There’s a popular expression that writers tend to hate: “It writes itself.” They hate it because it conjures up a vision of an unseen force typing away and unfolding all the predetermined story beats, long-term arcs, and dialogue. It makes the writers sound irrelevant to the process when even the most mediocre television project requires a tremendous amount of effort. It also ignores network notes and diva actors wanting a say in stories. Stories on television go through so many hands before they make it to air.
I thought a lot about this while watching General Hospital last week. A man returning from the dead after ten months to find his wife and best friend married to each other should be dramatic as hell. Instead, Sonny strolled into his bedroom after almost a year away like he had just gone to the store for milk and caught up with his besties on all he missed.
Why would you deliberately make such a dramatic moment so boring? And it was a deliberate choice. Dramatic returns from the dead are a soap staple. Every soap producer and writer knows the ingredients for a dramatic reveal. Executive producer Frank Valentini did it with beloved legacy character Robin Scorpio in 2013. Robin showed up to husband Patrick’s wedding to Ugly-Betty-Expy Sabrina and listened to the vows in tears. It wasn’t until daughter Emma saw her and ran to her that they all saw that Robin was alive. It was touching, dramatic, and made the almost two-year wait to reveal Robin was alive worth it. It was the exact opposite of the underwhelming return of Sonny.
There are many ways they could have made this reveal make dramatic sense. Let me give you a few options:
Option 1: Have Sonny walk in on Jason and Carly having sex. This is the most obvious of all the possible ways they could have written this. Carly and Jason had admitted to having feelings for each other, and she was taking off his tie when Sonny strolled in and [bleep] blocked them. If they had actually boinked, Sonny would be enraged. Every GH fan knows how he feels about betrayal. The barware would have been flying and every hurtful word in his vocabulary would have been used. It would have been soapy.
Option 2: Sonny walks in on the wedding and hears the vows before revealing himself. This might have been too similar to the Robin reveal which is a possible reason it was rejected, but a wedding being interrupted by a dead person is one of those soap tropes that you can do a million times and fans will eat it up if you execute it right. A thousand times better than casually walking in and getting a recap of the last ten months.
Option 3: Wait a few months longer to reveal Sonny is alive. The actual reveal we got was so rushed that it felt like head writers Chris Van Etten and Dan O’Connor were ordered to end the Nixon Falls story. If it played out a little longer, Sonny could have returned home to Jason and Carly as a happy couple. The actual reveal made it easy to separate the two as they had been married for three hours and they haven’t had sex with each other since Bill Clinton was president. If they had gone this route, I don’t think Carly would walk away from Jason so easily. He’s been her number person since they met. She loves him more than her kids and almost as much as herself. A Carly that had months of being Jason’s wife would have just told Sonny to go call Brenda and promptly went back to Jason’s dong, which is apparently more addictive than crack.
Each reveal option would have been more in line with what fans would expect with a character being dead for almost a year. Soap operas are supposed to be dramatic. I’ve seen episodes of The Powerpuff Girls that were more dramatic than that. It would be one thing if that were the only story GH had dropped the ball on recently. It decidedly is not.
Michael and Willow carried on a milquetoast affair while cinnamon-roll-with-abs Chase was paralyzed. Willow was even disappointed when Chase lived. Chase found out his wife was getting the four-inch nudge from Michael and they broke up. This sounds soapy, right? It was one of the most pathetic excuses for a soap story I’ve seen this year, and that says something considering The Young and the Restless is more effective than Ambien at putting people to sleep. They had Chase apologize to Michael and Willow! The man who was lied to and cheated on apologized to the faux nice sluts who got off on being martyrs. The absolute gall of this show to act like the human embodiments of rice pudding deserved kindness from the man they screwed over. An actual soap opera would have had repercussions for Michael and Willow’s affair. Instead, we get to see the flavorless duo skip around town happily like they are a Hallmark couple stuck on a loop for the last two minutes of the film.
My only hope of actual soap writing on that show is Trina figuring out that Spencer and Esme are Ava’s stalkers. The show has done a good job of playing Spencer and Trina’s potential relationship and blowing up Spencer’s actions could be another obstacle to them getting together. Though with all the recent writing being allergic to drama, it could end up being another limp reveal. Spencer’s father Nikolas could be like, “You terrorized me and my wife? No biggie! It is all that Nelle-lookalike’s fault! Here’s a Spider-Man ice cream cake, Spencer!” And Ava could say, “I forgive you, Spencer. I have a stalkable face and that’s on me. I apologize if stalking me was inconvenient to you.” And then they all dance like they are in the end credits of a rom-com or a commercial for a medication with horrifying side effects.
I don’t think it is too much to ask for dramatically satisfying climaxes to soapy stories. It is a soap opera. Do you think a primetime show would intentionally make something boring? No. I don’t know what is up with the decision-making on this show. It could be Chris and Dan being incompetent. It could be Frank or ABC meddling. I just know this is a bad soap opera. No one is tuning in for boring. If the setup is soapy, the follow-through has to be dramatic. It writes itself.
General Hospital airs on ABC and can be streamed here.
Dispatches From Soap Land:
*I am loving MarDevil on Days of Our Lives. This is the kind of soap opera I like. It’s entertaining, they are using history and mixing generations. I wish the other stories on Days were as good as Satan being inside of Marlena again. It is quite a letdown to go from MarDevil one day and Gwen lying about being a prostitute the next day. The B and C stories need to be stronger.
*Quinn and Carter on The Bold and the Beautiful were hot at first, but now that they are banging because Eric’s dong is hibernating, it feels gross. I’m not against an open marriage story, but when it is an old white guy outsourcing a Black man to pleasure his wife, it has obvious racial implications. Also, does Eric’s tongue not work? Does it get tired quickly? Because there are solutions that don’t involve Eric watching Perry Mason while his wife has her legs on another man’s shoulders.
*I am tired of all the boring backstories for new characters on The Young and the Restless. Josh Griffith should try writing an interesting story in the present and concentrate less on things we never saw. If you constantly fail at something, try something different.
*The Sonny reveal was an embarrassment to the genre of soap opera, but at least everyone looked great at the Jason and Carly wedding. Great gowns, beautiful gowns.
