![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeRebecca Budig has come back to All My Children. I care, but I know you don't, so I am cutting this.
Oh man, oh man, but I love this woman. Or I should say, to be specific, that I love Greenlee, much more than I love fish or fettucine alfredo or salt, and I oversalt my food a lot, so that is saying something. And, as history has proven, there is really no Greenlee without Rebecca Budig. (We did try Greenlee without Rebecca Budig. We don't talk about that.)
I love Rebecca Budig generally, as aside from the fact where she married a reality TV star, there is nothing objectionable about this woman in the world at all; she always says really nice stuff about her co-workers, who in return only say nice stuff about her, like that she's so cutely tiny and easy to pick up that even a slender stork like Alicia Minshew can do it, and she loves dogs, and appears to give her all in every role she's even taken. And she really seems to get soaps, and what makes them work, and what doesn't, and what makes a character like Greenlee work, and what fails horribly (like most of her time paired with AMC co-star Cam Mathison. Oh, I believe they both tried at it, but ouch, Greenlee/Ryan was a couple that should have died in 2006. I can't say it had no merit at all, but a pairing for the ages it was not).
I don't know why precisely Budig left AMC the first time, though I might guess, but I'm pretty sure I know why she left the second time, and I respect her for that. And I believe she came back to AMC both for the reasons she claimed, and because she was given reason to believe that AMC was hauling its pathetic ass back from the brink of a deserved cancellation to return again to traditional soap stories based on characters and relationships, not ratings stunts.
(Who knows? Maybe we won't even have to endure another extended round of Greenlee/Ryan, which is almost certainly why Budig left once, and definitely why she left the second time. ...Lord knows, she was happy enough in the classic soapy stories she had leading up to the godawful reunification of Greenlee/Ryan. I hope she won't need or want to depart over it a third time.)
I love Greenlee more than I love Budig. I do not know why I so love Greenlee.
[My other great soap love, Bree Williamson's Jessica Buchanan (One Life to Live) is a total 180 from Budig's Greenlee (alternate personalities aside. Tess and Bess are fine, and I enjoy Williamson as them, but I prefer Jess. Weirdly, her feisty red-headed twin, Natalie, does nothing for me). I find I like--retrospectively--Erin Thorpey's Jessica, but Williamson's Jessica is the one I'm in love with; there is something about her pretty and pathos and the before-her-time-wisdom of the character that I adored literally the first time I stumbled upon OLTL accidentally when I didn't turn the TV off right after AMC. I believe Jess was in an insane asylum at the time, which I suppose set the tone for everything to come, and may explain why Jessica's perpetual victim status doesn't set my teeth a-grinding.]
Anyway, I fell for Budig's Greenlee by reading soap mags when I was a teen-age cashier at Rite-Aid, oh, oh, those many years ago. I'd never known that I wanted soaps in my life until then, but I have never been able to quit 'em since. Greenlee was so pretty and so feisty, so mean and so vulnerable, and there was just something about that Leo dude she was in a triangle with at the time that made me root for her like nothing else. I was fresh out of high school at the time, and not predisposed to like vindictively bitchy young women, but ten years later, I am still rooting for Greenlee's vindictive bitchiness, so hey, here we are.
I am wickedly psyched about Greenlee's return to AMC for a few reasons:
1) I watched that Lifetime movie with her with the lame bad seed kid and the sucky actor co-star who I know only from Charmed--please do not ask--and while I have no criticism at all for Budig's work on it, it made me sad. AMC is still the best work she's ever done, and it may well be the best work she ever does. She's been consistently fabulous as Greenlee, and never been given another role she could be fabulous in. Even Greenlee's stupidest stories at least held my attention, when Greenlee was there.
2) She's in a story with David Hayward, which means A) Vincent Irizarry, who's great,* B) a revitalization of Greenlee's history with David and David's family, i.e. his utterly fabulous brother Leo, the love of Greenlee's life and about 50% responsible for Greenlee's enduring popularity (in the day, Leo and Greenlee were a supercouple, and rightfully so). Though Leo kicked it back in 2001 or 2002, everybody who ever saw them together remembers Greenlee and Leo, and brother David's familial fondness for them both, and the never-followed-up-on chemistry of Greenlee and her deceased husband's brother, not to mention the way that for years, David called Greenlee his sister--!!!--long after there was no legal connection binding them. AMC's been neglecting that relationship for years. Bravo to AMC for finally going back to it, and man, is it long overdue for recognition. C) David and Greenlee had, and have great chemistry--until recently, somewhat overlooked--and many, including Budig, have wondered why it was never followed up on. I hear David and Greenlee are gettin' hitched--in revenge, natch, but who knows? I hope only good and fun things come from this. Budig has been on fire the last week or so (her scenes when she's planning the revenge wedding with David are seriously some of her best scenes since Leo died), and I haven't felt this pleased and excited watching a soap screen duo since...I do not remember when.
3) I basically never feel the desire to watch AMC without Budig's Greenlee. And I like having soaps in my life. They're fun. GH and OLTL are still pretty new to me, and I don't know how long those acquaintances will last, but I have been watching AMC on and off for a decade now, from undergrad to retail to grad school, and seeing it makes me nostalgic as hell. I feel a little bit emotionally attached to it in general; it's like having a friend move back close to you after having moved out of the country five years ago to join a cult where they smoke a lot of hallucinogens and try to get close to God by bathing naked in ice water every morning at 4am--you realize that this is not the same person you once knew, and you can't help feeling a little wary about them, but gosh darnit, it's just so good to see them again.
*And, I just now found out from Wikipedia, 50 years old. Whoa. He doesn't look it. Or act it.
The other day, I saw, somewhere on the vastness of the internet, someone complaining about TV in public, specifically in re: TVs in public are always tuned to things like soap operas--yeah right--which apparently offend his delicate masculine sensibilities. Oh yes, they offend him. Dude, aside from being a sexist twit, you're at least a decade out of date, and if you really wanted to keep your cultural elitist cred, you'd be bitching about reality TV or Fox, not daytime soaps, which are a) dying and b) still more awesome than anyone you will ever know.
I can pretty much never take soap-haters seriously, because the things they say they hate about soaps are pretty invariably either not actually universal characteristics of soaps, or are perfectly unexceptionable genre characteristics (a strong emphasis on personal relationships, decompressed serial storytelling, etc), and thus are silly to hate. Like hating musicals because they're full of people singing. And that's just. So! Offensive! How dare they! If you want to hear some good reasons for hatin' on a soap, go hang out on a soap message board and listen to the complaints of people who watch them. You will learn more about the genre and what makes it tick (and what makes soaps fail) than you ever knew you could.
Oh man, oh man, but I love this woman. Or I should say, to be specific, that I love Greenlee, much more than I love fish or fettucine alfredo or salt, and I oversalt my food a lot, so that is saying something. And, as history has proven, there is really no Greenlee without Rebecca Budig. (We did try Greenlee without Rebecca Budig. We don't talk about that.)
I love Rebecca Budig generally, as aside from the fact where she married a reality TV star, there is nothing objectionable about this woman in the world at all; she always says really nice stuff about her co-workers, who in return only say nice stuff about her, like that she's so cutely tiny and easy to pick up that even a slender stork like Alicia Minshew can do it, and she loves dogs, and appears to give her all in every role she's even taken. And she really seems to get soaps, and what makes them work, and what doesn't, and what makes a character like Greenlee work, and what fails horribly (like most of her time paired with AMC co-star Cam Mathison. Oh, I believe they both tried at it, but ouch, Greenlee/Ryan was a couple that should have died in 2006. I can't say it had no merit at all, but a pairing for the ages it was not).
I don't know why precisely Budig left AMC the first time, though I might guess, but I'm pretty sure I know why she left the second time, and I respect her for that. And I believe she came back to AMC both for the reasons she claimed, and because she was given reason to believe that AMC was hauling its pathetic ass back from the brink of a deserved cancellation to return again to traditional soap stories based on characters and relationships, not ratings stunts.
(Who knows? Maybe we won't even have to endure another extended round of Greenlee/Ryan, which is almost certainly why Budig left once, and definitely why she left the second time. ...Lord knows, she was happy enough in the classic soapy stories she had leading up to the godawful reunification of Greenlee/Ryan. I hope she won't need or want to depart over it a third time.)
I love Greenlee more than I love Budig. I do not know why I so love Greenlee.
[My other great soap love, Bree Williamson's Jessica Buchanan (One Life to Live) is a total 180 from Budig's Greenlee (alternate personalities aside. Tess and Bess are fine, and I enjoy Williamson as them, but I prefer Jess. Weirdly, her feisty red-headed twin, Natalie, does nothing for me). I find I like--retrospectively--Erin Thorpey's Jessica, but Williamson's Jessica is the one I'm in love with; there is something about her pretty and pathos and the before-her-time-wisdom of the character that I adored literally the first time I stumbled upon OLTL accidentally when I didn't turn the TV off right after AMC. I believe Jess was in an insane asylum at the time, which I suppose set the tone for everything to come, and may explain why Jessica's perpetual victim status doesn't set my teeth a-grinding.]
Anyway, I fell for Budig's Greenlee by reading soap mags when I was a teen-age cashier at Rite-Aid, oh, oh, those many years ago. I'd never known that I wanted soaps in my life until then, but I have never been able to quit 'em since. Greenlee was so pretty and so feisty, so mean and so vulnerable, and there was just something about that Leo dude she was in a triangle with at the time that made me root for her like nothing else. I was fresh out of high school at the time, and not predisposed to like vindictively bitchy young women, but ten years later, I am still rooting for Greenlee's vindictive bitchiness, so hey, here we are.
I am wickedly psyched about Greenlee's return to AMC for a few reasons:
1) I watched that Lifetime movie with her with the lame bad seed kid and the sucky actor co-star who I know only from Charmed--please do not ask--and while I have no criticism at all for Budig's work on it, it made me sad. AMC is still the best work she's ever done, and it may well be the best work she ever does. She's been consistently fabulous as Greenlee, and never been given another role she could be fabulous in. Even Greenlee's stupidest stories at least held my attention, when Greenlee was there.
2) She's in a story with David Hayward, which means A) Vincent Irizarry, who's great,* B) a revitalization of Greenlee's history with David and David's family, i.e. his utterly fabulous brother Leo, the love of Greenlee's life and about 50% responsible for Greenlee's enduring popularity (in the day, Leo and Greenlee were a supercouple, and rightfully so). Though Leo kicked it back in 2001 or 2002, everybody who ever saw them together remembers Greenlee and Leo, and brother David's familial fondness for them both, and the never-followed-up-on chemistry of Greenlee and her deceased husband's brother, not to mention the way that for years, David called Greenlee his sister--!!!--long after there was no legal connection binding them. AMC's been neglecting that relationship for years. Bravo to AMC for finally going back to it, and man, is it long overdue for recognition. C) David and Greenlee had, and have great chemistry--until recently, somewhat overlooked--and many, including Budig, have wondered why it was never followed up on. I hear David and Greenlee are gettin' hitched--in revenge, natch, but who knows? I hope only good and fun things come from this. Budig has been on fire the last week or so (her scenes when she's planning the revenge wedding with David are seriously some of her best scenes since Leo died), and I haven't felt this pleased and excited watching a soap screen duo since...I do not remember when.
3) I basically never feel the desire to watch AMC without Budig's Greenlee. And I like having soaps in my life. They're fun. GH and OLTL are still pretty new to me, and I don't know how long those acquaintances will last, but I have been watching AMC on and off for a decade now, from undergrad to retail to grad school, and seeing it makes me nostalgic as hell. I feel a little bit emotionally attached to it in general; it's like having a friend move back close to you after having moved out of the country five years ago to join a cult where they smoke a lot of hallucinogens and try to get close to God by bathing naked in ice water every morning at 4am--you realize that this is not the same person you once knew, and you can't help feeling a little wary about them, but gosh darnit, it's just so good to see them again.
*And, I just now found out from Wikipedia, 50 years old. Whoa. He doesn't look it. Or act it.
The other day, I saw, somewhere on the vastness of the internet, someone complaining about TV in public, specifically in re: TVs in public are always tuned to things like soap operas--yeah right--which apparently offend his delicate masculine sensibilities. Oh yes, they offend him. Dude, aside from being a sexist twit, you're at least a decade out of date, and if you really wanted to keep your cultural elitist cred, you'd be bitching about reality TV or Fox, not daytime soaps, which are a) dying and b) still more awesome than anyone you will ever know.
I can pretty much never take soap-haters seriously, because the things they say they hate about soaps are pretty invariably either not actually universal characteristics of soaps, or are perfectly unexceptionable genre characteristics (a strong emphasis on personal relationships, decompressed serial storytelling, etc), and thus are silly to hate. Like hating musicals because they're full of people singing. And that's just. So! Offensive! How dare they! If you want to hear some good reasons for hatin' on a soap, go hang out on a soap message board and listen to the complaints of people who watch them. You will learn more about the genre and what makes it tick (and what makes soaps fail) than you ever knew you could.