For a little more than a year, General Hospital was widely considered the best of the five soap operas. This year, the show started to spiral starting with the insipid car accident until the show fully went into a ditch the past few months. In this column, I’m going to identify what I think are the main problems and also what I think the show is doing right.
Sniffing Glue
There are bad stories on soap operas where I can kind of understand why it got greenlit and why they thought it would be good. For example, I understand why ABC greenlit the Balkan story under Bob Guza and Jill Farren Phelps. They hired Daniel Benzali, who is a fantastic actor, and it involved the return of Vanessa Marcil as Brenda. That would sound promising to anyone hearing that pitch, but it ended up being one of the most unpopular stories in GH history. When it comes to the car accident story that mildly disfigured Jordan, I don’t understand how it got past the pitch phase. This is how I imagine that meeting went:
Elizabeth Korte: “So we’ve got this umbrella story where Jordan is injured in a car accident, and the town will be looking for the driver. It will be Brook Lynn who had one glass of wine and didn’t even realize the other car crashed.”
ABC Executive: “Oh, that sounds terrific! Tanisha Harper has been twiddling her thumbs for years since y’all hired her, and Brook Lynn causing a car accident could give Amanda Setton some great material to play.”
Chris Van Etten: “Brook Lynn doesn’t cause the car accident. Jordan is too busy smooching Curtis to pay attention to the road.”
ABC Executive: “Excuse me?”
Chris Van Etten: “It would be too traditional to have the story be about Brook Lynn causing the accident. It is subversive to make it so she didn’t cause it, but gets yelled at more than characters who have murdered, attempted murder, and kept their ex-husband drugged up in their basement. It is going to be awesome!”
ABC Executive: “Won’t this cause the fans to say that y’all were sniffing glue when you wrote this because it is that stupid?”
Elizabeth Korte: “Of course. And Frank is on a hiring spree again so this will happen at the same time we introduce several new characters! The ratings are going to go through the roof!”
ABC Executive: “I seem to have lost the ability to say the word that is the opposite of yes. Okay. If this goes wrong, we can just fire Chris again and then hire him back if his replacement fucks up even more.”
Chris Van Etten: “Please don’t.”
All joking aside, this storyline is just another thing that makes Brook Lynn look weak. She’s groveling to multiple characters like she mowed down a crowd and then got out and did a TikTok dance as they died. She isn’t the reason why Jordan took her eyes off the road and caused the accident. She isn’t the reason why Curtis was looking for a reason to hate Isaiah and hit him in a public place. They made their own choices, and they need to live with the consequences. The only nefarious thing Brook Lynn did was try to frame Willow for being the other driver, which went nowhere.
It also doesn’t help that Brook Lynn is being absolutely pathetic over Chase. The man didn’t bat an eyelash when he found out she had a kid with Dante from a teen pregnancy she didn’t tell him about before marriage, but a car accident she didn’t cause is where he draws the line! And it isn’t lost on me how similar this is to the Curtis, Portia, and Jordan story last year. Self-righteous asshole has an ex-wife he’d like to cheat with, and his wife has a bit of a problem with the truth. There is a certain amount of repetitiveness you have to accept if you are going to be a soap fan, but too similar of a dynamic that is played out too close together.
The Arguing About Kids Hour
This isn’t a new problem for General Hospital, but when they overdo it, they really go all in. Here’s what the average episode sounds like:
Character A: “You can’t be around the kids!”
Character B: “You can’t keep the kids from me! I’ll get custody and keep them from you!”
Character C: “That grown woman had better stay away from our kid and stop kidnapping him! I’m going to be quite upset if it happens again!”
Character D: “My kid hates me.”
Character E: “Our kids shouldn’t be friends! If they keep hanging out, they are going to blow up the hospital or steal the Mona Lisa!
Character F: “These characters need to cheat so this other character can keep her baby! That’s right. Even adultery loops back to being about a kid.”
Elizabeth: “Y’all are allowed to have kids on the canvas? Must be nice…”
Children are essential to storytelling on soap operas given the multigenerational nature of the genre, but if all roads lead back to children, every story feels the same. You can have conflicts that don’t involve arguing about kids. You don’t need to make a potential affair really be about a child custody strategy. That really kills the mood.
The show is so obsessed with children that when a story isn’t about arguing about kids, you can feel how uninterested the show is in it. For example, this Dante, Elizabeth, and Ric triangle is so underbaked. I wanted it to be hot and to have some delicious yearning. What we got was cringey yoga scenes and Ric making faces if Dante and Elizabeth so much as breathe the same air. Maybe the show would care more if one of them were telling the other to stay away from their kid.
Cartoon Asshole
Drew was actually a big part of the show’s hot streak. The asshole victim on Murder, She Wrote writing he received drove a lot of drama on the show. Cameron Mathison was also really good at playing that and was clearly having a blast. The problem is that Drew couldn’t talk or wipe his own ass for six months and when he was able to do those things again, he went right back to the things he was doing before Willow put his body on a forced sabbatical. No reflection on how his actions led to this. Not a hint of growth.
Characters in this wheelhouse can exist on soap operas. Adam Newman and E.J. DiMera are popular characters on The Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives. Those shows will have them being diabolical, but show the humanity in them as well. Drew’s scenes are 99% him being a cartoon asshole. They tried to show the softer side recently in scenes with his daughter Scout, but it was too little, too late after more than a year of weaponizing her to hurt his enemies, including her half-brother Danny, who is a teenager. And it doesn’t help that if you paired him with literally any woman on the canvas, fans would say she could do better even if they hate that character. Even people who hate Ava Jerome wouldn’t wish Drew to be writhing on top of her, doing his whisper shouting during sex.
Inertia
In April, Michael told Jacinda and Carly about his plan to have Willow and Chase have an affair, which would ruin Willow’s political career and get Chase out of the Quartermaine mansion. Recently, he had the same conversation with Josslyn. Months had passed, and he was still talking about the possibility of Willow bouncing on Chase. If you had died when Michael first had this idea, this has gone on long enough for your husband to have buried you, claimed the life insurance money, eaten all the casseroles he got, started dating other women, including one of your cousins that you don’t like. The one that he picks to be your replacement could have repainted the bedroom and reorganized your spice rack.
Michael isn’t the only character experiencing inertia. Trina’s stalker story has been going on for a few months, and nothing really has happened. It doesn’t help that she’s in a boring pairing with an underdeveloped character, and when she’s in drama, it is more about other characters, like her parents, than herself. It feels like ever since Spencer died, the show isn’t quite sure what to do with her, and that isn’t fair to Tabyana Ali.
Parade of New Characters
One of the most consistent complaints about the Frank Valentini era is the cast size. That man loves to hire people impulsively. Unfortunately for us, Frank is on a shopping spree. It feels like every other day there’s an announcement that he’s hired a 40-year-old white man to play a new character. As I type this, I am afraid there will be an announcement that Carter Nixon Hoover is playing Chet Fink, a dentist and WSB agent with no charisma and middling acting skills.
I do blame the cast size for at least some of the inertia problems. If you have a big cast and an executive producer who likes shopping even more than my mother, of course that is going to cause issues with the pace of stories because you have so many damn people. And I do think all these hires would have gone over better if there were more recasts instead of “Surprise! Here’s three white men who look alike and are all new characters! Suck it, bitch!” Just a thought.
What’s Going Right
The show is lucky that they have such a talented cast. Almost everyone on General Hospital can act. Cynthia Watros has her Daytime Emmy reel for those scenes at the police station after Drew framed Nina. Finola Hughes did good work with some very questionable writing with Anna imagining Peter. The teen actors are good, including Finn Carr, who I think should be put on contract. Even when I want Lulu to leave Rocco in the woods with just a granola bar and a flashlight, I am happy to see him onscreen because I think he is a child actor who should play a role into adulthood. And while it is very annoying to have everything lead back to kids, I will give GH credit for caring about the next generation.
The other thing is that all the problems are very fixable. This isn’t The Young and the Restless where Sally McDonald, Jamey Giddens, and Dan O’Connor will need at least six months to even clean up some of Josh Griffith’s mess. Just focus more on romance, get rid of some duds, have more forward motion in the story, and that would greatly help the show. If they want to keep Chris Van Etten and Elizabeth Korte, maybe they can have a meeting about not everything needing to be about kids. Loop Frank Valentini into that because I strongly suspect he’s just as guilty for that problem.
Dispatches From Soap Land
*Beyond The Gates was so good last week. I’m actually fine with Hayley not going to prison. That would have been a limp climax, and this way we can possibly get Dani and Hayley shooting at each other.
*Sonny and Justine on GH are gross. Why is this beautiful career woman ruining her life for an elderly mobster? It was ridiculous when they would do this shit decades ago, and it is even crazier now.
*Katie on B&B is ridiculous for comparing Dylan to Brooke. If she were like Brooke, she would have already fucked Will’s father and gotten pregnant.
*Why was Matt Clark saying he’s leaving town and then not leaving town greenlit on Y&R? And multiple times at that. Did CBS just not care as long as Josh Griffith didn’t do anything too destructive?
