If you’ve ever watched soap operas, you know that they often “age” younger characters for storyline purposes. It’s known as “soap opera rapid aging syndrome”, or “SORAS” for short. It’s also fairly common for characters from one soap to cross over to another, most notably in the case of “The Young & the Restless” and its sister soap, “The Bold & the Beautiful”.
Years ago on B&B, a character named Amber gave birth to a stillborn baby. Amber had a cousin named Becky who had just given birth, as well, but Becky was planning to give the child up for adoption. Amber decided to take Becky’s baby and pass it off to her husband, Rick, as theirs. She was afraid that her marriage would fall apart without the baby. That baby was named Eric Forrester, Jr.
A few years later, a guy named Deacon came to town. He was little Eric’s biological father, and was bad news. He wanted his son, who he called “Little D” back, and he resented the Forresters for keeping him from his son. To get revenge on the family, he married naive young Bridget, Rick’s younger sister. They eloped to Las Vegas. Unknown to Bridget, he called her father from their hotel room, and left the phone off the hook, as her horrified father heard him taking his daughter’s virginity.
Not long after that, Deacon began an affair with Bridget’s mother, Brooke. Brooke became pregnant, and although she tried to protect her daughter by lying about the baby’s paternity (even going so far as marrying some guy named Whip), the truth eventually came out. Bridget divorced her cheating husband, ands was angry with her mother for a long time. They reconciled when the baby, a girl called Hope, was born.
Deacon got custody of Little D, Amber & Rick divorced, and Amber left town. Deacon married a woman named Macy, who later died. Deacon had become an alcoholic and went to rehab, and Little D went to live with Becky’s parents. Becky herself had long since died of cancer.
Years later, Amber re-surfaced, but this time on Y&R. Deacon returned not too long after that. He’d always had the hots for Amber, and blackmailed her into sleeping with him, even though she was in love with Daniel. Daniel, an artist, had gotten embroiled in a rather convoluted art forgery storyline that involved a murder, and Daniel was being framed for said murder. Deacon could keep Daniel from doing serious time for murder, but only if Amber married him. The wedding never took place, and Daniel was able to prove his innocence. He and Amber got married in a small ceremony at their apartment, under the Seagull lighting, with family and close friends in attendance.
It came out that Little D was living with Amber’s mother, Tawny. Right now, Deacon isn’t in the picture…not sure if he left town, or went to jail for his participation in the art thing. Amber, who still considered herself to be Little D’s mother, wants the boy to come and live with her and Daniel. Daniel, however, does not agree, he doesn’t want kids now, and he says he’s not sure if he ever will. This, of course, is causing problems in their marriage.
Meanwhile, over at B&B, Hope was SORASed to a teenager. She’s dating a guy named Oliver, and is also the spokesmodel for a line in her family’s fashion design house, called “Hope for the Future”.
Here’s where the stupid comes in. Today, on the preview for tomorrow’s episode of Y&R, they briefly showed Little D. I only got a glimpse, but the kid playing Little D looked to be maybe 10-11 years old! B&B comes on right after Y&R, and on today’s episode, Hope was making out with Oliver. What is wrong with this picture?
Little D is supposed to be OLDER than Hope. Do these writers think we are stupid? Do they not realize that many people watch both shows, and are aware of the fact that Little D and Hope share the same father, and that the boy was born first? If they are going to have both characters on the canvas at the same time, on two shows that are on one right after the other, at least be consistent with the SORASing! They have Hope as age 16-17, so that would make Little D in his early 20′s.
Something else that I think is dumb – normally, when they SORAS a character, the character has been off the canvas for a while, before they bring on the older actor. But on Y&R, the character of Abby, who was supposed to 14, is being aged to her early 20′s. So, one day, she’s flirting with some older guy and sneaking booze from the family liquor cabinet, and the next, she’s legally old enough to have sex with said guy (which I heard was part of the reason for the SORASing), as well as drink in a bar. WTF?
Sigh. What can you do? They’re just TV shows, anyway!
