GH: December 2024 Discussion Thread

[Khan]

nm

Edited December 27, 2024 by Khan

[carolineg]

I think the name was just explained by the fact she was from Quebec or French Canadian lol

[Vee]

Leave Brody alone! He had great chemistry with Melissa and Susan Haskell, too.

Edited December 27, 2024 by Vee

[Liberty City]

Honestly... I try to forget that era of the show so much... it was towards the end of the "writer's" tenure, and it was messy as ever-hating-fück. I dreaded watching.

And honestly, I won't lie: he and Emme Rylan (ex-Lulu) did have some chemistry. But, the role of Dustin missed a lot of marks... so many anvils they could have played on with him, and they never did.

If Y&R had brought Rylan back as Abby, I could have seen Mark Lawson being cast as Chance, and them continuing their work there.

[Vee]

I love Mark but he should not have been on this show. Like most OLTL stars.

[Liberty City]

Just be thankful it wasn't in his One Life role, and we were forced to care about why he was there. 

Please register in order to view this content

 I'm still wondering why I should have cared that Starr's baby and her boyfriend were dead within an episode of debuting....

[carolineg]

It was fine to kill off Cole, but killing off the kid was pretty harsh lol.

[Vee]

That's kind of standard practice for many soap opera crossover characters, though. Vicky Hudson, heroine of Another World, was brutally killed off months after the show's finale to free up Jake McKinnon for ATWT. I believe Robert Delaney's family got slaughtered when he moved to AW from Somerset. Genie's Ceara Connor got it when her husband Jeremy Hunter moved to Loving (in part to force Genie to return to GH). The inconvenient family or love interest often gets axed, it's soap tradition.

I didn't love Starr losing both Cole and her daughter (though I never liked her having them on OLTL anyway, really) or Tea Delgado losing her baby on top of her husband, but I understood it. Frankly OLTL fans like me are lucky Natalie and Blair didn't also get torched offscreen like those many classic examples.

Edited December 27, 2024 by Vee

[BetterForgotten]

I wanted to kill all of those OLTL parasites! 

[Liberty City]

As a non One Life viewer, I again question why I should have cared the kid was killed off, and why we needed a multi-month storyline of Starr (poorly crying) trying to avenge the death against General Hospital characters.

Yes, but it was within the first episode.... like, they came on, in a car... and then BOOM died, so we didn't even get to "know them". I knew some backstory of Cole & Hope, but wasn't a One Life viewer, so it felt like forced-care as a viewer via script where their deaths were concerned. It was poor writing and execution, as if we should have automatically cared for these characters, and for Starr's loss. If anything, it turned me off to her more than it should have.

Fans should be lucky Kassie DePaiva wasn't offered a contract (which, if I recall, semi-pissed her off, didn't it?). The only positive that came out of the whole One Life saga was the hiring of Maura West (caused by TOLN's production of AMC/OLTL).

[carolineg]

Oh, believe me, I have expressed my hatred of the OLTL characters coming over to GH.  It was just odd to end Cole/Starr/baby's vaguely happy ending just to shoe horn Starr onto the canvas.  And for nothing.  She was Kiki a few months later lol.

[BetterForgotten]

I’m just glad Kristen Anderson doesn’t “act” anymore (not that she ever did). 

[Vee]

I understood how it was done at the time. OLTL was a popular show with heat on it, ended relatively strong (IMO) despite a slew of dog-ass storylines in its last year, and they wisely promoted the OLTL stars jumping to GH within days, maybe a week or two of the show's finale. Love it or hate it, it got eyes watching GH in a year when the show critically needed it, and I think those initial crossovers, the Robin resurrection mystery and the subsequent water crisis saga in the summer-fall helped save GH from the other two soaps' fate. (The other dreadful new stories RC introduced - Kate/Connie, Trey and Kristina, etc. - sure didn't do it, but he knew how to keep an audience engaged back then with a lot of shocks.)

Anyway, the timing made sense to me. A lot of ABC Daytime viewers had seen OLTL end with Starr, Cole and their child together, and a lot watched both shows or all three previously. So within a couple weeks they picked it up with Starr, Cole and their child passing through Port Charles. It was a fairly seamless transition to me.

Did I think they needed to spend months on Starr going around PC demanding justice for her baby in material Kristen Alderson was not great at playing? No, and I say that despite being the man who once wanted Dr. Sarah Webber to come back on the show married with three kids, one of whom would turn out to be the long-lost Hope Thornhart lol. GH fans would put me in the bear suit from Midsommar for that today!

[Liberty City]

I could have seen the "writer" trying to pull that kind of storyline had TOLN's production not forced ABC's hand, re: OLTL characters. And, honestly, the absence of Sarah Webber is one that should be remedied at some point.. Rebecca Budig was right there, ijbol.

Oh, I fully understand it, but it felt like there was an assumption predominately GH fans should have/would have cared about the loss of Cole & Hope after only three/four episodes of watching them. Now, had they lasted a few months, maybe? But three/four episodes? No. As a regular GH viewer, I felt nada but annoyance... plus, the immediate onslaught of OLTL characters being force-fed was so off-putting. Again, as a non-OLTL, that's my POV. I get it, from a OLTL viewer experience, it must have been wonderful to see "their characters" again, and had it been AMC characters (whom I felt would've worked better at GH than OLTL, especially if we had been given Lorraine Broderick), I might've felt differently.

And, honestly, I didn't mind the D.I.D. storyline with Kate (who I will never acknowledge as "Connie")... and, at the time, I liked the Kristina recast but, looking back, it was ill-fated. They really said, "Less Alexis, more Sonny" with Lindsey Morgan as Kristina (a.k.a. "the Mob Princess").

Edited December 27, 2024 by Liberty City

[BetterForgotten]

Memouries of Lindsey Morgan and her acting still makes my teeth itch.