Sharon (Sharon Case) and Nick (Joshua Morrow) were horrified to come face to face with Matt Clark on Young and Restless because, as far as they knew, their infamous tormentor died back in 2001 after his last attempt to destroy their lives. Matt’s demise, which occurred on screen, was pretty definitive at the time, but the soap’s head writer and executive producer, Josh Griffith, weighed the pros and cons of resurrecting another character from the dead and opted to go for it. As the scribe put it to Soap Opera Digest, “To me, the only con is that you’ve got to just be able to get the audience to suspend disbelief so they go with it. But the pros, for me, much outweigh that, because there’s nothing better than being able to draw from history for a new story.”
Telling Tales
Griffith explains, “I wanted to do a big suspense story with Sharon and Nick at the center of it. That was the first thought process.” As he began brainstorming ideas, setting the story outside of the show’s typical location was always on his radar. “I was [thinking]. ‘I’d love to take it outside of Genoa City.’ And I started thinking, ‘L.A. noir,’ [that] I wanted to do like an L.A. noir. So then I thought, ‘Well, is this a femme fatale that Nick’s been involved with?’ And I said, ‘No, it needs to be tied to the history.’ So I looked into the history, and there was Matt Clark, the great nemesis he was, and as is always the case, just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he has to be dead!”
The trick then became how to bring Matt into Sharon and Nick’s orbit once again. Continues the scribe, “I started thinking, ‘What if there was a way to pull [Nick and Sharon] into a new arena that Matt was working in,’ that could create this suspenseful dynamic that I was going for?” That gave birth to the notion of Matt having created an alternate identity. “I thought, ‘Okay, let’s say he came back to life and created a new persona. He’s living in L.A., and he’s in the rock and roll world.’ So then I started thinking, ‘What about Noah [Lucas Adams]? How about Noah being the one that he connects with, because Noah has been living in London with his own club.’ And then everything just sort of fell into place from there.”
As the story continued to develop and Matt’s new identity of Mitch Bacall began to take shape, there was another crucial element necessary to make it work — giving Mitch a wife, Sienna (Tamara Braun). “Because I wanted that to be the sort of mysterious, romantic element of it,” Griffith shares. “What would pull Nick and Sharon to L.A. would be something horrific happening to Noah. So I wanted the car accident to happen. Out of that, I said, ‘Well, if Noah’s having an affair with Mitch’s wife, then that could lead to the car accident.’ And we start wondering, ‘Was this all a setup for Matt? Did meeting Noah bring back all his anger and all the past, and he set this train wreck of a story in motion because of that?’”
The Nightmare Continues
Previously, Matt’s ire was directed at Nick and Sharon — but Noah’s affair with Sienna has caused him to widen his focus quite a bit for his newest plot. “The core of his agenda is the feeling that the son of his most hated couple, Nick and Sharon, has taken from him someone that he — in his way — felt that he loved,” Griffith says. “And so they all have to pay for that. He has been betrayed, and so they will suffer.”
Unfortunately for Matt, his plan went awry, because Noah remained in the land of the living after his car wreck. Griffith explains that Matt was “prepared” for a big showdown with Sharon and Nick when they came to Los Angeles — he just expected them to be in emotional tatters at the time. “He knew they were coming,” Griffith asserts. “What he didn’t bank on was Noah surviving the accident. Because by Noah surviving the accident, he knew at that point he probably was about to lose Sienna forever, and that just enraged him.
The Sharon that Matt has been contending with since she first ran into the villain outside of his club is far from a shrinking violet, though; in fact, she’s proving to be quite formidable. “That is definitely a surprise for him,” Griffith attests. “Obviously, Sharon has been through hell the past few years, and it’s really given her even more strength than she’s ever had. And he wasn’t prepared for that.”
In recent years, Sharon had to contend with being tormented by another villain from her past, Cameron Kirsten (Linden Ashby), first in the flesh and then, after she killed him, as a figment of her embattled imagination. When Matt resurfaced, some viewers assumed they were in for another storyline that pivots around Sharon being tormented by a bad guy. “I don’t think this is that,” Griffith assures. “The difference here is that, from Sharon’s point of view, she has more rage than fear when it comes to Matt,” he says. “She is just furious that he’s messed with her son, that he’s messing with her family.”
And just how much fight Sharon has in her will become apparent this week. “Anybody who thinks Sharon is not going to stand up to this son of a bitch, watch this week,” declares Griffith.
Not only that, but Nick’s own ugly history with Matt is just as volatile as the one Matt shares with Sharon, which will be a critical factor in the drama ahead. While both Sharon and Nick will go up against Matt, “Really, the protagonist/antagonist battle is coming down to Nick and Matt,” the scribe teases.
For Nick and Sharon, confronting Matt and leaving him behind in California will mark the end of the first part of this storyline, but only sets them up for more trouble. “They are hoping that everything in the denouement of the Los Angeles part of the story will have so scared him off that he’d be foolish to come after them, but they’re wrong,” Griffith previews. “Second act is definitely they return [to Genoa City], and Matt and all his trouble follow. It becomes a nightmare, not just for Nick and Sharon, but to the whole Newman family.”
