The Best F*** Up Ever: Who's That Lady in Charge of "Hollywood Heights"?

Jill Farren Phelps

Jill Foster Abbott

Leave it to Daytime Confidential, one of my favorite websites devoted to daytime soaps (or anything else, for that matter) to point out an almost-genius gaffe that recently was made by Entertainment Weekly, the magazine where I spent one year working as a senior editor in the mid-'00s.

"I think he really enjoys how fast we go," says executive producer Jill Foster Abbott, referring to the genre's speedy production schedule. "He filmed 65 pages of material in the first day that he was here. That's crazy."

So read an item in the current issue of EW about one-time Oscar nominee/host and former General Hospital guest star James Franco's soon-to-launch (on June 29) guest arc on Hollywood Heights, the new Nick at Nite prime-time telenovela which premiered on June 18.

In my 21 years working as a professional journalist, Victor Lord Jr. knows I've made my share of blunders and cringed at the oversights of countless others, but this must be the first time I've ever seen someone confuse a real-life person (former General Hospital executive producer and James Franco BFF Jill Farren Phelps, now executive producer of Hollywood Heights) with a fictional one, especially one with three names that don't exactly roll off the tongue. And considering that Jill Foster Abbott has been known as Jill Abbott Fenmore for a couple of years now, I'd say the culprit must be something of a lapsed Young and the Restless viewer.

Whether he, or she, has fallen off the Y&R bandwagon, this is one error that's almost too good to be truly just an oversight. I'm almost tempted to presume that it wasn't an honest mistake at all, but someone's idea of a very funny joke.

If so, mission accomplished!