Red Room Where the Writers Are

I’m wondering if All My Children’s head writer Chuck Pratt has been watching old clips of Guiding Light for inspiration?

The first parallel I noticed was the dueling Crazy Annie stories. Melissa Claire Egan has been doing great work as Pine Valley’s Annie, but I still miss Cynthia Watros’ bravura performance as “that mutton woman” Annie Dutton.

In 1997, Annie paired up with power-hungry Alan. Their scheming (against Reva) turned to a full-fledged romance. 2009’s Annie story is quite similar.

Stay in a mental institution? Check. Shared need for revenge? Check. And both Annies latched on to the town meanie to further their agendas. Just change “Alan” to “Adam” and, wa-la!

Erica’s pending romance is being promoted as revolutionary and new, but it’s hardly a new twist for daytime. It’s not even the only cougarly romance on the air right now (Jackie and Owen at B&B have that honor).

One of the first romances to fall under the “cougar” category (and not be played for laughs or a joke) was the Matt and Vanessa pairing on GL. There’s a few parallels there, too – including the fact that Matt and Ryan will have had, ahem, “relations” with a mother and daughter.

And Liza’s baby belly reminded me of Nadine faking her pregnancy and passing Bridget’s baby off as her own. (And yes, this is a perfect time for me to add a snarky comment about how pissed off I am that GL missed an opportunity to show us a grown-up Peter Reardon.)

I’m joking about Pratt copying these ideas directly from GL, but this does underscore how unoriginal and recycled most of the ideas are over at AMC these days. Amanda is supposed to be the heroine of the show, but telling a man that his baby is dead – particularly after he has lost the other two children he has – is almost a direct copy of the Babe/Bianca story from a few years back. If the intention was to make the audience hate Amanda, AMC is off to a running start.

These stories are supposed to make a big splash. But murdering the sweetest character on the canvas, and putting nearly every baby on the canvas in jeopardy is hardly must see TV. Sadly, little else is worth watching.

It’s sad when the biggest chunk of positive discussion online about AMC has been whether one of the actors was the subject of a recent blind item making the rounds on the Internet (about said performer’s Dirk Diggleresque qualities). When you have people paying more attention to those details and not to the story playing out, then you’re in big, BIG trouble. (No pun intended.)