erilyn | ranting ahoy

Can anyone hook me up with a fandom that won't break my heart? Cause if bandom lately hadn't been bad enough, my recent happy place of One Life to Live just stomped all over my battered heart >:(

OLTL has axed Kyle and Oliver, the best gay couple on daytime soaps, and one of the best on tv. I'm trying to decide which is worse - that they're blaming ratings issues on the storyline, or that Scott Evans who plays Oliver found out about this FROM THE MEDIA REPORTS.

And the former isn't even true - it was never one of the primary plots on the show, and it's biggest point (the Big Gay Wedding) was more about Dorian, and that finished at the beginning of November sweeps. They've never really been a front-burner pairing, on 4-5 days a week (sadly, but since they were both supporting recurring characters before being paired up, and not related to core families, this wasn't surprising, even if it wasn't a gay couple). The show has plenty of other stuff to blame their ratings woes on (like the worst leading men I've seen on a soap, and I've watched Bold and the Beautiful).

Their relationship has been praised amongst both GLBT and soap opera media, and the actors have great chemistry not only with each other, but with pretty much everyone else they interact with. There was still so much they could do with the characters - Brett Claywell (Kyle) never got enough material, given how good he is. Let alone that they're about to become parents, thanks to Oliver's last night o' faux-heterosexuality.

A fairly reputable source is saying that the OLTL exec producer made the call to axe them, but I still see the dread hand of Brian Frons (ABC Daytime exec) behind this. Combined with the sacking of two other actors in intersecting storylines and same age bracket, and some other movements going on (people being dropped from contract to recurring), and either their budget has been cut again, or they're trying to save money to bring back some big names. I don't want to blame the EP, cause both he and the headwriter are out, and I thought fairly committed to telling this story (and apparently Ron the HW fought to keep them, so I'm very curious as to what did happen and why). I wonder how long til the actors who play Brody and Layla are sacked.

They're not even gonna write Kyle and Oliver leaving town, they're still be living in Llanview, just raising the baby while never interacting with friends and colleagues apparently. Is Gigi even gonna talk about seeing her niece at times? I'M JUST SO DISAPPOINTED.

I know it's a perilous time for the daytime soaps. Guiding Light is gone, As the World Turns only has a few months left to go, and from the sound of it, it'll be a surprise if any of the six surviving soaps is around in 5 years. As someone who grew up watching soaps, this makes me sad. At least Kish got to make out on-screen and have a sex scene, unlike the poor lesbians on Guiding Light, who never did more than touch each other's hands meaningfully.

I was even consoling myself that if OLTL got axed soon, they might just go for broke and give Kish some even meatier airtime, but I guess this is not to be (not that it worked for poor sexless Otalia on GL). And this from the soap that apparently had one of the best early gay characters on daytime - Ryan Phillipe's Billy Douglas back in the 90s.

All this on the day when I got a pretty Kyle and Oliver icon from