Madison James: Independent of Independence

"You're siding with Madison! She's new in town, and Brady
definitely needs a fresh start. A smart, sharp woman, Madison
can keep up with Brady in business AND romance."

It’s no secret that it took forever for me to be won over by the reset after my initial excitement over the promo.  Things started disappointing me right and left.  Boom.  John and Marlena playing I-Love-You-No-I-Love-You-More.  Boom.  Austin moving into the Smugnest with Rafe, Sami, and her fifty kids.  Boom.  Nicole and EJ yet again. Boom.  A tedious triangle with Daniel, Jennifer, and Jack.  Boom.  Pacing slower than me on ether after a milkshake and an episode of Mad Men.

One pretty bloody big boom was Madison.

No, really.

While the stellar dialogue is now being paired with much better pacing, a far more intriguing mystery out of Alice’s box (behave now), the surprise grief sex, Sami versus Marlena, Matt Ashford kicking ass with Jack’s PTSD, and so many nods to history that I need a massage to ease the tension out of my neck and shoulders, one thing still bugs me, and that’s Madison.

"I can't believe you'd betray me this way after I spent a whole twenty
minutes hanging up pictures of your missing son, you ungrateful bitch."

I’m over the fact that Madison is being paired with Brady because it’s clear that, much to my chagrin, Nicole is locked in a quad along with Sami, Rafe and EJ, and Bradison is the new…something.  We’re stuck with them for now.  Obviously, I had my prejudices the second I heard that the new character was going to be brought on the show and, within minutes, become Brady’s new lady-love.  It was like EJaylor all over again.  It didn’t help that Madison was immediately being sold as a sort of anti-Nicole, similar to how Taylor had been first presented to us.  Madison is a strong, independent, self-made business woman.  She’s sassy, tough-as-nails, but still feminine.  She’s Carrie Bradshaw.  She’s a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore.  She’s ready to take on the evil Kate DiMera.

The romance here must be hiding under all that yogurt.

Obviously the first problem here is that I hate being told who I’m going to love, who has romantic chemistry, and which pairing I’m supposed to be rooting for, but I won’t prattle on about that.  There’s no turning back time.

The second problem is that Madison is none of the things listed above.  Self-made business women don’t glaze their bosses like hams and rub up on them with cucumbers, or wake up hungover, naked, and clueless as to whether or not their employer did some rubbing up on her with his own cucumber.  Strong, sassy women don’t have hissy-fits then throw in the towel after finding out that one small, start-up business run by a former pimp isn’t carrying her guy-liner and nipple-lube.  “Feminine” doesn’t mean I need to see the blue bra you’re wearing under your see-through, short-hemmed, office-inappropriate dress.  And, for me, “tough-as-nails” doesn’t translate into noisily tearing your employee a new one in a public place (why the hell was Madison at the spa again anyways?), humiliating her in front of her husband. 

I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me.

Finally, for a woman who’s supposed to be so independent, she sure is depending rather heavily on Brady’s pep talks and bags of potato chips a lot these days.  I wouldn’t find this tedious if it wasn’t for the fact that I never got to see Madison as the strong, female powerhouse she was supposed to be, so these peeks into what are supposed to be rare moments of vulnerability aren’t really peeks, and they aren’t all that rare, either.  But because I’d been told what to expect, and that it was going to be nothing short of fabulous, there was no way I was going to be anything but underwhelmed.  It was impossible.

Because I had always thought it was weird that Brady went from being a drunk who locks old ladies up in sarcophaguses to running Titan, I wouldn’t have minded if Madison was the one giving Brady the pep talks.  Brady questioning his ability to be able to run a company, for me, would have been far more believable than him being a smarmy Harrison Ford to Madison’s Melanie Griffith.  I’m supposed to believe that Madison built this amazing cosmetics company on the pretty pitiful foundation of a woman who throws a hissy-fit after her first real run-in with another business woman?  Not a chance.

One solo run-in with Mrs. DiMera nearly sent
Madison literally running for the border.

I would have liked to have seen Brady be the one plagued with feelings of self-doubt – a man trying to prove that he’s running the company not because he’s the grandson of the grand poobah, but because he’s a more than capable successor to the great Victor Kiriakis, blood or no blood.  Madison could have waltzed in and shown him how it was done.  She could have been the one helping to bolster Business Brady’s confidence, instead of us having to watch the tired old formula of Brady swinging in on a vine to rescue Jane as he did Nicole, Arianna, Melanie, and Chloe.  Watching Madison be the strong one would have made the glimpses of the scared little girl she’s supposedly sheltering inside herself more poignant, and it would make her father’s (we suspect), arrival in February a much soapier occasion.  This man, played by the mighty Ian Buchanan, is going to be Madison’s big, bad wolf.  This is going to be the man who, for better or for worse, shaped the woman we see today.

Instead we have this woman stomping through Salem throwing temper tantrums, with any glimpses of vulnerability revealing a little girl more like Veruca Salt than Anne Shirley.  How worthy an opponent is Madison going to be in the face of adversity if Brady is already the guy who has to peel her off the floor whenever she momentarily loses her footing in barely the shadow of it?