In this week’s Young & Restless Soapbox column, my colleague Candi groused, and understandably so, that the “terrible” thing that Mariah did while out of town had taken place off screen. As if viewers wouldn’t want to watch actual drama unfold. But what struck me wasn’t that — by now I’m used to this show avoiding excitement at every turn — it was Sharon’s reassurance of her daughter.
One bad act, the therapist insisted, doesn’t make Mariah a bad person. Mm, OK, but how about a whole bunch of them? I’ll grant you, having a psycho like Ian Ward as a guiding force in her life would have warped anybody. But Mariah has a looong history of misdeeds, from her criminal past in Portland to her deal with Victor to gaslight Sharon by pretending to be Cassie.
Whether we forget it now, the show has altogether forgotten the fact that Mariah stalked ex-fiancé Tyler after cheating on him. She also terrorized his then-significant other Abby. And once Mariah got together with Tessa, she cheated on her, too. Remember Lindsay? Some of us do.
For some reason, Young & Restless has also decided to whitewash Tessa’s checkered past. Sharon reminded Mariah that her wife was kind and good. Er, is she, though? Sure, she’s been on the straight and narrow for a while now, but once upon a time, Tessa was hell on wheels.
She didn’t even need the wheels!
Do we need to do a flashback to the time that, during “Teriah’s” relationship, Tessa blackmailed Nikki into paying her a quarter of a million dollars to keep from revealing evidence that she’d been involved into J.T.’s “death”?
These characters are supremely flawed — damaged, even. And that’s OK. That makes them terrific for a soap. So why is Young & Restless trying to rewrite history and tidy up the messiness to make them both out of be saints?
