Are you worried the Daytime Emmys will become extinct?

As the Emmy crew unfurls the red carpet for its annual awards show, some viewers anticipate watching their faves win, and some are miffed the show won't be televised. If you're a soap fan, you might be asking, "Am I the only one that still cares about the Daytime Emmys?"

It's time to put on makeup, and it's time to light the lights. It's time to give out some daytime awards on Sunday night! Before we get to the scoops of the week, let's get Two Scoops deep into the awards show that is upon us.

Presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the 45th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards show takes place April 29, 2018, in Pasadena, CA. The awards will be televised -- digitally, that is -- on Facebook, on the show's website, and on TV telecasting apps, which really isn't televised at all, and that angers some viewers.

If you've got fifty bucks and some formal attire, you can witness the show firsthand by purchasing a seat from Ticketmaster. As of April 27, a few dozen chairs remain open in the very back rows if you're so locally inclined. The Bold and the Beautiful's "Emmy" (Sheryl Underwood) will be hosting the so-named awards show on Sunday along with Mario Lopez, who you may recall played Hector's younger brother, Dr. Christian Ramirez.

Not only are B&B alums hosting the Daytime Awards segment of the show, but some of the veterans are also presenting. Look for Katherine Kelly Lang, who plays the Forrester matriarch, to usher in the 2018 award winners. She will be joined by Rena Sofer, the other Forrester matriarch, and the award-winning Heather Tom, who plays Katie Logan Spencer.

The Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards segment of the awards event took place Friday, April 27, and Annika Noelle (Hope Logan) and Jeremy Ray Valdez (Detective Sanchez) were on tap to present creative and technical awards to the behind-the-scenes talent that drives the daytime shows.

B&B has several nominations in the game, and even though its leading ladies are presenting, the show was shut out of the leading actress category this year. John McCook is up for a leading actor award, beating out Scott Clifton in the pre-nomination round.

Jacqueline MacInnes Wood (Steffy, B&B) made it to the finals in the supporting actress category. Darin Brooks lost his bid for supporting actor, shutting B&B out of that category, also; however, Rome Flynn (Zende, B&B) and Reign Edwards (Nicole, B&B) represent B&B in the younger actor and actress categories.

B&B is also up for best daytime drama, along with the other three remaining soap operas. These four drama programs vie against each other in eleven of the thirteen creative categories. As for the other two categories, B&B did not make it into the best casting category, and Days of our Lives didn't make it into the finals for best costumes -- a category you'd think B&B should win after Sally Spectra shed her 80s wardrobe.

I wish the Bold and the Beautiful the best of luck in their categories; however, with fewer and fewer actors in the pool and every existing soap making it into the final nominations almost by default, I wonder: are the Emmys awarding talent or participation?

Back when there were something like fourteen soaps, the daytime Emmys drew in millions of viewers, and no doubt, the competition to take home an award was much more fierce when powerhouse divas like Kim Zimmer, Susan Lucci, Maura West, and Susan Flannery battled for Outstanding Lead Actress. Now, there are four soap operas, which means a lower viewership for the awards show, significantly fewer actors and shows competing for the awards, and a real risk of the same actors and programs winning the same categories year after year after year.

With only four soap operas remaining, each with historically smaller casts, are our actors and actresses vying to find out who's the biggest fish in a shrinking pond? If the soap genre continues to shrink, at what point will doling out daytime Emmys for drama become futile? When we are down to three soaps? Two? One?

Don't get me wrong. I know the entire casts and crews of these shows are the hardest-working people in show business. You have to be in order to operate a show five days a week for decades with only one or two reruns per year! It's always been Ripley's amazing to me that there are thousands of episodes that we only see once and never again. Millions of gripping moments that lived on only in our minds -- until the invention of the VCR, anyway.

The dramas deserve awards for all of it -- the cast, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the sets, the scripts, and the music. I just question whether it's a true competition when there are only four shows competing. I mean, would you watch a pageant with only four competitors? Wait...would you even watch a pageant at all nowadays? Do they even still exist?

Advertisers have probably questioned this very thing about pageant and award shows, and it could be the reason that some viewers are perturbed that they can't see the awards shows on the channels that broadcast the shows up for awards. As each defunct show drew to a close, so shrank the talent pool to win Emmys and so shrank the number of viewers who tuned in for the awards ceremony. If the ratings aren't there, the advertisers aren't there. If the advertisers aren't there, the show isn't there.

As the Emmys program bounced between the three major soap channels, it shed millions of viewers each time, no doubt shedding advertising dollars, as well. In 2009, none of the soap channels opted to carry the awards show. That led to its debut on the CW, a station that carried no soaps at all. On the CW, the annual awards show's viewership dropped almost to half, but it recovered in the next two years when the show returned to CBS. If you call climbing back into the five-milion range recovering, that is.

CBS didn't agree that five to six million viewers in 2010 and 2011 was a recovery, especially not when CBS had withdrawn from hosting the televised event after getting only around eight million viewers the last time CBS carried it in 2007. CBS passed the Emmys show to HLN in 2012 and 2013, and the ratings dropped below two million.

In 2014, the Emmys were broadcast on the Internet, where the ratings were not tracked. The next year, POP picked it up and received a under a million viewers. In 2016, the awards ceremony didn't broadcast at all, with the explanation cited on broadcastingcable.com being:

"After months of negotiations to find show sponsorship, the NATAS Executive Board has decided that the current climate for awards shows prohibits the possibility of a telecast this year. With that said, we will be putting on a world-class awards celebration honoring the best and brightest of Daytime television and look forward to an exciting show. All efforts regarding returning the annual gala to television in 2017 are underway."

Umm...it never made it back to the small screen. Instead, the 44th annual show was broadcast on Twitter, Facebook Live, and possibly streamed on the show's own website, as it will be this year in 2018. New for 2018, viewers can download the free app for Apple TV, Roku, iOS, or Android to stream the Emmys onto their smart televisions.

As I write this, it's 8:00 p.m. Friday, and I'm trying to pull the Friday stream up now on my laptop. The feed isn't even moving. I have slow equipment, though, so...you guys have to let me know whether you enjoyed streaming it from the website, telecasting it to a TV with an app, or watching it live on Twitter or Facebook -- or if you just wish they would create a gofundme, so viewers can pay a major network to broadcast it for us commercial-free in 2019.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled scoops

What a difference two weeks makes! Two weeks being the last time we scooped together. The minute I thought we solved the shooting crime and got our promotions to deputy chief super scooper sleuthers, in came the "plot twist." If you thought Spaghetti Junction was windy, it has nothing on the Taylor twist.

Supposedly, Taylor, not Liam, shot Bill. Supposedly, Liam overheard enough of the crime that his guilty conscience formed subconscious memories of the shooting. Supposedly, Taylor flew immediately from Paris to Los Angeles upon learning about Bill and Steffy from Ridge, who supposedly called Taylor right when he learned about it.

If all that is true, Taylor had to be flying on the wings of a gnat to take so long to get to Los Angeles. If you'll recall, Brooke went to ask Steffy to be the matron of honor in Brooke's wedding, and that was when Brooke found out that something was going on with Liam and Steffy. Brooke sent Ridge to talk to his daughter, and that was when Ridge learned what had gone on between Steffy and Bill.

These scenes occurred around Valentine's Day, and though we had long days in soap time, they were still actual days that passed between Ridge's revelation and the shooting. Steffy's stomach got bigger in the meantime, and Ridge and Brooke got married. Katie and Wyatt were broken up for at least two or three days before the shooting. I need for someone to explain to me how Taylor flew there immediately after she'd learned about Steffy and Bill from Ridge, who claimed that he'd told Taylor right after he'd found out, but it took Taylor days and days to actually arrive at Bill's house the night of the shooting?

In trying to figure it out, I thought that maybe Ridge meant that he'd told Taylor after finding out about the marriage proposal, but if that is the case, we go from wondering why Taylor arrived so slowly to wondering how she could have gotten from Paris to L.A. that fast. We're talking about an eleven-and-a-half-hour flight from Paris to L.A., and that's not including traffic or going through airport security.

So, someone please explain it to me. Once you help me figure that one out, I next want to figure out how in the world Liam could imagine the entire crime exactly as it happened. If you ask me, the writers pulled a cheap trick with this one because Liam is supposed to be a trustworthy character, and if he actually has flashbacks of the crime, there's no reason not to believe him -- even if the idea that he did it is hard to swallow.

Believe it or not, people do falsely confess to a crime in real life. There are dozens of cases of false confessions, and false confessions are the hardest to overturn because it's so hard to believe someone would confess to something they did not do. The real-life case that sticks out in my mind is that of Ryan Ferguson, who spent over a decade in jail because his friend, Chuck Errickson, dreamed that he and Ryan had killed someone on Halloween two years prior.

Ryan told Chuck to get off the drugs, but instead, Chuck confessed to the police. He got every detail of the case wrong as he confessed, but the police continued to feed him details until he told the story back to them correctly. Ryan did not break under interrogation, but he was convicted based on Chuck's testimony and eyewitness testimony that was later discredited.

Ryan was set free due to the incredible work of attorney Katherine Zellner. Chuck is still in jail for the murder; however, Ryan insists that he took Chuck straight home that night, and neither one of them committed the crime. You can still find Ryan and Chuck's interrogations on YouTube. They are eye-opening if you wonder how false confessions can happen.

I would have preferred it if Liam had been pressured by Sanchez into a false confession rather than have it be that Liam just made it all up; however, Chuck shows us that making it up is also possible.

Will the shooter ever be found? This week, Bill hinted to Wyatt and Justin that the shooting case was "Taylor-made" for Sanchez. In a one-on-one with Wyatt, Bill let Wyatt overhear a phone call between Steffy and Bill, during which Steffy thanked Bill for keeping the secret. Wyatt's ears perked up at the idea of secrets between Steffy and Bill, and I started wondering if Bill would find a way to let it somehow get out that Taylor was his shooter. After all, Bill is not one to just let things go, and trying to kill him ain't no small thing.

When last we scooped, I floated the idea that Bill might blackmail Steffy about Liam being the shooter. The shooter seems to be Taylor instead, but Bill is exploiting Steffy's feelings for his shooter just the same. Bill also has no problem continuing to manipulate Wyatt, either. Apparently, making Wyatt leave Katie isn't enough for Bill anymore, and if Wyatt wants to become the heir apparent, Bill says Wyatt has to help Bill "fix" the family by getting Liam to realize he should be with Hope because Steffy truly wants Bill.

Wyatt wanted nothing to do with it until he overheard the phone call between Bill and Steffy. Bill tried to convince Wyatt that Steffy has been calling and visiting Bill constantly, and if Wyatt loved Liam, he'd tell Liam the truth about Liam's wife. Will Wyatt fall for it, or will he share the information with Katie, who will remind him that he cannot believe anything Bill says about Steffy -- or anything else for that matter?

Across town, blonde and blonder decided it was a good idea to ask Brooke's estranged son-in-law to live on the same property as his father-in-law and the stepsister-in-law who wants to bang him. Boy, there's a lot of room for growth in that brain of Brooke's, isn't there? Hope keeps acting all apologetic for putting Brooke in such a tough spot with Ridge, but Brooke keeps claiming she can handle it.

Yeah, Brooke, but why do you want to handle it? While we're on the subject, why would Liam want to handle it? What kind of scuzzy son-in-law moves onto his father-in-law's estate when everybody knows -- including the father-in-law -- that the stepdaughter has the hots for the son-in-law in question? Ridge will probably come home one day with Katie's telescope and Quinn's spare pair of binoculars to use every time he hears Hope leave her room at night.

I'm looking at Liam sideways right now because after ping-ponging between these women for years, he should know better than to move onto the estate where Hope lives and to also work with Hope when her job is at the same place as his wife's. He keeps telling Steffy that he can't see her without seeing her with Bill. Well, Liam, how the hell do you think Steffy feels each time she sees you with Hope?

Usually, I'm #teamHope, but Hope is acting way too needy and clingy. Suddenly, instead of being all about her career like before, all she wants to do with her life is heal the world and cook vegan Mediterranean meals on time for Liam. And I feel bad for Steffy. And I feel cold. Hell must have frozen over, because that's the only time I thought I'd ever feel sorry for Steffy.

A killer herself, Steffy grapples with the fact that her mother, also a killer, shot at Bill -- and Steffy just shot at Sheila herself last fall. Steffy has to conceal all kinds of crimes and deal with a precarious pregnancy while the bikini-ready Hope tries to lure Liam away with gourmet dishes Steffy can't even pronounce let alone figure out how to burn with her non-cooking self.

Maybe I shouldn't feel sorry for Steffy. After all, she took no pity on Katie, who was falling down in cardiac arrest over Steffy's affair with Bill. I guess I feel bad because, like an ant in a spider's web, Steffy's got no chance against Bill. He wants her. He's gonna get her, but sadly, she does not want him. It's gonna make for one hell of a cold marriage. It reminds of a first couple we all know who has a slight hand-holding in public problem. Will Steffy give in and become Bill's Melania?

After botching the attempted murder investigation, I'm out of the predication business for the next few weeks, but let's take a look at the spoilers for a glimpse into what could happen next.

In a look ahead

Next week, the end will justify the means for Bill, who manipulates his sons to get what he wants. Katie reminds Wyatt of the one thing Bill does best besides making money -- Bill lies. It seems to me that Bill wants to keep Wyatt and Katie apart just for perverted kicks, but no matter what Bill's reasons are, Katie doesn't want to get caught at Spencer, canoodling with Wyatt.

Bill appeals to Steffy again for them to be together, while at the same time, Liam tells Hope that he can't make any commitments. The only commitment Hope ought to want from Liam is one to get his head examined. Hope should find them a two-for-one coupon so she can also have her head examined for winding up in the exact same place with Liam that she was when she first met Wyatt!

It is slightly different, though, isn't it? Steffy's is still pregnant this time, and Bill sides with Hope this time, not Steffy. During Sweeps, Liam makes a decision, but his father's manipulations could thwart his plans. Liam and Hope might have a shot at a future, after all, which puts Brooke and Ridge at odds with each other. There's an engagement and wild wedding in somebody's near future. Do Katie and Wyatt or Hope and Liam tie the knot?

We said goodbye, but Courtney Hope says, "hello, hello, hello" when she returns as Sally Spectra. Don't tell me that Sally returned because Caroline talked Thomas into reuniting again. If Sally's back to stay, there had better be a good excuse that she's not with Thomas, or I never want to see him again. Don't you agree? Isn't dumping Sally in three major cities all the dumping Sally ought to take from him?

Rumors indicate that someone else might be coming back, too, and she's just the one Detective Sanchez has been looking for. Taylor makes another appearance in L.A. and spars with Brooke. Will Taylor continue to elude police?

Let us know what you think, and may your Emmy weekend be bold and beautiful, baby!

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