Carly, we hardly knew ye…

I’m sorry Jennifer Brandsford, but so far Misters Guza and Pratt have made you totally abhorrent to me.  Carly was never one of my favorite characters but the way they are writing her/you now completely disgusts me.  Take heart though, you are just one of a very long list of actors who has been offered up as a hellish sacrifice on the altar of misogyny at the First Church of Pruza.  

One of the first things I read about the latest recasting of Carly was how they were planning to ‘bring back the Carly of old, the schemer, the manipulator’ –I’m paraphrasing here but I really don’t give a shit.  Do they expect us to think that the last four years under Tamara Braun never existed?  Is this like the Bobby Dream on Dallas where the whole GD season was so abysmally horrid that the writers felt they could put Bobby in the shower (or in this case, have Carly walk up and down the stairs) and it’s like it never happened?   

When Tamara Braun hit town as NuCarly she was immediately ridiculed as being a cheap copy of the original.  There were no bones made about the fact that one of the reasons she was hired was that she so closely resembled Sarah Brown that the only thing they needed to do was apply a little Clairol #312 over the weekend for her to be almost a dead ringer.  Even so – they slowly but surely began aging (and maturing) the character, which made sense and gave us a lot of new story possibilities to work with.  Carly made peace with her mother, she became the quintessential mob wife, she divorced Sonny (the first time) she was partners with Jax in a legitimate business (we’ll let slide that pesky little embezzlement misunderstanding) – and she even (gasp!) found a female friend that she wasn’t in direct competition with. I realize that Sarah Brown originated the character; she could play it any damn way she wanted because there wasn’t anyone to compare her to.  She did a fantastic job, though I had more than my fill of the nostril-flaring thing.  But she wasn’t coming back to reprise her original character this time around.   

Tamara as Carly wasn’t perfect, she was wonderfully flawed.  That’s why people liked her.  She didn’t always hit the mark, but she made a damn good showing.  She and the character grew and now in some sick and twisted way TIIC have totally retarded the character and reduced her to a wild-eyed frenetically narcissistic harpy.  Take for example this last week or so… we’ve seen Carly confront Sonny and Reese in flagrante delicto and demand that Sonny acknowledge that he’s only using Reese in a sad attempt to make Carly jealous.  Her grasping and pathetic neediness in those scenes was exceeded only by her ridiculous ambush of Sam at Jake’s Bar.  The catfight was bad enough – God knows Pruza probably sat around trying to figure out how they might possibly get the two gals to go at it in mud or baby oil, but it was just so I-just-landed-in-Port Charles-and-am-out-to-self destruct-Carly that I had to hurl.  Even steadfast Jason is tired of her shit and we all know it takes a helluva lot for Carly to piss off Jason. 

On today’s show she outdid even herself in the category of psychotic regression.  She couldn’t be happy that Courtney managed to forgive her for deliberately trying to destroy her wedding to Jax, oh no, she had to go one better – and for what?? Carly was so over the top today in her one note characterization that I was praying that someone, anyone would just gag her muscle bound ass and drag her out of there.   

Now we are expected to see Courtney’s lecture at the altar as the catalyst of Carly’s realization that life goes on and she needs to get with the program and embrace the present and stop living in the past?  Jeez, couldn’t they have just sent her to a Tony Robbins seminar for the weekend?  It would have saved us all a lot of grief… as it stands, I’m downright afraid to ask, “what’s next?” ~ and at this point, I really don’t care. 

KellyB