Critical Reception
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At its debut, reviews for the series were mixed. The Orlando Sentinel gave Passions a "bleak prognosis" regarding the Princess Diana controversy: "It is still early days for Passions, but a review published in the Orlando Sentinel gave the soap opera a rather bleak prognosis. Their critic wrote: "A show's dearth of creativity is evident when it shamelessly keeps picking over the bones of the dead. Passions seems to have a death wish." TIME magazine wrote that apart from the show's supernatural elements, "Passions would appear indistinguishable from almost any other soap opera," and that unlike the Orlando Sentinel, the Princess Diana link showed that Passions wasn't "devoid of promise" and that the storyline showed "flashes of a certain kind of genius."
By 2001, Michael Logan of TV Guide remarked of Passions, "There hasn't been this sort of buzz about a soap since the Luke and Laura days on General Hospital...It's unlike anything else out there. There's a real sense of hipness to it."
Craig Tomashoff of The New York Times praised the campy storylines by calling Passions the "Twin Peaks of daytime": "It's a staggeringly psychotic blend of supernatural thriller, melodramatic soap opera and situation comedy, featuring acting that would make a pro wrestler blush. I'm never quite sure whether this is a laughing at or a laughing with kind of show; either way, I'm still laughing."
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