A Beginner's guide to General Hospital: What new viewers need to know about the ABC show

There's no doubt that General Hospital happens to be the touchstone of American daytime soap operas. Beginning its long-running journey with the premier of the first episode on April 1, 1963, General Hospital has successfully been on the air, broadcasting new episodes for sixty-two years. General Hospital also happens to be the longest-running scripted television show in American television. It can thus be asserted that the ABC show wields a lot of cultural significance and influence.

Apart from charting the course of daytime soap operas and serving as the inspiration behind many of today's well-received fiction shows, General Hospital has also served as the launching pad for many well known Hollywood stars and actors including Demi Moore, Richard Dean Anderson, Kimberly McCullough, Mark Hamill, Ricky Martin and several others. Airing five times a week, the show has forever been a source of consistent revenue for the network while at the same time adapting itself to changing social paradigms.

Although it might seem to be nothing out of the ordinary now, General Hospital has been one of the most progressive daytime soap operas ever since its inception. The show has time and again featured bold and often overlooked themes in its narrative, such as HIV AIDS awareness and spousal abuse.

Join us as we attempt to provide a beginner's guide to the beloved ABC show and illustrate the show's cultural significance.

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Exploring the cultural significance of General Hospital in American TV

Frank Hursley and Doris Hursley were husband and wife soap opera writers who first created the ABC show. They single-handedly led the show through the initial years before Gloria Monty joined as executive producer in 1978. The show is set in the fictional town of Port Charles, located in upstate New York, and endeavors to take a close look at the lives of staff of the eponymous hospital and the local residents.

True to daily soap fashion, the intertwining relationships between the characters are complex and multi-layered. The narrative arcs picked up by the show writers are protracted and stretch across several episodes and seasons. The revelations and reversals presented in the narrative are often shocking, and this has involved characters being brought back from the dead in the past. The usual tropes include romance, mystery, and intrigue that are dished out in a serial manner to satiate the audiences.

Back when General Hospital first arrived on the landscape of daytime American television, daily soaps had just begun making a name for themselves. Beginning with the first-ever daytime soap, All My Children, the genre was teeming with possibility in the 1960s and 1970s as there were as many as eighteen daily soaps catering to the audience back then. With the passage of time and the rise of other forms of entertainment, only four of the original soaps, including The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives, and General Hospital, are still airing new episodes.

The ABC show not only set the parameters for a successful daily soap but also brough to the forefront the lives of health care professionals dealing with real world problems such as the increase in the number of HIV AIDS cases, the inclusion of characters from the lesbian, gay and transgender communities, the sensitivity to approach mental health and so on.

The first-ever super-couple of American daytime television was formed on the ABC show itself by Laura and Luke Spencer. The couple were the center of attraction on the show during the late '70s and early '80s, with their on-screen wedding episode in 1981 raking in a record thirty million viewers, making the episode undeniably the most watched one hour in the history of American daily soaps.

Daytime soap operas in general and General Hospital in particular developed as a response to the otherwise male-dominated and pristime prime time television programming. Contrary to this, daytime soaps were largely produced by women for women audiences. The daily telecast format often led to actors improvising their lines against dimly lit backgrounds from what appeared to be a rushed production schedule. Oddly enough, these flaws and inconsistencies somehow lent themselves well to the small and/or black and white television sets that most households had back then, thus making the shows wildly popular.

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Executive Producer Frank Valentini speaks about the challenges of daytime soap operas in a new age

Frank Valentini is the current EP and has been associated with the ABC show since 2010. In a 2017 interview with MediaVillage editor Ed Martin, Valentini candidly spoke about the realities of producing a legacy daytime soap opera in a new world that has turned to streaming platforms and other modes of daily entertainment. He remarked:

"The challenges that we face in 2017 in daytime are very similar to the challenges that everyone else faces – there are many more choices and viewing options, more competition as we all know. For the audience that we’ve had, which back in the Eighties was huge and has dwindled significantly over the years, we still want to hold on to them. Our audience ebbs and flows. Sometimes people will come back, something draws them back in. Sometimes they stay, or they just sort of stay with us to some degree, whether they watch one day or four days or five days. The challenge is to make the show as exciting as possible every day, so that there’s something in it every day for the audience, either something that has a nostalgic flavor to it or is thrilling in terms of the storyline."

He further added:

"The daily soap or daytime drama is an original American art form. It perseveres because it is unique in that regard. I don’t know that the other media would be able to do it, be able to handle all the challenges of doing 240-plus episodes every year and keeping them all interesting and fresh. Primetime writers sometimes complain about writing 22 episodes with a team that’s probably twice the size of what we have."

General Hospital airs exclusively on ABC and is available for streaming on Hulu.