![]() ![]() As if by miracle this spring, General Hospital celebrated its 60th anniversary, making it the longest-running scripted show on American television still in production, while CBS’s The Young and the Restless marked its 50th anniversary. These days, slandering the soap opera is almost a form of punching down, considering how much the genre has fallen on hard times: Daytime soaps have been circling the drain for years, thanks to sagging ratings and slashed budgets. Too often, General Hospital and its fellow daytime soaps-shows historically consumed and cherished by women and Black audiences-tend to get a bum rap from critics, who malign them as unworthy of respect. This about-face prompted the television critic Ed Martin to dub the show “ Sopranos in the daytime.” Here was the ultimate indictment: One of daytime television’s crown jewels had become the Great Value knockoff of a prime-time masterwork. But in the early aughts, the soap’s gentle, humanistic notes gave way to machismo energy as it fixated on the dimpled mob don Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard) and those in his violence-ridden orbit. Storylines in the ’90s were dedicated to socially relevant topics like a teenage couple navigating the HIV/AIDS crisis, a doctor dealing with her own breast-cancer diagnosis, and an adoptee tracking down her birth mother in adulthood. The show, which had aired on ABC since 1963, had once been preoccupied with the titular hospital in the fictional city of Port Charles. Around the turn of the millennium, viewers of the daytime soap opera General Hospital may have noticed a shift in their favorite afternoon medical drama. ![]()
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ERIC
4/30/2024 11:24:42 pm
BILL HAYES ALIVE CAMEO
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