It is no secret I’m not a fan of GH’s Sonny. I’ve disliked him since I started watching the show in the Spring of 2002. However, I recognize there have been good stories because of his presence in addition to all the negative things I could say about his existence. However, lately I’ve been wondering if it is time for Sonny to exit the narrative. He’s been replaying all his greatest hits for years, he’s had one good love interest in the last 15 years and he feels stagnant. Does GH still need Sonny?
Blinded By The Dimples
Sonny Corinthos was not created to be face of General Hospital. His entrance story was giving a 17-year-old Karen Wexler pills, sleeping with her and putting her on the pole. Not the story you’d give a character if you expected your soap opera to revolve around him. Yet Sonny continued on and work was put in to humanize him and make his presence palatable. It helped that Maurice Bernard was handsome and charming.
Women flocking to media featuring attractive criminals isn’t unusual. There’s an entire subgenre of romance novels about the mob where the heroine is a young virgin and the hero is a 38-year-old sociopath with an unreasonably large penis. The possessiveness and the over-the-top machismo are the selling points of these novels. Yet a book and a soap opera are very different. When the mobster hero shoots someone in the head, there’s another hundred pages in the book and it is over. When Sonny shoots someone in the head, the story goes on and he has to interact with people who have to pretend he isn’t a monster.
That’s the problem with making a mobster the lead of a soap opera. GH has been twisting itself into knots for 30 years to justify it. Most of the characters have to gush about Sonny giving his blood money to charity or how nice he was to Stone without bringing up Sonny killing his brother. Carly even went as far as to tell Michael as a child that Sonny and Jason were just like firemen and policemen. If a character points out that Sonny is a terrible person, they are, at best, painted as a meanie. At worst, they are a villain who is going to die for the crime of saying true things about Sonny.
Soaps have always had characters who did terrible things and stuck around like Roger Thorpe on Guiding Light. Everyone in Springfield knew Roger was a horrible person. There wasn’t a cultish campaign to pretend he was a misunderstood saint like there’s been with Sonny. It is just cowardly to me.
Off Ramp
Lately, Sonny has been thinking about leaving the mob. This isn’t a new discussion for him. He’s thought about it many times before and has never taken any off-ramps to get him out of his life of crime. The difference now is Sonny is elderly and Jason is elderly-adjacent and not super into the business as he used to be. None of Sonny and Jason’s kids want to be in the mob so you just have two old men who can’t eat hard foods anymore.
Do I think they’d actually end the mob in Port Charles with Sonny still around? No. As much as they love having Sonny cosplay as a lovable patriarch who gives advice to the younger characters, they also want to have him killing people. They won’t even let Maurice go gray. So we have a character who sometimes cosplays as Tom Horton, kills people and the show would like to pretend is still 45 years old. It is bizarre.
What would Sonny out of the mob even look like? Would Maurice allow it? We know he has some power. Not enough to be allowed to be a silver fox, but he certainly could have the juice to kill a story that permanently got Sonny out of the mob. They could have done this 25 years ago and Sonny could have been a businessman, but now they have to ponder if they are going to have to tell a story about a senior citizen going from mob boss to kindly grandfather.
Take Her To The Island And Buy Her A Pretty Dress
Sonny loves having sex with women in law enforcement who want to lock him up. It has been happening for decades with characters like Hannah, Reese and Margaux. Sonny tells these women about his abusive stepfather Deke as a manipulation tactic. When he’s done crying on these women’s bosoms, he takes them to his island and buys them a pretty dress and they have sex. They go from being rightly convinced Sonny belongs in prison to dickmatized. Then these women either die or leave town.
ADA Turner seems destined to join the ranks of women Sonny will hypnotize with his penis. It was silly enough to do this years ago, but it is downright absurd to do it in 2025. A beautiful woman with ambitions isn’t going to ruin her life for an elderly mobster. It would probably play better if they had a younger guy in the mob that looked like Josh Swickard, but they don’t. They are going to expect us to believe ADA Turner would set her life on fire for Sonny to have his pillow princess moment. It is laughable. They should have just kept Sonny with Nina.
Passing The Torch
Traditionally on soaps, the veterans shift to more supporting roles as they age so the younger characters can do stories you can’t do with a 70-year-old. Soaps have struggled with this in the modern era. Y&R had Victor and Nikki in an open marriage at their advanced ages. Days had elderly men still playing action hero. B&B still has Ridge being confused about which woman he should be with and he’s old enough to star in reverse mortgage commercials.
Michael has been overshadowed by his parents for almost his entire adult life. Carly hijacked the reveal about Wiley when it should have been Michael’s moment. Sonny is certainly a factor in Michael feeling like a supporting character when he should be a lead. Michael is a Quartermaine, Spencer and Corinthos. He should be the romantic lead of this show.
Rory Gibson has had a promising debut as Michael. He’s hot, a good actor and he already feels like a lead. Thus far they haven’t allowed Sonny, Carly or Jason to overtake what should be Michael’s story. This is pleasing, but I do worry that in a few months they’ll become the focus and Michael will be standing around with fries up his nose. When Rory played Noah on Y&R, he had little to do because they like to pretend that Noah’s father Nick is still 30 years old, so he gets stories that should have gone to Noah. I don’t want Rory to get fucked over again.
Dante is another factor in the passing the torch conversation. Dominic Zamprogna is one of the best actors on GH. And for the first time in years, he feels like a lead. However, Dante’s position as the good guy is undermined by the times he’s helped Sonny stay out of prison. From when Dante lied about Sonny shooting him, to last year when he helped him evade justice for murdering Jagger, Dante just loves helping his evil father. When Dante is self-righteous yelling at someone, I just think he should be in a cell next to his daddy.
If they really want to keep Sonny, they have to use him to enhance the stories of his children, not hinder them. They also have to have a clear direction for him, because shooting someone in the head one week and characters going to him for advice the next week is nuts. Pick a lane and stick to it. With the right writing and positioning, Sonny can still be an asset to the show. They just need to figure out the direction for his dotage years right now.
Dispatches From Soap Land
*Giovanni Mazza has improved so much. I do find all the retcon children stories that GH has done under Chris Evan Etten to be annoying, but I can’t deny that this one is the best story on the show. Gio has gone from an annoying violin-playing flop to an actual likable character.
*If you turn on Y&R, you are just going to see people eating at restaurants and discussions about Aristotle Dumas. Cleaning the fridge might be a better use of your time.
*Hayley on Beyond The Gates feels like that soap character who has a baby and dies and that’s the only relevance they’ll ever have in the history of the show.
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