This isn’t the first time I’ve advocated for terminating the employment of Y&R‘s head writer and executive producer Josh Griffith. Last year, I outlined reasons why I thought it was best to move on from his tenure. A lot of it had to do with tedious and boring writing. This year, we’ve moved beyond that with actively destructive writing so I feel compelled to go back to the well.
10. The Damn Train
I can go along with Cane with now being a 40-year-old American billionaire with a dump truck ass. I’m less inclined to tolerate Cane suddenly being obsessed with trains to the point that he has a train on every continent and he now lives on a train in Genoa City. Yes, that means Cane has a train in freaking Antarctica! That’s how important train travel is to Cane.
It is just silly to have a character living on a train. The only fictional characters I know that live on a train are The Boxcar Children and they are four homeless children. I understand that they spent a lot of money on that train set so they want to use it, but they could have just spent money on a basic mansion set and say he built a replica in Genoa City. That’s less weird than the train thing.
How I imagine the pitch for this went:
Josh Griffith: “So this Aristotle Dumas guy is really Cane. We’re poaching Billy Flynn from Days and everything. And now he’s obsessed with trains!”
CBS executive: “A choo choo train?”
Josh Griffith: “Yep. And also Cane is going to get two characters killed by holding half the town hostage, but they don’t matter. What’s really important is the train set! We must devote a big chunk of the budget on the train. The fans want Billy Flynn and a choo choo train!”
CBS executive: “Hot damn. That’s brilliant! And he could live on the train. There’s nothing sexier than a man living on a train like some Great Depression era vagrant. It won’t have the energy of a grown man in a race car bed at all! And we can gently mock it so if fans call it stupid, it will seem like we are self-aware.”
9. The Party Where Nothing Happened
Soap fans get excited when they get most of the cast on the same set in formal wear. Budgets now don’t allow for it to happen often. We expect something to happen. A secret revealed, a slap, a couple’s first kiss, a death or someone getting shot. A moment we will retain in our memories for years to come. The only thing I’m going to remember about Nikki’s birthday party is that nothing happened and the clothes were ugly.
If you want to do an event on a soap where nothing really dramatic happens, it had better be a wedding for a couple that fans had really looked forward to. Then you can get away with pretty people in formal wear with good vibes especially if the couple had to go through hell to get to this place in their relationship. Nikki’s party didn’t fall into that category and it wasn’t a holiday event either so there’s no excuse for it being boring.
8. Trying To Pair Tessa With a Man
Tessa is gay. She’s said it herself. Not bisexual or sexually fluid. Gay. That’s why all these scenes with Daniel are enraging. Once a character says she’s gay, you don’t get to fling a penis at her. It doesn’t matter that Tessa slept with Noah during her introduction story. It is beyond clear that she was using him to get a better life.
For me to get past Tessa saying she’s gay and accept a pairing with Daniel, they would need to have Annika Noelle and Matthew Atkinson level chemistry. They don’t have that kind of chemistry. Tessa teaching Daniel how to play the guitar falls into the lovely picnic energy level of chemistry and it is on the lower end of that range.
I do feel bad for Cait Fairbanks. She doesn’t usually get much material and she finally gets a story from Josh Griffith and this is what she’s handed. I also feel bad for Michael Graziadei. Josh has fumbled his return to the show so badly that if he were to get fired there wouldn’t be much of an uproar. That’s saying something considering Y&R fans wanted Daniel back for years. Bad writing can poison things fans desperately wanted to happen.
7. I Don’t Want Him Writing Victor’s Funeral
Eric Braeden is 84 years old. It is fairly likely he’ll pass away with Josh Griffith running Y&R. I don’t have confidence Josh would do a good job honoring Victor and Eric Braeden. Katherine’s funeral during Josh’s second tenure as head writer was mediocre. Nothing during this third tenure convinces me he’d do a better job with Victor.
Even putting aside the funeral aspect, Y&R losing Victor will be a pivotal time for the show. There will be fans who watch the show for Victor who will consider tuning out. I don’t think Josh will have a good plan. He’ll probably do what he’s done three times now: Have a billionaire come to town hyped up as a threat to everyone’s businesses and absolutely nothing will happen. Another Tucker McCall recast isn’t going to fill the Victor hole. Randomly bringing Raul Guittierez back and making him a billionaire won’t fill that hole. Only a real vision for the future will help and Josh doesn’t have that.
6. He Can’t Even Write for His Faves Well
If a head writer can’t even write for one of his faves well, what’s the point of keeping him? Everyone knows Chelsea is one of Josh’s favorite characters, but outside of the attempted suicide story, his writing for her is shit. He likes to think of her as a heroine when Chelsea thrives more in the schemer space. Failing to understand a character he seems to love is not a credit to him as a writer. It also didn’t look good when he whitewashed Chelsea raping Billy.
There’s also the factor of Chelsea and Adam. Melissa Claire Egan had chemistry with the Michael Muhney and Justin Hartley versions of the character Adam. She does not have chemistry with Mark Grossman’s Adam. It doesn’t help that they look like siblings and not in a “Help me, stepbrother. I’m stuck in this dryer!” way. If I saw them at the grocery store and didn’t know who they were, I’d think they were brother and sister and not a couple.
To be fair, Josh might be stuck with Adam and Chelsea in a pairing. Mark was in a relationship with two of the actresses who last played his love interests so that’s awkward. Chelsea already flopped with Nick and Billy. I think having a short reunion of the two given the circumstances would be forgivable, but having this be long term is laughably stupid. A good writer and producer would be looking for ways to dramatically untangle them and spin them off into better pairings.
5. Josh Doesn’t Know the History of Y&R
Jill saying via Zoom that Chance was Nina’s only child made my jaw drop. They forgot about Ronan who was stolen from Nina when he was a baby and she didn’t see again until he was an adult. Getting this wrong is especially appalling considering Josh wrote Ronan’s exit story in 2012! This wasn’t some obscure character from 1976 to him.
There is a possibility that they actively decided to erase Ronan’s existence. Cane hasn’t mentioned his son Sam since he’s been back. Y&R has a history of white fathers not mentioning the children they had with Asian women going back to Jack and Keemo all because Peter Bergman hated that story. Josh can’t plead ignorance on Sam either because he was around when Cane got booted in 2019. Though ignoring Sam might have more to do with appeasing Lane fans since he was a child born of Cane cheating on Lily with Juliet. Either way, it is icky.
4. Wasting A Lot of Talented Young Actors
Right now, Rory Gibson is one of the most popular actors on GH. He’s being praised not just for his jawline and abs, but his performances as well. Y&R could have had Rory locked down as a young leading man, but Josh wasted him and then fired him so Trevor St. John could think about pizza on CBS’s dime for a few years. It pisses me off to think about could have been with Rory as Noah if we had a writer and producer interested in developing younger characters.
And I’ll never forget Faith and Moses just sitting around and talking about life goals that were written like they should join the Clean Teens on One Tree Hill, but more boring. You have to really establish legacy characters with personalities and stories that will sustain them. Having Moses want to be a doctor wasn’t enough. I felt bad that Jacob Aaron Gaines wasn’t given real material. Reylynn Caster got a smidgen of real material when Faith was kidnapped by Cameron, but she’s someone who just drops in when she should be a young lead.
3. He Writes A Lot of Business Stories, But He’s Bad At Them
Josh Griffith’s business stories are about mergers, billionaires coming to town and whatever is trendy that he uses without making it an actual story. For example, when Billy was all about podcasting, it was just him having navel gazing monologues, but not an actual story. The same thing is happening now with A.I.
A real soap story about A.I. would be an ex-boyfriend of Faith’s using A.I. to make fake nudes of her. Or maybe Connor becomes obsessed with a chatbot to the point that he withdraws from people which would be timely. I don’t think Phyllis deciding to become an A.I. expert will go anywhere interesting.
2. No Fallout From Chance’s Death
Legacy characters die. Sometimes it is a smart decision. Oftentimes it is a big mistake. The thing is it almost always delivers good drama and material for the actors playing the characters affected by the death. I’ll never forget Maxie on GH going off on Felicia at Georgie’s funeral or Bo and Hope grieving Zach on Days after Chelsea ran that little boy over. Even Maria Arena Bell’s dumb decision to kill off Colleen gave Beth Maitland good material. It is unthinkable for a head writer to kill off a legacy character and not give fans the good part of that equation. Yet Josh Griffith made that choice.
It is unforgivably stupid to not have Jess Walton and Tricia Cast giving Daytime Emmy winning performances in reaction to Chance’s death. Jill should be crying and slapping the crap out of Cane for getting her grandson killed. In a well-written Y&R Nina would be in Cane’s face as well and relying on her other son Ronan who does exist. I don’t know why we didn’t get that. If it was scheduling, they should just have Chance wounded and leaving because killing him with no impact is destructive and idiotic.
Josh has been writing soaps since I was one years old. He should know better than to kill a legacy character off and not mine that for good television. I remember when Josh and Michael Malone killed off Al Holden on One Life to Live and did a whole Heaven Can Wait inspired story. That story had effort and drama. A day player shooting Cane and zero of the story beats you’d like to see played out happening is embarrassing. Dena freaking Higley could have done a better job with this and it pains me to say that.
1. The Ratings Bump Won’t Last
Inexplicably, the ratings did go up with Damien and Chance’s dumb deaths. I don’t think Josh should get to stay because of that. It was his writing and producing that got the show to under three million in viewers. If I shot your grandma, would you call me a hero if I got a towel and started applying pressure to the wound? I don’t think you would, but maybe you don’t like your grandma that much.
I’ve talked before about the ass pulls Josh has done to keep his job. He’s brought Diane back from the dead, hired Colleen Zenk to be Eve Howard’s sister Jordan and the latest ass pull is Billy Flynn as Cane with three deaths and no funerals. We know the tedium that follows that writing. We are already back to boring conversations and I expect the ratings will drop. So why keep someone who will eventually have Y&R at GH‘s level if he’s allowed to stay?
I fully understand I’m not going to like every story or character on a soap. I just expect effort from a soap opera. It shouldn’t be an annual thing. It also doesn’t help that this year’s annual “Pull Out the Stops To Keep His Job!” writing was the worst one he’s ever done. At least the Jordan story had great episodes the first few months of it. I can’t say that about anything that aired this summer on Y&R. I’m sure CBS and Sony could find a writer interested in trying to keep their job more than once a year and can deliver on basic things you expect from a head writer since we can’t get that from Josh.
Dispatches From Soap Land
*With Leslie being Barbara’s daughter, Michele Val Jean has found the twist that can keep Leslie on Beyond The Gates for more than a year. Now Michele needs to work on creating a hot young couple.
*GH‘s Drew had better die and not just get shot this fall. Drew isn’t E.J. on Days where fans want him to stick around after getting shot. Drew needs to be in an urn that Scout eventually throws in a dumpster.
*Brad Bell’s obsession with rape stories and not playing it seriously continues to be disturbing. He’s like Ron Carlivati in that he never learns anything from it.
Josh’s next attempt to keep his job should be casting Sophia Mattson as a still alive Colleen. They could go the same route as Jake on GH where she still had brain activity and Nikki and Victoria found Victor a black market donor on the sly. They could even have Alan/Martin lead Traci to Colleen in exchange for another chance.
They could try to get JT back and/or she could be a love interest for Daniel.