The Enemy Young & Restless’ Victor Should Really Be Worried About Isn’t Jack, Billy *or* Dumas

The Young and the Restless has fallen into a terrible pattern over the last few years of introducing one male antagonist (Dumas) after another (Tucker) after another (Ashland) to take on the great and powerful Victor Newman. Why is the pattern so terrible?

1. We’ve been trained to know that Victor will never lose. Can’t. So these stories aren’t suspenseful at all. 2. Even if one of these guys did get the best of Victor, it wouldn’t resonate. What the big man needs is to be taken down by a bigger woman.

As it is, both Young & Restless and sister soap Bold & Beautiful are suffering from female troubles.

While the latter turns almost every woman into a character who sole purpose is the getting of a man (Daphne, Brooke) or the keeping of a man (Taylor), the former keeps telling us that its leading ladies are strong and independent…

 And then having them accept jobs from their significant others (Sally, Chelsea, Nikki). Even worse is what the show has done to Audra!

Historically, Young & Restless has also gotten Victor into the appalling habit of weaponizing women like they were guns to be aimed at those that he dislikes.

Remember when he gave unstable Patty Williams plastic surgery and turned her loose on Jack?

Or when Victor allowed Jack to be kidnapped by the also-unstable Kelly Andrews while he dropped a lookalike drug lord in Phyllis’ bed? Unacceptable.

But Young & Restless could start to move in the right direction by introducing a female tycoon who not only targets Victor’s empire but actually manages to take it from him.

For decades, he’s bragged that he’s a self-made man, that he came up from nothing to become a titan of industry.

Well, let’s see him put his money where his mouth is. If he did it once, shouldn’t he be able to do it again? (Review Victor’s life in photos.)

This time, of course, Victor would be trying to rebuild rather than build — and with a new obstacle in his way: the woman who put him down and intends to keep him there.

How satisfying would it be to see Victor toyed with the same merciless way that he so often has Jack and Billy and even his own children? 

Plus, headwriter Josh Griffith loves making up “new old” characters, and he could do so again here. Let the woman in question be a former lover of Victor’s.

We’ll call her Joyce Del Monte. She stood by him as he began climbing the corporate ladder, only to have him dump her for first wife Julia Newman when he decided he needed someone classier by his side.

But Joyce was no dummy. She paid attention to Victor’s moving and shaking, and left to her own devices, she did some of her own.

Now she’s back to do what her ex taught her — to take, take, take, no matter who it hurts and then shrug off the misbehavior as “simply business.”

Imagine the fun it would be to cast Joyce, too. A Who’s Who of soap greats could fit the bill, from Days of Our Lives’ underused Leann Hunley (Anna) to One Life to Live’s Erika Slezak (Viki) to Guiding Light vet Maeve Kinkead (Vanessa).