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All My Children

Susan Lucci delivers bravura performance on yesterday's AMC!

January 4, 2011

Photo Credit: JPI Studios

Photo Credit: JPI Studios

If you missed Monday’s episode of All My Children you had better get on your computers and get to ABC.com and watch it, pronto!  In a emotional, stirring and thought-provoking performance, Susan Lucci showed viewers and soap critics why she is still one of the greatest soap legends of all-time.  In an episode clearly written to showcase Lucci’s strengths,  and a possible episode for use as an Emmy reel for 2011, Lucci’s Erica Kane goes through New Years Eve making sure she pays visits to some very important people in her life, good and bad, and especially her beloved girls, Bianca and Kendall.

What makes the episode all the more touching, is from the opening sequence it is truly about Erica’s love of her late mother, Mona,  and how still to this day, she misses her stern hand and guidance.  As Erica finds it hard to navigate being the glue that holds her family together, she feels he can’t be to her children as Mona was to her.   The episode also took us on a tour of Pine Valley with Erica as our tour guide including stops to David Hayward’s hospital room,  Kendall’s home where she finds her daughter not feeling well,  and then Erica has a meltdown of her own, which looks to the audience as she had taken a swig of champagne and then in frustration, pain, and anger discusses her sobriety and addiction.

Later, as this “momma bear’ announces she would do anything to protect her daughters, it is Caleb played with understated strength by Michael Nouri, who ultimately has figured out what is going on with Erica.  She has been covering up for Kendall since Thanksgiving.  For it was Kendall who shot David, not Erica.    After Erica admits to Caleb he is correct, the two kiss and ring in the New Year!

The writers and Lucci did an excellent job of showing us layers of Erica Kane, and not just the superficial.  Kudos!

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Jane
Jane

You’re spot on with your praise. I think that Monday’s episode was one of the best AMC fans have seen in a very long time. I hope we get more of this quality to come. Lucci gave an inspired performance. It was fantastic.

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January 4, 2011 5:12 pm
Jesse
Jesse

While I loved Erica’s letter to Mona talking bout her girls AND HER LOVE FOR JACKSON WHICH WAS LEFT OUT HERE, I found the kiss between her and that unbearable mountain bore highly inappropriate, chemistry-less, and barf inducing. MN/SL have NO chemistry and I haven’t bought them or this boring story from day one. It ruined the entire episode for me. I’d rather see Erica and Jack marry and maybe have Erica finally make good on all of her words to her mother.

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January 4, 2011 5:52 pm
db
db

What a way for AMC to ring in the new year with Susan Lucci front and center–she IS All My Children. One of the best soap episodes I have seen in a long time, and if there is any justice, Susan Lucci will be collecting Emmy #2!

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January 4, 2011 6:17 pm
Reddi
Reddi

I’ve not watched a complete episode of AMC for some time now. But I heard good things about this one and watched on abc’s site. This was incredible. Lucci was outstanding, and the show moved along at a good clip, while providing those character moments soap viewers crave. I understood how Erica got from point A to point B emotionally, and this was a combination of stellar writing and Lucci’s stellar performance.

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January 4, 2011 7:00 pm
Lisa Cox
Lisa Cox

I never watched soaps until Michael Nouri joined AMC; now I can’t wait for next episode.
He is really a wonderful, believable actor. I found myself crying when he found out Asher was his son. His performance was so touching, so real. He is wonderful with Susan Lucci; there is an undercurrent of real chemistry there (or if not they sure can make it seem so) and it’s very sexy!!.

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January 12, 2011 5:06 pm

All My Children

FRIDAY: ATWT’s Larry Bryggman and AMC’s Dorothy Lyman Guest Star On ‘The Blacklist’

January 17, 2019

Two of the most revered performances ever in the world of daytime drama will be seen tomorrow night on an all-new episode of NBC’s drama series, The Blacklist. (10/9c).

In “The Pawnbrokers”, Daytime Emmy winners, Larry Bryggman (Ex-John Dixon, As the World Turns) and Dorothy Lyman (Ex-Opal Gardner, All My Children) will be seen as a criminal duo!

Bryggman and Lyman play a couple that fronts cash to criminals on the black market. In story, series star, James Spader’s Red acclimates himself to his new digs in federal prison, where he is challenged by an old rival.  Samar (Mozhan Marnò) goes undercover to stop a black market organization that fronts cash to criminals. (Enter Larry and Dorothy!)  And, Liz (Megan Boone) and Jennifer (guest star Fiona Dourif) continue their investigation into Red’s past.

Check out the promo for tomorrow night’s episode below.   Then let us know if you will be checking out Larry and Dorothy and if all of this brings back memories of their amazing performances in Oakdale and in Pine Valley in the comment section below.

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All My Children

David Canary’s Daughter Raises Question If Repeated Head Traumas From His Football Past Contributed To AMC Star’s Condition Before His Death

January 14, 2019

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative brain disease that is now widely known to be the outcome of repeated head traumas, concussions and more for many NFL athletes, Pro Wrestlers, hockey players and more   It has caused mental illness, severe behavioral changes and more in younger athletes to even old-timers, many who suffer unaware what is happening to them. Some athletes who have committed suicide have been later to have been diagnosed with CTE when their brains were donated to research.

Kate Canary, the daughter of All My Children’s beloved and late, David Canary (Adam/Stuart Chandler), is a contributing writer to the New York Daily News, and she wrote a heartfelt, and thought-provoking article, on just what happened to this icon, who died in 2015 at the age of 77  with his formal diagnosis being Alzheimer’s disease.

However, David’s earlier football past as a high school and college football player could very well been the reason why he suffered so many years before, and as Kate related here in these excerpts: “But this diagnosis came after years of suffering with Dad’s cognitive decline, and arguably decades of signs. Without exposing the most excruciating details of a disease that could extinguish the most vibrant of men, I can confess that his case was anything but typical.  We lost him in fits and starts, over and over, for roughly seven years leading up to his final breath. Begrudgingly, we learned to lie to him — ‘entering his world,’ as my brother Chris so delicately deemed it — to skirt the contradictory truths that would trigger his outbursts, which left physical scars on objects, on himself, and on others. We knew many families who had faced Alzheimer’s, yet we were the only ones uttering the comparison ‘Jekyll and Hyde.  Those closest to Dad witnessed firsthand the erratic, delusional and at times explosive episodes that characterized his particular case, which we tried attributing to an overactive imagination in a broken brain. But as more information emerges about CTE and the nature of its symptoms — the violent mood swings, the lapses in judgment, the hours-long hallucinations, the paranoid delusions — we are left with more questions than answers, more regret than relief.”

Kate goes on to state the facts that David Canary suffered at least four major concussions as a lineman in his high school and college football playing days between the ages of 16 and 22, (she also relates that those are the ones he remembered).  She also notes the multi-Daytime Emmy winning star has experienced cognitive difficulties decades before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and that there was no genetic lineage that the family knew of that would you would often find with Alzheimer’s patients.  She also noted that David’s volatility was unusual for a patient suffering from this disease, which leads us all back to CTE.

In the end a loving daughter asks the questions, “Did football kill my father?”  Kate was on the verge of looking into a way to donate David’s brain to science, but sadly he passed away eight weeks later in November of 2015.

The upshot is that when mothers and fathers allow their kids to play football or other-related sports at an early age were concussions are a possibly or involved, think again, you could be changing the course of their lives forever.

So, what did you think of what Kate shared about David Canary’s mental health and condition?  It would seem CTE could have been the root cause of what befell this giant of a man in the daytime soap world. Share your thoughts via the comment section below.

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All My Children

Kim Delaney To Reprise Her Role As Diane Russell In ‘NYPD Blue’ Revival

January 9, 2019

Everyone loved All My Children’s Jenny Gardner played by then soap opera newcomer, Kim Delaney.  And after Kim left the world of soaps, she went on to a career on primetime television most notably on NYPD Blue as Diane Russell.

Well, in news this week, Delaney has signed on to reprise the character in the revival of the series in development over at ABC.  This is the role that Kin won a Primetime Emmy for her work back in 1997 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

According to TV Line, what we do know about the pilot; it will center on the son of Detective Sipowicz, who is working in the 15th squad and trying to earn his detective shield while investigating the murder of his father. However Emmy winner, Dennis Franz, who played the Sipowicz, will not be joining on to the reboot.

The pilot will be helmed by notable executive producers: Matt Olmstead (Chicago Fire), Nick Wootton (Scorpion), and Jesse Bochco (Murder in the First), who is the son of the late NYPD Blue co-creator, Steven Bochco.

Jesse Bochco, will direct the pilot, which is being considered for a potential fall season 2019 launch or possible next year midseason. NYPD Blue aired originally for a 12-year-run from 1993 to 2005 on ABC.

On her instagram account, Delaney wrote: “Diane Russell is back! So excited! Let’s go!”

What do you think about a ‘NYPD’ revival?  Glad to know Kim is reprising her role as Diane? Share your thoughts via the comment section below.

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