrative hook.
’90s Carly is a positive example of a new character having a baby and generating drama. She came to town to destroy her biological mother Bobbie, seduced Bobbie’s husband Tony, had a hookup with rich kid AJ, got pregnant with AJ’s kid, and messiness ensued for years. It worked because Carly was a compelling train wreck even if you hated her, and the story was filled with characters GH fans cared about.
Soaps always need new characters because, frankly, the established characters need new people to bang. You just need to craft the story in a way that doesn’t have fans rolling their eyes because there’s a baby that we didn’t ask for coming.
9. Tara, Y&R
Speaking of bad characters breeding, Tara exists. The idea for Tara was actually a good one. Having Kyle conduct an affair with a married woman that resulted in a child during his time offscreen is soapy. Unfortunately, they cast an actress with the charisma of a napkin. Not even a nice linen napkin. A paper napkin from McDonald’s that you use to wipe the barbecue sauce from your mouth and throw right in the trash.
The character should have been this glamorous woman that you’d expect Kyle to have an affair with in the Hamptons. She should have exuded confidence and resembled the love of his life Summer, who he was still hung up on. Someone who could be a credible threat to Kyle and Summer’s relationship. Instead, we got this lady who is so flat in scenes that she makes the job of the other actors harder because they have to compensate for her low energy.
They originally cast Rebekah Graf in this role, but she left and it never aired because she booked a gig on Walker. So this mousy version of the character wasn’t the first choice. This is a lesson in casting. If you lose your first choice in a role, Plan B needs to be at or near the same level as Plan A. There are so many blonde actresses in LA that could have played Tara. Were literally all of them booked?
This is really unfortunate because this story has the potential to actually be good and Tara’s dull presence is an albatross just bringing it down. They should recast the character pronto.
8. Rafe, Days
We came so close to being free of him, but we’ll never be free of him. I remember Soap Twitter rejoicing when they fired Galen Gering last year, but alas that joy was short-lived because this show enjoys firing people and then hiring them back five minutes later. I’m not trying to kink shame anyone, but maybe wait longer to bring someone back after you’ve unceremoniously fired them?
Rafe easily lifted right out of the series and reinserting him hasn’t been so smooth. Going back to being the most incompetent cop in Salem was easy enough, but trying to pair him with former mobster Ava is a miss. It is true that Rafe enjoys women with questionable morals that may also be rapists, but it just seems like they’re just trying to find something for him to do. You can tell when a head writer on a soap is just writing for a character because they have to do it and not because they want to write for them. Rafe is just there because Corday wants him there and Ron Carlivati has to justify his presence on the show.
Now we have to watch Rafe in yet another romance where he’s the weak link. The worst thing Sami ever did was stop that cop from chopping off Rafe’s dong.
7. Zoe, B&B
I know she’s leaving, but I still need to talk about this horrid character. When Zoe debuted, she was somewhat intriguing. She was talking to a cat and being obsessive over a man. Instead of making her a psycho like nature intended, they made her this pea-brained twit who gives her sister laxatives, talks in a way no human in the world has ever spoken, and dresses like she’s going to a costume party in some Japanese cultural appropriation. I hope her exit is seeing Quinn riding Carter which causes her to run out onto the street and get hit by a bus. Good riddance.
6. Carly, GH
Why does Carly need to be inserted into every damn story on this show? I know Laura Wright must have a high number of guarantees to be on THIS much, but she is in every story and on nearly every damn day. Soap fans know which characters we are going to see a lot because the show has deemed them as leads, but you don’t put them in stories where they have no business being. Carly has had more focus in Franco’s death story than Franco’s actual wife Liz! And putting Carly in the Sasha pregnancy story? No! Sasha dated Carly’s son Michael for a bit, but she’s the wrong long-term character to insert into that story when you have Carly in every other story just wandering around yelling at people.
Pushing a character this much is bad because it causes people who don’t even dislike Carly to resent her presence. I like Laura Wright, even though I’ve never been a Carly fan. I’ve always thought she’s a good actress. I’ve even met her via Zoom and she’s delightful. The thing is now whenever I see Carly, my first thought is, “Ugh. She’s on again?” It is too much. Carly needs to be off for a full month. Laura Wright can have a lovely vacation. She deserves it for how much she’s been working.
5. Rey, Y&R
Will someone please free Sharon from her mommy husband? I do not need to watch a man treating a grown woman who owns the house they are living in like he’s going to send her to bed without supper. And now they are back together and this show didn’t even have the decency to give us Adam blowing Sharon’s back out at least once. It is just painful to watch Sharon and Rey together.
Cops are tricky to write on soaps. They can’t be too competent otherwise most of the cast would be wearing prison orange. They are often self-righteous and annoying and unfortunately that’s the direction they went with Rey. Jordi Vilasuso is a good actor and hot so I really feel terrible that he’s stuck playing the most insufferable character on this show. The initial mistake was pairing him with Sharon and not Victoria and writing him this way. If they had paired him with Victoria during the “We buried JT!” story and given him an edgier personality, Rey could have been successful.
We all know why they paired Rey with Sharon. Sharon Case has chemistry with almost every man she’s paired with and stans will ship her with anyone. Even her lower-tier pairings have stans like Dylan and Scotty. If they paired Sharon with the Hope mannequin from B&B, I guarantee it would have stans. There would be fan videos of Sharon and the Hope mannequin set to “Love So Soft” by Kelly Clarkson. Unfortunately, Sharon and Rey don’t have chemistry. Move them on.
4. Kristen, Days
I feel terrible putting her on this list because I adore Stacy Haiduk. If I were making a list of the best soap actors ever, she’d be on it. Unfortunately, Kristen has been the obvious weak spot of the show the last few months. The shenanigans with the masks and the kidnappings got to be too much. Stacy did a great job with what was handed to her, but bad material is bad material. A great actor can make it watchable, but people are still going to notice the writing is bad.
How did we get here with Kristen? Well, we can trace this back to Kristen in the nunnery with Lani and then her return to Salem. People didn’t care for nice Kristen. It felt wrong for Marlena and Kristen to be friendly. It was like seeing Batman and The Joker hugging. There was too much history for either of them to ever truly be peaceful with each other. Fans were very vocal about how out of character it was for both of them and apparently Ron was listening.
The thing is that there’s a happy medium between praying to God and running around town in a mask and kidnapping people all for the goal of keeping Brady’s presumably magnificent penis. Ava on GH is a good example of this. She has an edge, but she isn’t shooting people in offices anymore. I wish they treated Kristen more in that vein instead of having her become comically evil. If they had, they could have kept her in town indefinitely instead of being on the run.
3. Abby, Y&R
They keep on throwing men at her and they’ve been failures. The only times Melissa Ordway has had chemistry with a man paired with her are when Abby had that retcon affair with super-dead Austin and when her real-life husband Justin Gaston temporarily stepped into the role of Chance when the other actor caught COVID. That’s it, and she’s been on the show since 2013.
Now they have Abby in this surrogacy story where Mariah is carrying her baby and Devon, whose first baby tragically died in 2018 along with his wife Hilary, is the sperm donor. To say that fans hate this story would be an understatement. The last time I saw the Y&R section of soap fandom this heated Jack was wondering which dead man was his father. The only person I’ve seen that is happy about this story is Camryn Grimes and that’s understandable. Prior to this story, Mariah was just there for months. Not even Mariah cheating on her girlfriend Tessa generated a story for the pairing. Something is always better than nothing from an actor’s point of view.
Y&R needs to take a good, hard look at Abby and figure out what to do with Abby or ship her off to Paris. I know that everyone at Y&R adores Melissa Ordway, but the character is a hindrance to the canvas and something needs to be done.
2. Liam, B&B
I already did a whole column about why Liam sucks and how he can be fixed. You can go read that if you are inclined to. He sucks so much and his suffering brings me joy. Next!
1. Peter, GH
No one reading this is surprised to see Peter at number one. Every GH fan knows why he’s terrible. People who don’t even watch GH have heard about him. I don’t need to explain it. I could just write “Peter stinks and he needs to die!” and I’d have multiple GH fans saying “Perfectly said, Alan. Bravo!” Well, this week seemingly had the miracle of Peter dying and there were some fans twerking in jubilation, others are more skeptical about this supposed death. I am in the latter category.
It was too easy. Fans have been begging for that scourge to be wiped from GH for years and he died after falling down the stairs? Not likely. This is probably a fakeout. I know what you are thinking. “Alan, Finn, and Liz pronounced him dead and they are a doctor and nurse!” So? This same hospital had Jake “dying” and his organs donated and he showed up a few years later breathing with organs intact. Death means nothing.
When you add in how stubborn the show has been about Peter, you have even more reason to doubt that man is burning in Soap Hell. It took them way too long to retcon Alex being his mother instead of Anna and even longer to reveal it. And Wes Ramsey’s four-year contract isn’t up until this fall. I doubt the show would release him from it early at this point.
If Peter is alive, I just think it is cruel to tease fans with something they vehemently want and then take it back. They know we’ve begged for this. Fake deaths are a classic soap villain trope. It has happened with Stefano DiMera, James Stenbeck, Sheila Carter, and many more. The difference being those were actually compelling villains that were worthy of returning from the dead. The majority of GH fans never want to see Peter again and they’ll be furious if he returns to do his overly broad theatre acting.
Steve Burton and Bradford Anderson recently did a podcast defending Peter and his portrayer Wes from criticism suggesting fans didn’t like him because he was a villain and using terms like “Petergasm” suggesting that the character of Peter is so good that he could make you ejaculate with his greatness. I’m happy for Steve and Bradford even though that sounds messy, but we aren’t having that response. The only thing that could actually make fans have a Petergasm is his true death and, unfortunately, I think we’re going to have to wait for the real one because this one feels fake. I’ll try to be patient for our real happy ending.
Dispatches From Soap Land:
*I’m really happy Days is bringing Johnny on. It wouldn’t make sense for his parents and his twin sister to be in town and he doesn’t show up. Although, the only woman in his age group that he could have sex with is Chanel and she’s interested in his sister.
*Y&R needs to come up with an actual storyline for Billy and Lily because right now they just feel like Lane 2.0. Just having sex and telling each other they are hot all the time.
*I really like Quinn and Carter on B&B, but knowing Brad Bell, he’ll have Quinn back with her Santa Claus-looking husband by fall.
*I’m really hoping they don’t pair Roger Howarth’s new character Austin with Liz. It would just be weird. I’d rather they find a different pairing for both of them for now.
they all need to be in the white house in washington