Daytime TV Performer of the Week: ‘B&B’s Heather Tom Gives Tour de Force as a ‘Ruthless’ Katie

TV Insider is bestowing Daytime Performer of the Week honors on Heather Tom. The Bold and the Beautiful actress continues to take viewers on a powerful journey as her character, Katie Logan Spencer, a formerly acne-ridden, insecure teenager, evolves into a fiercely devoted mother, a forgiving wife, and, dare we say, a “ruthless” businesswoman.

After feeling pushed aside in her role as Forrester Creations’ publicity executive, Katie quit and was given her own fashion house, Logan Designs, financed by her husband, Bill (Don Diamont).

Katie forgave Bill his transgressions with her sister, Brooke (Katherine Kelly Lang), and gave him another chance to be her husband. However, she’s not forgetting what Brooke did to her. And she’s apparently rethought forgiving her, too. Unfortunately, for Dylan (Sydney Bullock), Katie sees a lot of Brooke in her son Will’s (Crew Morrow) girlfriend.

This set-up has viewers and characters alike comparing Tom’s Katie to Stephanie Forrester, the controlling matriarch played by Daytime Emmy winner Susan Flannery, who left the show in 2012.

Stephanie practically invented “helicopter parenting,” as evidenced by her perpetually sticking her nose into the lives of her children and her on-again/off-again husband, Eric (John McCook).

Even non-regular B&B viewers have heard of the legendary feud between Stephanie and Brooke. The B&B writers have brilliantly crafted a modern-day dynamic that is already proving to be a worthy successor to Stephanie v. Brooke with Katie v. Dylan. (And that is not said lightly given the magnitude of the former feud.)

Tom’s Katie doesn’t give a rat’s you-know-what about calling Dylan out as, more or less, a “consummate opportunist” (IYKYK), at every opportunity, even when it’s in front of Will.

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Katie’s facial reactions, eye-rolling, and caustic comments towards Dylan have quickly become one of the best parts of the half-hour soap opera. Last week, Katie hurled a towel at a bikini-clad Dylan as if the young lady should have known better than to wear a bathing suit…on the beach.

Poor Dylan. Every time Katie sees her, it’s as if it’s Dylan’s fault that Brooke betrayed her sister. It may not be fair to Dylan, but feelings are feelings, and Tom conveys them through her character with deep pathos.

Last week, Katie came up with the idea to have Dylan, a Forrester Creations employee, act as an emissary to get Zende (Delon de Metz), a frustrated designer at Forrester, to switch over to Logan Designs.

Katie was actually polite to Dylan, dangling in front of her Katie’s acceptance if she were to act as a spy. Of course, Katie doesn’t care that this could jeopardize Dylan’s job. And even if Dylan were to succeed, we suspect Katie would suggest to Will that Dylan was disloyal to the Forresters! Tom can turn Katie on a dime if it means painting Dylan in an unflattering light.

Tom plays Katie as a woman in charge. She walks (barges?) into her son’s beach house as if she owns it. “Did you do as I asked?” a pissed off Katie snarked at Dylan after Zende failed to reach back out to Hope. Dylan stands in front of Will’s mom like she’s a high school student whose dog truly did eat her homework, but the principal (Katie) isn’t interested in hearing her circumstances.

“No more buts, no more excuses,” Katie told Dylan. “Take a look around, Dylan. You’re living the high life here, hanging out with my son in this beautiful beach house… You say you love him, you say you want a relationship with him? If you’re hoping for my support and trust, you need to go back and talk to Zende again. Make it happen. Finish the job, Melissa!”

Yes, Dylan’s first name is actually “Melissa” (her surname is “Dylan”). But every time Katie snarks the name “Melissa,” Tom is adding the subtext that reads, “You’re a fraud. You haven’t even told us your real name, and you’re not good enough for my son.” Yep, she conveys all that in a one-word delivery.

Lovers and partners often change on soaps, and past dynamics are often put, well, in the past. (Remember when Katie dated Wyatt, played by Darin Brooks, for example.) However, the writers have kept Bill and Brooke’s cheating on Katie when she was suffering from post-partum alive in today’s scripts.

When Katie shared with her niece, Hope (Annika Noelle), that Bill and Brooke betrayed her, we felt her pain. Sure, time had passed, but the rawness was still there, and it always will be. Katie’s acting like the wronged party because, well, she is.

The businesswoman recounted to Hope how hurt she was in her last confrontation with Brooke and the Forresters. (Kudos to Noelle, who was the perfect scene partner as Hope silently acknowledged that every word Katie was speaking about her mother was the truth. In fact, Hope’s very existence is a product of Brooke doing what she wants in the moment.)

“I was literally begging her, begging her to just move past this,” Katie told Hope about Brooke. “Stop the fighting. Stop the ‘war’ that she keeps talking about and come together as a family. And she stood side by side with Donna [Jennifer Gareis] and she told me that I was no longer her family. That I was no longer her sister. That what I did was unforgivable.”

Tom had Katie let out a chuckle, the kind of laugh people emit when they refer to a situation so inconceivably painful that there’s other choice but to laugh, as she remembered the impact that Bill and Brooke’s affair had on her.

“She stole my husband, she took him, seduced him – twice! And was Bill a willing participant? Yeah, he was,” marveled Katie, adding with surreal frustration, “How could he not be? It’s ‘Brooke Logan!’ No man can resist her!”

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“She should never have done that to me,” Katie painfully continued. “It didn’t matter if she had fallen in love with him. It didn’t matter if she was just ‘following her heart.’ She should have looked at Bill and said that is my sister’s husband and I am not going to go there with him… What did I do? Well, I forgave her because that’s what I do. That’s my role in our relationship. I’m the one who forgives the unforgiveable. Not anymore.”

Katie cried in her car the night that she learned about Bill and Brooke’s betrayal. But she’s done crying — at least over her sister.

“I was going to try,” Katie added. “I’m going to try to stop shedding so many tears. Because they are wasted on her.”

Tom can take Katie from an emotionally raw moment like this and then, shift her character into feeling optimistic about the future and all the good things in life — like success. Katie enthused to Hope that they were creating a family at Logan Designs that could include Zende.

“We are going to continue to succeed, and does my history with my sister make that success just a little sweeter?” Katie rhetorically asked. “You bet your ass it does!”

While Katie plans on being the winner in the fashion war against her sister, Tom, a six-time Daytime Emmy-winner, has already emerged as the victor. She is one of the most powerful actresses in the history of soap operas thanks to performances like these. Brava!

Bold and the Beautiful, Weekdays, CBS