A Critic’s Review Of The Bold and the Beautiful: Maturation, Ruination & Chicanery

When it comes to The Bold and the Beautiful, every fan has their own opinion – and Soap Hub is no different. For five days, we sat and watched the good, the bad, and everything in between, and now we offer you a handy review, and a cheeky critique, of B&B’s week that was.

The Bold and the Beautiful: A Critic’s Week In Review

I wish I could say that The Bold and the Beautiful’s decision to have Taylor Hayes (Krista Allen) attempt to go through with her wedding to Ridge Forrester (Thorsten Kaye) without apprising him of Thomas Forrester’s (Matthew Atkinson) chicanery surprised me — and yes, I know that technically Friday’s episode left us to wonder, but if you read our spoilers then you know the score — but I can’t.

For me, this seems pretty par for the course for this character who was ruined, at least in my eyes, years and years and years ago, long before she was recast with an actress nearly a decade younger than her predecessor and before she adopted a vapid “Valley Girl” attitude. [If you’re interested, I haven’t been able to stomach Tay-Tay since she made roadkill out of Darla on Old Decatur Road.]

What surprised me, in the best way possible, was the maturation of Steffy Forrester Finnegan (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), a character seemingly in perpetual arrested development, save for that one moment in time when she went ape on Sheila Carter’s (Kimberlin Brown) behind. How lovely to see that Steffy on my screen.

I wish the same could be said of Bill Spencer (Don Diamont) but…eh, yuck. What to say about a man like that…other than I wonder why The Bold and the Beautiful is chockablock with them? Bill, Ridge, Liam Spencer (Scott Clifton), Carter Walton (Lawrence Saint-Victor)… The only decent males on this soap are John “Finn” Finnegan (Tanner Novlan) and possibly Wyatt Spencer (Darin Brooks), and that’s only by virtue of the fact that they’re barely on screen. I have no doubt that should they be made permanent fixtures they’d soon start to waffle between the one that they have and the one that they have not.

Further B&B Musings

* So, you get Patrick “Bobby Ewing” Duffy back for two days — not to mention his real-life ladylove Linda Purl — and you use him to recap Brooke Logan’s (Katherine Kelly Lang) relationship woes which were just recapped in the episode previous, and in the episode before that, and the episode before that, and the episode before that, and…

* Yea, I got it right last week, Carter really did let himself into Brooke’s abode, without her knowledge or permission, in order to riffle around for Ridge’s cufflinks. Do I even need to bring up the optics of a black man infiltrating the home of a rich white woman — who also happens to be a rape survivor? Who in that writers’ room thought, “Yea, this whole thing is appropriate”?

The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays on CBS. For an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.

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