Scapegoats and Sacred Cows

I’ve been watching General Hospital on and off for most of my life. This is not something I’m proud of, but it’s just part of who I am. You cannot imagine my relief when GH (yeah, I call it GH) was spared from the daytime soap chopping block at ABC.

I know it’s hard to understand why I’m loyal to a show with cheesy dialogue and far-fetched storylines. But these are the things I love about the show. It’s the purest form of escapist television.

On soap operas, ANYTHING can happen.

Currently on GH, mob hit man Jason Morgan was presumed dead not once, but TWICE! Then he was in a hit and run and his face was all smashed up and then repaired into super HAWT form and he has amnesia (there are two people on the show right now with amnesia-so rad). He’s going by the name of Jake, which is also the name of his son who was presumed dead but was recently found alive (on Cassadine island, natch). So now, we’re waiting on pins and needles to see if he finds out who he is before he marries Elizabeth, who knows who he really is but has always been in love with him and wanted him for her own and now she has him even if his pretty little brain is broken.

They ain’t got to explain NOTHING.

Everybody’s rich somehow. There’s a mob element but we don’t really know what exactly they deal in. And assassins (like the above Jason) never go to jail, and if they do they get pardoned quickly through some magical technicality. The beauty is: it doesn’t have to make sense or be explained. Things move too fast around here for actual plot development!

Storyline recycling is the way of the walk.

I love to watch the storylines recycle every few years. Some things are obvious: One-night stands always result in a pregnancy. Pregnancies are never healthy and normal. Dead spouses always show up to weddings.

And a few things take longer to resurface. For example, Olivia got pregnant by mobster Julian Jerome after a one-night stand (these people DO NOT know about birth control), so she had Ned Quartermaine say the baby was his just like he did when Alexis Davis got pregnant with mobster Sonny Corinthos’s baby a decade or so back. It’s hard to remember exactly when that happened, because I think that kid should be about 10 but she’s about 20 because of SORAS (soap opera rapid aging syndrome, which is totally a thing).

Recast, recast, recast!

Recasts don’t always turn out great, but sometimes they are fantastic. The original Carly, Sarah Brown left to pursue her movie career after she was cast in Big Momma’s House 2 or something. A few Carly’s later, GH was happily settled in with Laura Wright. But Sarah wanted her job back and fans loved her. So…they recast Sarah as a mob princess. Things didn’t quite work out, but it was fun to see them be all “hey, why the hell not?” about the whole thing.

Don’t like this plot line? Freakin’ DROP IT!

Occasionally there were be a plotline so dumb, so pointless, that it just disappears with no explanation whatsoever. It’s like the writers are all “this crap ain’t working so let’s just forget about it and hope the viewers do, too”. I can’t explain why, but I admire the attitude that must go along with those actions.

Please, General Hospital, never change. Keep doing what you do and I’ll keep watching and talking to the TV like a crazy person.