Meandering Musings

SMG blindsided everyone involved when announcing -- on air --  in her acceptance speech when she won her Emmy that she wasn't going to renew her contract. Soap press -- and SHOW -- were shocked by the announcement.  It was a surprise.   It was a thing!  Soap Press covered everyone's reactions because it was an out-of-the-blue announcement.  By her.  On stage.

The show didn't have an exit storyline planned for her.  They hadn't planned on her character exiting, and the existing plot had to be truncated and new story had to be pulled out of the show's asses to accommodate her not renewing her contract (a story that never made much sense, btw, and got disposed of once they brought the character back a couple of years later).

The show was not prepared to lose SMG's character (a character who was slated to become and who eventually became a show staple. When they recast the character a couple of years after SMG's exit, the character remained on canvas until the end of the show, having become arguably one of its most central characters).  The swerve in story was 100% obvious at the time because it was so clearly a detour in the storyline engineered after her announcement at the Emmys.

SMG didn't re-sign her contract and exited at the end of her contract despite the show wanting her to stay (which, come on!  It was a good career move for her at that time to move on.  Look at what it did for her career-wise to jump while the jumping was at its apex.  It was a smart move!).  SMG was. not. fired.

I always side-eye Lucci getting tagged with this because it always seems to stem from people being incapable of separating Lucci from her character, the diva-ish Erica Kane.  Lucci -- the actual woman -- as opposed to the fictional character that she played, was never known to be much of an instigator.  She was on the show for 35 years and did not have a history either before or after SMG of on-going feuds or diva behavior with other actors (or actresses to use a gendered term)*  I would suppose that Lucci being on the same show for 35 years (throughout many different regimes running the show and that misogynist asswipe Brian-what's-his-sexist face who took over running all of ABC Daytime in the late 90s-00s) that Lucci wasn't a boat-rocker. She appeared happy to go along with the status quo. That's not all that high maintenance in showbiz.

Lucci  was not Erica Kane. She simply played her on TV.

An actress is not her character (Alyson Sweeney is reportedly a nice person as well, despite playing Days bitch-in-residence Sami Brady.) Playing an OTT soap diva doesn't necessarily mean that an actress is a real life shrew. They may not be great or even good actresses, but that doesn't mean that they are the characters that they play on screen.

Plus, it's not like Lucci didn't have other actresses playing her adult daughters on the show.   Not only was SMG not the only actress to play an adult daughter of Lucci's character (and other than the little-kid version of Bianca, SMG was the YOUNGEST actress portraying one of Lucci's daughters ...at the time she was portraying her.  {It was downright ludicrous that SMG was 16 playing a 24 year old, anyway.  Not only did she NOT look 24 but it made it hella uncomfortable watching her character attempt to seduce her 50-something stepfather... ::shudder::} So it cannot be an age thing either.  A few years later it would be a 32 year old recast playing the same character as SMG, and Lucci and Minshew got along from her hiring through the end of the show just a couple of years ago).

Anyway, SMG was not the only actress to be nominated or to win the Emmy by playing one of Lucci's daughters on AMC.  SMG's replacement repeatedly got nominated for an Emmy (for the same role).  And the actress who played SMG's character's sister won more than once (in fact... I think BOTH women who played the adult version of SMG's character's sister were nominated for that role....which...erm... guys.  In case no one knows this, the 'younger daytime actress' (and younger daytime actor {looking at you yelly-mc-yellerson when you played recast Lucky Spencer...)  Emmy is a joke.  Always has been.  Yes, even more of a joke than all the other Daytime Emmys... which are uniformly a bit of a LOL  (for example:  It hands out Emmys to the likes of Days of Our Lives... for real! Even for writing (once).  I mean, seriously.  That places things in perspective.)    So, where awards are concerned, it's not the greatest one that an actor can get.  Or within many, many, many miles of it.  )  And all three four actresses who played Lucci's daughters were nominated for Emmys (and a couple won) . (Basically, the 'Kane women' were some of the most showcased characters of the show).  So, again, this wasn't a SMG-specific thing.  [And Michael B. Jordon -- yes, that one -- played Lucci's adopted son.  So SMG isn't the only one to have mainstream success.  For that matter, Amanda Seyfried started on AMC in the 00s as well...]

What's more, the "Kathy Griffen says..." rumor says SMG was fired by Lucci because SMG won the Emmy.  Um... SMG announced her exit as part of her acceptance speech, and the soap press at the time revealed that EVERYONE was shocked by the announcement. Including the show.  That gives Lucci approximately a 1 minute opportunity to stink-eye and magically fire SMG while SMG walked down the aisle to the stage... or something.

And the feud was not taking place while SMG was off being successful elsewhere, but while SMG was just an unknown soap vixen, so it cannot boil down to 'career envy'.  At that point in time, when this would've happened, Lucci was substantially the more successful of the two (it reversed AFTER SMG left the show) and Lucci had front-burner storylines on the show during the entirity of SMG's tenure with the show.  She wasn't being sidelined.

At any rate, it simply does not really fit the timeline, the in-show writing, or the general  circustances that Lucci supposedly  engineered the firing of a 16 year old girl (Wasn't SMG 19 by then?)  apparently without the show knowing about it... because they would've planned a better exit if it was the show firing SMG.  And it would've had to be the show and Agnes Nixon firing SMG because Agnes Nixon (and whoever was beneath her at that time) ran the show not Lucci, who was only an actress even if perhaps the highest profile one.  {I've heard of actresses 'getting' a couple of actors fired... but in both those cases it stemmed from actresses accusing actors of sexual harrassment with said actors being abruptly replaced/recast as love interests  {one guy this happened to, had it happen on two different shows with a total of 4 actresses accusing him -- 3 on one show, 1 on the other so...yeah.  He was scuzzy and the shows were fearing lawsuits... especially given that he revealed he'd also been dating a teenaged -- jailbait-- costar.... while he was in his mid-thirties.)

So... I'm just not buying that Lucci had SMG fired.

It might make juicy 'gossip' for Kathy Griffen to float that (why at this late date, I do not know.  But, I guess, it works better when people don't remember the context of SMG's announcement and exit.) Given the shock surrounding SMG's Emmy announcement that she was leaving and the show having been blindsided by it such that they were not yet prepared for an exit storyline -- and had to pull one out of their asses -- yet STILL had a couple of months to write and film the SMG exit storyline (so she didn't just disappear overnight or had the character suddenly recast (as is what generally happens with abruptly fired actors on soaps). They instead wrote  and filmed a 'happy ending' plot for the character, having her within-a-few-weeks-fall-in-love with 'good guy' Del, with her swearing off her perpetual revenge against her mother to run off to 'be happy' with the {temporary} 'love of her life' (Want to know who got fired?  The guy who played Del who got written off with her!).

Anyway, way to pull out ancient gossip and mangle it.


* Noted while Lucci has no track record of feuding, SMG has a few known 'feuds' in her history... (Neve Campbell, Charisma Carpenter, and Alyson Hannigan among them).