I remember Port Charles the spin-off when it debuted.
The network had decided to schedule a two hour tv movie on Sunday night and then premiere it as a 30 minute soap on Monday. It was smart of them to do the Greg Cooper hostage situation during the tv movie where we also got to meet all the interns and also show how Kevin/Lucy were tied into the premiere along with Audrey Hardy.
Biggest mistake was scheduling it opposite the Tony Awards so ratings weren't good and the acting/direction wasn't the most realistic. The biggest complaint the first weeks/months of the show was that it felt like two completely different shows where you had the interns starting their new journey at the hospital while Lucy/Kevin/Scotty were in an almost separate storyline involving Serena's kidnapping. Even though three of the interns were connected to that story (Jake, Eve, and Karen).. it still felt like two completely separate shows with little to no connection to one another.
Having the developers of the show (Cullitons) leave and be replaced by Lynn Marie Latham was the shot of energy that was needed with the show eventually merging the two fragmented shows into one show with the General Homicide mystery and the mixing of characters that hadn't interacted much during the Culliton era.
Was Latham perfect, no... but she did manage to make the show interesting and was able to make the two unrelated halves of the show merge and become one messy show even after she left in the spring of 1999 until the telenovela/soap hybrid experiment started in late 2000.
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Soaplovers ·
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