Stop Having Adults Wanting Their Parents To Bang, Or Just Lean Into It
One of the most consistent things about The Bold and the Beautiful is you have a bunch of characters obsessed with their parents banging. Thomas called CPS on himself and framed Brooke for it in an effort to get Ridge to leave her for his mother Taylor, and it worked. Steffy got the room ready for Ridge and Taylor to fuck like a total pervert. I’m surprised Steffy and Thomas didn’t just watch in the corner and sing “2 Become 1” by the Spice Girls as Ridge and Taylor copulated in between yelling “Swivel those hips, Dad! Arch that back, Mom!” It is deeply weird and disconcerting.
Thomas and Steffy aren’t the only weirdos on the canvas with this perverse interest in the comings and goings of their parents’ genitalia. Now they’ve got Hope wanting her father Deacon to be with Brooke. Thomas and Steffy have memories of Ridge and Taylor being together. Hope was born from the affair Deacon had with his then-mother-in-law Brooke 20 years ago. It wasn’t a love story. Hope didn’t grow up with Deacon in her life. It doesn’t make sense for her to be joining the “I want my Daddy to give my Mommy kissies” brigade.
If Brad Bell insists on writing this, he should lean into how fucked up and weird it is to have grown adults who care more about their parents screwing than their own love lives. On As The World Turns, Barbara Ryan’s obsession with her son Paul is painted as unhealthy. The emotional incest of that dynamic led to her other son Will poisoning Paul’s love interest Rose’s mouthwash, and she died. If you are going to write a toxic family dynamic, I’d rather the narrative portray it that way than pretend it is normal for adults with kids and back pain to be pulling a Parent Trap.
Accountability For Men
Everyone knows what is going to happen when the truth comes out about the doctored CPS call. Ridge will go back to Brooke and Taylor will look like a fool. Thomas will get all the blame for this mess. Calling CPS on yourself in an effort to get your parents back together is pathetic, but Ridge should be held accountable for his actions. He’s the one who got on a plane to Aspen without one conversation with his wife. He’s the one who didn’t even bring up the CPS call to her when she had to show up in Aspen herself to find out her husband had left her. He’s callous. and he only cares about himself.
The show would be so much better if they held Ridge and the other men accountable for their bullshit. Thomas and Steffy talk about Brooke like she’s a monster that crept into their house and stole Ridge from them in the dead of the night. The reality is that Ridge is the real villain in this situation. He’s the one who spent years ping-ponging between two women. I understand the psychological reason for wanting to blame Brooke. It is easier to blame the other woman than your own father. I just think it would be better television if this show would stop acting like Ridge is a poor woobie who just innocently gets confused about which woman he wants to be with that week.
This isn’t a new problem for B&B. This is the same show that had Liam making out with Steffy on the beach when he was engaged to Hope, and they did not treat it like cheating. The transgressions of women’s bad behavior are played up, like Brooke’s history, and the men’s history is downplayed, like Ridge making out with Quinn when she was married to his father. It is frankly sexist writing and I’m sick of it.
Try Writing Internal Conflict
Brad Bell is very reliant on external conflicts to create drama. Earlier this year, we had to see Brooke having the same “Why did I drink?” conversation for months after Sheila switched the nonalcoholic champagne for real champagne. Now we’re getting the same type of conflict with Thomas pulling a Scream 3 with that CPS call. It is like the MadLibs of soap writing. “[insert character] uses [noun] to cause problems with Brooke and Ridge.” Every conflict is from outside forces scheming and not from the couple themselves.
External conflict isn’t a bad thing. Some of the best soap stories of all time revolved around it. It is just boring to feel like you are watching the same story over and over again. It would feel so much fresher if Brooke and Ridge had broken up organically. They could have had disputes over work at Forrester Creations or they actually could let Brooke fall off the wagon by herself. Not every story needs a third party playing trickster.
Get Rid Of Sheila
Sheila is one of the most iconic soap villains of all time. The show always gets a boost when she reappears. But if she has an extended stay, the impact gets watered down. In her last stint, she didn’t even have an exit. One day she was a hostess at the only restaurant in LA, and then she disappeared without explanation. Now she’s been back for over a year and I would welcome an offscreen exit.
Sheila shooting Steffy and Finn was the best B&B scene we’ve gotten this year, but now I fail to see the point in her continued presence. We’ve had months of her hiding at Deacon’s place with no movement. We know from previews she’s sticking around and Steffy and Finn will learn she’s alive in the near future. I just think they should get to the climax of the story and send her to Y&R to terrorize Genoa City. Sheila is too evil to be a long-term character and the show should know that by now.
Have A Semblance Of Logic
From watching the show, you’d think joint custody doesn’t exist in Los Angeles. All the talk is that Douglas either lives with Thomas or with Hope in her and Liam’s shack. No discussion about sharing custody and trading off days. I’m willing to accept some ridiculous things on soaps. Babies being stolen every few years, Satan being obsessed with a woman who lives in the midwest, and children going from 5 years old to 17 years old in a day are all acceptable to me. I’m not accepting joint custody just not existing. It feels like our intelligence is being insulted by Brad.
This idiocy is just a plot device to get Hope to spend a bunch of time at the Forrester mansion so Brad can play with Thomas wanting Hope again. There were other ways to accomplish this without treating fans like imbeciles. Douglas could have gotten sick, and that could have made it necessary for Thomas and Hope to spend a lot of time together with him. That is a more viable option to get the same outcome without doing the soap-writing equivalent of calling your fans dumb bitches.
This is the same show that makes every other married couple get an annulment because divorces take a long time in California. If you can write the reality of divorce in California, I don’t think it is too much to ask to not pretend joint custody doesn’t exist. Just be slightly more creative and you can avoid stupidity like this.
Get Rid Of The Superfluous Characters And Bring Other Characters Back
What exactly is the point of Bill being on the show? Bill could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter at all. Katie is another irrelevant character. They are trying to pair her with Carter again, but what kind of story can they have when Heather Tom is barely on? Heather is more focused on her directing career and B&B is her side hustle at this point. They both are just taking up contract spots that could be used on characters that could revitalize the show.
Deacon has a son, which this show seems to have forgotten. Hope has never met her half-brother, Little Deacon. He’s a blank slate so Brad could write him any way he wants. You could even use it to get Amber back in town. The show needs a schemer that isn’t focused on the AARP crowd fucking, and Amber wouldn’t spend her time thinking about whether or not her mother Tawny is getting enough dick.
Brooke’s son Jack is another blank slate character. He hasn’t been mentioned in years. Jack is unique because while Brooke is his biological mother, it was Taylor who gave birth to him in an egg mishap. You could use the Kendall Hart archetype to craft Jack’s story. He has two mothers who abandoned him. I would rather watch Jack making Brooke and Taylor miserable than see those women argue about which one of them will be with Ridge in his dotage.
RJ is another character that should be considered for a return. The Bold and the Beautiful acts like Ridge only has kids with Taylor, but he has a son with Brooke and his name is literally Ridge Junior. If you are going to have thirty-somethings Steffy and Thomas talking about being a family again with Ridge reunited with Taylor, it just makes sense to have early 20s RJ there. Brad’s instinct would be to write RJ as pushing Ridge to reunite with his mother, but I think it would be more interesting if RJ was tired of the games Ridge plays with his mother’s heart and also make him resentful of how his siblings treat his mother.
If they did bring back Little Deacon, Jack, or RJ, they could pair any of them with a recast Nicole Avant. Brad unceremoniously writing out the Avant family was a massive mistake on his part, and I’d like for that to be rectified. You could have Nicole get hired as part of the Hope For The Future team as a way to bring her back to town. If a Nicole recast goes over well with the audience, you could bring back Maya or Sasha.
Set Hope Free From Liam
Annika Noelle has been playing Hope for four years now and she’s been tethered to Liam for her entire tenure. Annika has made it clear in interviews that she’d love for Hope to be paired with a different character. If Hope left Liam for the mailman, Annika would probably start doing flips and shimmying like Rose Nylund in the “One For The Money” episode of The Golden Girls. Soap Twitter would get #MailHope trending in the excitement of Hope being freed from the fickle manbaby.
They are currently teasing Thomas and Hope, but I have no confidence they’ll actually go there. It will likely end up being another round of “Thomas is crazy! Look! He’s licking the Hope mannequin again! Now he’s reading poetry from Lord Bryon to the Hope mannequin while holding a parasol for it.” If that’s what we are getting, I am not interested. A serious pairing between Thomas and Hope would cause a lot of drama, but that would require Brad Bell wanting to disrupt the status quo for longer than five minutes.
Even if Thomas and Hope don’t happen as a couple, I want Hope to leave Liam. It is time for Hope to find love elsewhere. The added benefit would be Steffy is with Finn so Liam would have no plan B woman to try to grasp onto like the pathetic weasel he is. I think it would be interesting to see how that would play out. Would Liam work on himself while being single or would he search LA for a new woman because he’s terrified of being alone while the two women he jerked around for years are happy without him? Yeah, it would be the latter. Working on yourself requires self-awareness and maturity, two qualities Liam lacks.
Dispatches From Soap Land
*I don’t understand why some GH fans are pissed that they recast Heather Webber. Robin Mattson is retired and Alley Mills is an experienced and talented actress. At least this show cast someone to play a character that actually matters and not a shopping network lady like they did with Morgan Fairchild a few months ago.
*Kudos to Melissa Claire Egan for the scenes of Chelsea contemplating suicide on this week’s Y&R. They were well done and Daytime Emmy nomination worthy.
*I am happy we’re getting more location shoots on soaps. We had Carly and Drew at the beach on GH, B&B went to Aspen and there’s a location shoot coming with Days next year.
This was a great read! Thanks Alan. I agree with basically every word. It’s so frustrating to watch the show repeat the same stories over and over. Their highest ratings of the year were for the Sheila shooting Sinn story and yet that’s been abandoned again for another few months of Brooke in her living room asking “why” about something that was done to her and Ridge. I could see it if Bridge had this amazing chemistry but they have none as do Lope so this is all for couples who are dull as dishwater with absolutely no fire. Speaking of, I honestly wish they would have kept Finn dead as I think that was the one way to keep Sheila on and keep Steffy interesting. After an amazing few months it’s been all downhill from there.
But Alan. You know everything about everything and you still got covid. lololol How can that happen? Dumb guy. By the way, didn’t read a word of your column. Just scrolled through. You’re so dumb Alan.
Alan Sarapa has no business critiquing anything!!! He’s a mess himself.