Diva Picks - 8/17 to 8/21

Winner of the Week: NBC.COM for finally getting out of the Stone Age and airing DAYS episodes on their website. You still have to sit through a commercial every five minutes, but at least the quality of the video is excellent. Also, so far, it seems that NBC is posting the episodes faster than those that put them out on YouTube. Hopefully, the website hits and ad revenue will help DAYS stay afloat during these perilous times of the daytime soaps. Whether PASSIONS LITE deserves to survive is debatable…but I give NBC some kudos for the pretense that they give a shit.

Losers of the Week: PHILLIP KIRIAKIS AND MELANIE LAYTON. With all of Pretty Boy’s money, he can’t afford to take Melanie to a decent hotel before he does the nasty with her? He couldn’t even spring for the Salem Inn, for fuck’s sake? Oh, I heard the lame excuse that he didn’t want to be caught with Melanie where he might be recognized. Yeah, right! The guy can manage to creep his way into a morgue drawer but can’t keep a low profile in a hotel? Whatevah! Then to make matters worse, he professes his love for Stephanie the very next day, dumping Melanie like a used washrag. I believed his promise to stop being a big bad Kiriakis about as much as I believed him when he told Melanie that he was over Stephanie. Okay, he’s got a nice set of dimples…but what a loser! He was a loser back in the days when he was calling Chloe “Ghoul Girl” and he’s still every bit as insensitive a jerk now. And speaking of losers, why did Melanie bore us all with that diatribe of how she didn’t want to be second best to Stephanie…and yet the dumb bitch has sex with Phillip in a motel so sleazy that the manager assumes she’s a hooker? Why did she brag to Arianna the next day about her score like she was a dumb high school jock? At least, DAYS didn’t insult the viewers with a pathetic twu wuv song like they did when Danloe first made out. Quite appropriately, this pairing was accompanied by that awful porn music the show likes to schlep out every once in a while. And we’ve already been blessed with at least two flashbacks of this latest skin flick so far. And now it seems that some whack job wearing a beret is planning on making a major motion picture out of it.

Scene of the Week: CIARA’S IMAGE ON THE COMPUTER. I hate Bo’s weird Celeste Perrault-like visions. I hate how Hope laid into Bo a few months ago for not trusting her with his visions, and is now distrusting him with those same visions due to her blind panic. I hate that the writing is so obviously leading to a BOPE breakup, just in time for Carly Manning’s return…and methinks Justin might get involved in all this mess too (I wouldn’t even mind a Justin/Hope affair actually if I thought there would be any real support for them as a couple; it would give Wally Kurth a love scene and Kristian Alfonso more storyline). But I have to admit that when Ciara’s photo showed up on the computer at the Salem Police station, that whole scene was pretty horrifying and powerful, especially if you’re a parent while watching. Kudos to little Lauren Boles (Ciara) for just being there. She is so cute and so physically right for the role of BOPE’s daughter that she adds a little more juice to this story. Yes, it’s disturbing and intense…but I find that preferable to boredom.

Performers of the Week: PETER RECKELL AND KRISTIAN ALFONSO. While I stand by my opinion that this is all rehash, no one can quite do rehash like Peter and Kristian. After the third go-around of a “losing a child” storyline (the fourth if you count Hope’s miscarriage in the mid-80s), I wouldn’t blame them if they phoned their acting in this time around. But their performances as Bo and Hope, fluctuating from horror to anguish to blaming each other, rises above all of the dreck and makes this stuff watchable, perhaps even entertaining…despite everything.

Line of the Week: KATE (to Daniel, regarding his situation with Chloe): “You’re kind of like an animal, rutting around on a field with the doe-eyed slut. And then when you find out she doesn’t want to be with you anymore, what do you decide to do? You decide to kill her.”

Rewriting Alert of the Week: EJ to VICTOR at the Kiriakis/Dimera Ciara Summit: “Now we do a lot of bad things in this world, all of us. But I can look every man I know in the eye and I can tell him why. What we do not do is harm children. And if anybody ever took a child from me, I would make sure that that person and anybody that supported him died a slow and painful death.” Oh, really? So I guess I just imagined Joe Jr.’s kidnapping last year when Stefano took over the hospital? And the attempt to get stem cells from Sami’s twins a year before that in order to keep Stefano alive? I know this is all set up for the Nicole downfall…but jeez, Dena, do a little fucking research, would ya? 2 years is not that long ago. Hard to believe, but you might still have some viewers that haven’t left your show for greener pastures since those days.