If you are going to watch a soap opera, you have to know that retcons will occur whether you like it or not. Retcons on soap operas mostly fall into three categories: Retconned Family Members, Back from the Dead and the dreaded Your Eyes Were Lying To You, Baby. The last one being the show lying about or ignoring what happened on screen. In this column, I’m going to go over notable retcons in these categories and why they succeeded or failed.
Retconned Family Members
Todd, One Life to Live
When Michael Malone and Josh Griffith created Todd, I don’t think they intended for the man who led the gang rape of Marty Saybrooke to be Viki’s brother. They just decided they wanted to keep Roger Howarth so they bent over backwards to make Todd staying in Llanview to be palatable. It worked and one of the reasons was Roger’s excellent chemistry with Erika Slezak. Do I think they should have worked so hard to keep a character that was a rapist? Absolutely not, but I can’t deny it was one of the most successful retcons of a character that wasn’t intended to stick around.
Paul, Days of Our Lives
Did it make sense to suddenly say that John Black randomly banged a Japanese woman in 1995 and the result of that was a gay baseball player named Paul? No, but Paul was just so likable and easy on the eyes that fans accepted him. It also helped that John Black is one of the most retconned characters in soap history so adding another retcon to the heap didn’t hurt. Though I think the thing that really sealed fans’ acceptance of this nonsense retcon was the father/son chemistry between Drake Hogestyn and Christopher Sean. They felt like they really were family.
Peter, General Hospital
Peter’s entire existence was one of the worst storylines in GH. It didn’t matter who they had cast as Peter. It could have been some big primetime star and he still would have flopped because Anna having a son with her stalker Faison was abhorrent. What made it worse was how stubborn Frank Valentini was about the situation. It took a few years for the most passive aggressive retcon in soap history of Alex being Peter’s real mother. And Peter didn’t die until a few years after that.
The whole debacle was a lesson in planning and knowing when to cut your losses. The idea should have never made it to screen, but once it was clear that it was universally despised among fans, they should have killed it.
Kendall, All My Children
I would argue that Kendall Hart is the most successful planned retcon character in soap history. The casting of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the conflict of Erica Kane having to deal with a daughter who was a bitch from hell who she never wanted was soap gold. It became the gold standard for that type of soap story. You still feel the echoes of Kendall Hart on soaps today. Two years after Kendall debuted, Bob Guza created Carly on GH who was similar to Kendall and is still around. Eva on Beyond The Gates was clearly meant to be in that archetype, but they just skipped the pariah part unfortunately.
Kendall is one of the reasons why I’ll always have some fondness for Megan McTavish. She killed Dixie off in a petty way and the Unabortion was one of the worst retcons in soap history, but not many soap writers can tell a story so well that many soaps will be reheating your nachos for years to come.
Josh, All My Children
Speaking of the Unabortion, I would be remiss if I didn’t include it in this column. Susan Lucci allegedly wanted Erica to have a son, but Megan McTavish didn’t need to undo one of the most historic stories in Erica’s abortion. Josh could have been Kendall’s twin. Plenty of women on soaps forget giving birth to a baby. A random doctor hoovering the fetus out and putting it in another woman was unnecessary.
Amanda, The Young and the Restless
There is a subcategory of retconned family members where they create a twin of a dead character because they don’t think they can logically bring the original character back. Amanda exists because Y&R was nickel and diming Mishael Morgan so Mal Young killed Hilary as a “gift” in his words so when Josh Griffith took over he created Hilary’s twin sister Amanda. Fans like Amanda, but the problem is Hilary was such a great character that it didn’t fill that void. That’s the pitfall of the replacement twin character. They’ll never be the original character.
John Black’s Entire Existence, Days of Our Lives
John started out as The Pawn, then was John Black, then was revealed to be Roman Brady and that was backtracked after the real Roman returned. Then it was revealed he was an Alamain. Years later, Hogan Sheffer wrote a retcon that John was Stefano’s half-brother. Then came the retcon that he was some white guy with a Chinese name’s son played by Jigsaw. Finally, it was revealed that his father was just some dude played by Dick Van Dyke. John’s history was so convoluted that if Drake Hogestyn were still alive, it probably would have been retconned again. They’d say that John and Abe were twin brothers and Shirley MacLaine would play their mother.
Back From The Dead
Irene, One Life To Live
The majority of resurrections on soap operas are welcome returns of popular characters. Not all of them fit that. Occasionally a character that was super dead returns so a soap writer can make a dumb retcon work. Ron Carlivati needed to make Roger Howarth’s return as Todd work when the character had plastic surgery and was played by Trevor St. John for years. Thus came the resurrection of Todd’s mother Irene who had died on screen of cancer in 1978.
Ron Carlivati wrote that Irene had twins and Trevor St. John’s character was really Victor, the special needs twin who took Todd’s place. Irene was now a super villain in search of a microchip. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but fans were so happy to have Roger Howarth back that they went along with the stupidity. It also helped that Ron was aware that it was nonsense to the point that the story was parodied in a dream episode.
Macy, The Bold and the Beautiful
Brad Bell doesn’t do resurrections that often so when Macy returned from the dead it was a bit surprising. Unfortunately, Macy was in the category of characters who get resurrected and are killed off again shortly afterwards. A.J. and Duke on GH are also in that category. It just feels like the show wasted your time.
Jason, General Hospital
Jason is in the category of character that has been resurrected more than once. Jason’s first death was in 2012 when he was shot and kicked into the water. Steve Burton went on to Y&R for five years to waste our time playing a character the show pretends never existed now. Then Jason returned when they revealed that Jason had just been shitting himself in Russia for five years thanks to Peter and Faison. Jason reunited with Sam, but the chemistry was gone. He had a fling with Britt and then married Carly out of convenience.
Jason’s second death was sparked by Steve Burton refusing to get the COVID vaccine so he was buried under rubble in 2021. After the vaccine mandate was lifted, Jason returned and he’s been a supporting character now which makes sense. If an actor keeps leaving, a show shouldn’t be putting all their eggs in his basket. Jason has another exit coming with it being announced that Steve is leaving for a few months. I hope we aren’t getting a third presumed death.
Diane, The Young and the Restless
Josh Griffith’s efforts to stay employed sometimes work in our favor. Did Diane faking her death to just hang around in Los Angeles make sense? No. We literally saw Diane’s corpse in the water. Deacon went to prison for his role in her death. Why would he help her fake her death and then happily go to prison?! It was utter bullshit that fans happily swallowed because Diane shouldn’t have died in the first place and having Susan Walters back was just wonderful.
The Victims of the Salem Stalker, Days of Our Lives
This was one of the biggest cases of a soap opera backtracking ever. They went through the trouble of having multiple characters murdered and almost all of them were veterans of the cast. They had Marlena, the most popular Days character of all time, as the killer. Ratings soared until fans got fed up with it. I think having Alice Horton die via doughnut was a bridge too far so they resurrected everyone on an island replica of Salem. Even Victor who died because Jan electrocuted him in a bathtub.
I do sometimes wonder what the show would be like if they hadn’t backtracked and resurrected everyone. The show currently has a problem of an aging cast and not enough young popular characters. Maybe they wouldn’t have this problem if they had made way for new characters in the 2000’s. I guess we’ll never know.
Jesse, All My Children
Jesse is in the category of soap characters that returned from the dead even though they were shown in heaven. In 2008, it was revealed Jesse’s death was fake because of some criminal and in the time he was dead he was banging some white woman named Rebecca who he had a kid with. I guess someone could consider that heaven. Anyway, fans were so happy to have Jesse reunited with Angie that they were willing to overlook the clunkiness and the white woman.
Your Eyes Were Lying To You, Baby
Sam, The Young and the Restless
Cane has two children named Charlie and Mattie. If you remember him sleeping with a Japanese woman named Juliet and having a kid named Sam in 2017, you hallucinated that. Your eyes were lying to you, baby! Asian people aren’t allowed in Genoa City and they certainly aren’t related to any prominent characters! Now let’s just move on and not imagine a nine year old Wasian boy begging for food on the street because his father abandoned him.
Everything Victor Lord After His First Death, One Life to Live
After Victor died in 1976, that show decided he was going to continue to serve the story. First was the retcon that Tina was his daughter. Then they made Todd his son. After that was a huge case of character assassination in revealing that Victor molested Viki and was the source of her Dissociative Identity Disorder. When Victor was alive, he was controlling, but he wasn’t a monster. It helped the show that he had been dead for almost twenty years at that point so a lot of the fans never saw Victor so they could retcon him to be evil.
Victor even returned from the dead for literally a week in 2003 as he needed a new heart and then died after failing to get Natalie’s heart. It was very pointless. I could only imagine how wild it was for fans who watched OLTL from the beginning to see Victor go from controlling businessman and father to a man who was killing to kill a granddaughter to live.
Nikki Being Dylan’s Mother, The Young and the Restless
A long lost child is a soap staple. It is a little more unusual for a show to say that a character had a whole pregnancy when she was on the show and very much not pregnant. That’s why fans were upset that Dylan was revealed to be Nikki and Paul’s child via a retcon that she had a kid after the cult story. The reality was Nikki wasn’t pregnant and became a stripper and met Victor. They really wanted Steve Burton’s Dylan to be a big deal so they foisted the retcon on us.
Now Dylan is rarely referenced. Nikki has two children. She doesn’t know some man in witness protection. The only Dylan Nikki might know is Mackenzie’s son Dylan.
Alex Being a Supervillain, General Hospital
Before Anna’s resurrection, Finola Hughes played Anna’s twin sister Alex on All My Children. She was a heroine on the show before they shipped her off and had Anna on instead. This didn’t matter to General Hospital. They had massively shit the bed with Peter so Alex had to go under the bus to help fix it. Alex became cartoonishly evil to undo Anna being Peter’s mother and it was the right call. If a character has to be sacrificed, it is best to do it to retcon twin and not the character fans are actually attached to.
Dispatches From Soap Land
*Hayley on Beyond The Gates needs to get caught soon. It has been months since it was revealed she was a con woman and we need some forward motion.
*You would never know that Alexa Havins had never shared a scene with Tony Geary watching Lulu mourn her father. GH was so smart to hire Alexa.
*I’m tired of hearing about Eric’s health on B&B. The man is 80 years old. Stop harping on this. Every time he’s in an episode I expect him to start singing “I’m Still Here” from the musical Follies.
*Days does have a boredom problem. I hope it will pick up soon, but I am not interested in watching Leo and Dimitri. Hopefully the show will pick up by the time the expected resurrected character is on.
