How We Watch: An Extended Rant
by Teresa Leslie

Somehow, I never got around to writing a contribution to our "How We Watch" series before now. That's really too bad, because my viewing habits have changed dramatically in the last six months. Since Christmas, I have steadily watched less and less GH, and I have to confess that I have not missed it much. I am making a concerted effort, now that summer is here and the children are out of school, to go back to being a faithful five-episode-a-week viewer. Given my lack of enthusiasm for much that's going on at GH these days, however, I suspect it will be hard to stick to that resolve.

Once upon a time, GH was appointment television for me. Way back in my early viewing days, I scheduled my college classes so that I would be free at 3:00 each afternoon to watch my favorite soap. I was so enamored of Luke and Laura and Robert and Tiffany tramping around the Cassadine island that I kept a GH diary, making daily entries of the goings-on in Port Charles. This was long before VCRs were the inexpensive and indispensable appliances they are today, and my notes were a way for me to hang onto each program just a little longer.

I had been a GH watcher as long as there had been a GH to watch, as a matter of fact. My mother started watching GH when it debuted, and I watched along with her, playing happily on the den floor as she ironed and watched her soap each afternoon. One of my earliest memories of television is of Jessie Brewer standing at the nurses' station in her ever-present sweater and cute little nurse's cap. I grew up with Jessie and her sister Lucille, Steve Hardy and Audrey, the evil Heather Webber; I remember Port Charles when everyone ate at the Floating Rib and the kids hung out at Pop Snyder's store. So when I got to college, I was already a GH fan. While I was an undergrad, the GH craze hit big-time, and Luke and Laura made General Hospital required viewing on every college campus. Sometimes I watched along with a crowd at a lounge at the student center, but usually I rushed back to the dorm to watch without the running commentary inevitably provided by the boisterous group of kids watching together.

After college, my viewing habits varied over the years, as work and travel sometimes made it harder to watch regularly. Tony Geary and Genie Francis left the show, and no one else captured my heart the same way they had. Robert and Anna I loved, but Anna and Duke did nothing for me. As much as I had despised Blackie Parrish, I found I liked
Stone Cates even less. Maybe there just wasn't a youthful punk with a heart of gold who could take the place of Lucas Lorenzo Spencer. Then again, I'm a big fan of the current version, Zander Smith, so who knows why I didn't take to those guys. There were no female characters I identified with strongly, as I once had Laura. Tanya, Dominique, Lois--they were interesting in their own ways, but I never developed a rooting interest in any of them. Only Lucy Coe was consistently fascinating to me, and that may well be because I never recovered from the shock of that fabulous episode where the mousy librarian walked into her apartment and transformed herself into the wild wicked accomplice of a murderer that I never suspected her of being.

So for many years, if I saw GH, fine; if I missed an episode or a month of episodes, that was fine, too. My youthful enthusiasm for the show returned, however, when Stephen Nichols's gorgeous Stefan Cassadine stepped onto the Port Charles dock that amazing summer of the Greek flashbacks. I was hooked big-time, and for years I would move heaven and earth not to miss a single episode. I wish I could say I had returned to regular viewing when Luke and Laura returned a few years earlier, but that isn't the case. I watched when I could, but I didn't bother to tape when I wasn't going to be home. The summer of Stefan, however, I was already falling back into a more regular habit. I had watched Laura's trial for the murder of Damian Smith with some interest, and remember thinking it was odd that they were rushing into another big Laura storyline so quickly, since as soon as she got out of that situation, Lesley Lu came down with a fever and we rushed headlong into the medical crisis that led to the introduction of the secret Cassadines from Laura's past.

I was thrilled with the revival of the Cassadine/Spencer feud, and even more thrilled by the clever way that Guza and company had created the perfect rival for Laura's affections, the "different Cassadine," Stefan Cassadine. It was suddenly not enough to just watch the show every day. I had to make sure to tape it, so I could savor the nuances of some scenes by reviewing them several times. The number of shows I could not bear to tape over began to grow. I also ventured onto the Internet to share my impressions with other viewers at various websites.

In those days, I watched GH "backward." My children get out of school shortly after 3:00, and it is usually after 3:30 when we get home. I would sit down and watch the last half of GH "live" and then later in the evening watch the first half on videotape. It's a strange system, but I enjoyed it. I had enough afternoon GH to satisfy me until I had the chance to savor my tape, and I knew if it was a great episode, say, one with some of those dreamy flashbacks to Laura and Stefan on the cliffs of the Greek island, I should plan to set aside a whole hour for delayed viewing, so I could rewatch the half I'd already seen, and rewind a few key scenes. The dialogue that summer and fall was fabulous, and I came to be able to tell within a few minutes if it was a "Mulcahey day," with dialogue by the ultimate scriptwriter, Patrick Mulcahey. (Elizabeth Korte also wrote strong Stefan/Laura material, but Mulcahey wrote everybody well, especially the Quartermaines.) While I became a fanatic about Stefan and Laura, there were lots of other treasures to savor as well, including that other divine Guza creation, Carly Benson.

The magic didn't last, of course. Guza left to launch Sunset Beach, Genie went off on an extended maternity leave, and the dreaded interregnum period, when first Bob Culliton and then the pair I can only remember as Itchy and Scratchy mangled Guza's carefully constructed Cassadines and much else about the show, began. It was rough sledding, especially watching Katherine Bell being paired with Stefan in a nonsensical Days-ish story in which he shot her and then fell in love with her. Ick. One story does not a soap make, however, and I stuck with it, still watching daily. After all, by then I had fallen into a wonderful email correspondence with four long-distance friends who became the editors of the GHR, so I enjoyed the dissection of the show in email even when I did not enjoy the show itself.

Guza came home, and I was filled with hope. I listened to the words he put in Luke Spencer's mouth that first episode back, and felt that things were looking up at last. Luke's opening line that day: "From here on out, everything's going to be different," (or something very similar), got the most attention from the online community and the press, but I was more interested in the speech Luke made later in the hour to a waitress at his club, ostensibly about putting up with the Quartermaine's service demands. Instead of the usual platitudes one might expect from anyone else about the customer always being right, Luke insisted that the customer (and the viewer, I felt Guza was saying) should remember who created the entertainment they had come out to enjoy, and let the professionals run the show.

Things did not stay on that high level, I admit, but I remained a Bob Guza fan until the day he left the show. I always wondered how different things might have been for some of the stories and the characters I felt most passionate about if there had not been so much backstage drama during Guza's second stint as headwriter, but that's the nature of the collaborative effort we know as daytime dramas, I suppose. Still, there was plenty to celebrate, including the demise of the character I despised most of any in the long history of General Hospital, Katherine Bell. When she went splat the second time, and stayed that way, I was ecstatic. Even if I did not feel the need to linger over every scene as I once had, I did find myself working hard to catch every episode.

This spring, however, things changed. To be sure, the change was mostly in my own life--a job change meant I was working most days when GH came on. Still, I own a VCR, so I could tape the show. Some days I did, but I didn't bother to tape every day. Soon I noticed that I sometimes didn't watch a show I'd taped until several days later, and then I often found myself fast-forwarding through much of it. My always-busy life had become even more hectic, and I simply didn't have as much leisure time as before. Shows that want to compete for my precious free time have got to earn their place, and this spring, to my surprise, GH could not compete. A spare hour to watch TV was better invested in Boston Public or The West Wing than GH. The days I bothered to tape began to dwindle.

How did that happen? I'm not sure. I know a lot of my antipathy was based on lowered expectations on my part. I was not a fan of what Jill Farren-Phelps wrought on One Life to Live, and I did not anticipate enjoying her vision of GH either. So I indulged to a large extent in what my great-grandmother called "borrowing trouble"--knowing I might not like what was coming in the future, I groused about it in the present and assumed the worst. Why make time for a show that I felt sure was headed in a direction I would not like? I know that wasn't fair, and I'm doing my best at present to give the program the benefit of the doubt and to watch without focusing on gossip/news/spoilers about behind-the-scenes stuff.

Not all my misgivings were due to anticipation of changes in the future however. A lot of GH just didn't grab me, or plain annoyed me. Such as? The recasting of Carly Corinthos. Carly was always one of my favorite characters, and I know see just how much of that was due to the magnificent work of Sarah Brown. Getting fans to accept a replacement for an actress as popular as Sarah is a tough sell under the best of circumstances. GH, mysteriously, chose to make it even harder for the new actress (see, I don't even know the poor girl's name) in a number of ways. The Powers That Be began by writing a storyline that just doesn't make sense for many Carly/Sonny fans. Carly, mob moll supreme, the one who got it in a way that Brenda never did, the one who loathed Hannah for working undercover for the Feds, the one who had accused more than one of Port Charles's upstanding citizens of hypocrisy for condemning Sonny's line of work, that Carly is suddenly going to decide it is in Sonny's best interest to cooperate with the FBI? Carly is going to want to go into the witness protection program, never to see her mom, Sonny's dad, or Jason ever again? Tell me another one. Sarah got out just in time, seems to me.

So we have an untenable story revolving around Carly and Sonny. Then one day, Carly comes through the door with a new face. No down time at all between actresses--a major mistake. It would have made so much more sense to use this recent period when Carly was out of town to introduce the new actress. I suspect that was the original plan, but something went awry. If they realized they couldn't get that far in the story before Sarah left, they should have reworked the story. Bringing in a new face in the midst of a heavy-duty storyline and asking us to accept her immediately just hasn't worked.

Finally, The Powers That Be erred, ironically, in trying to minimize the differences between Sarah and her replacement. NuCarly has the same hair, courtesy of a dye job and restyling. She tries to mimic Sarah's gestures and acting style--try being the operative word. The result is a bizarre sense that we are watching someone acting like Sarah acting like Carly, instead of someone performing the part of Carly. I got the impression of a little girl playing dress-up, putting on big sister's too large shoes and slathering on her makeup. It's disconcerting, to say the least.

Well, glad I got that off my chest. But Carly is only one reason I lost interest in GH. Another is the backburnering of my darling Stefan. True, there have been times in the past when I prayed he'd be backburnered rather than have to watch the character twisted out of all recognizable shape, as when he was carrying a crippled Katherine to the window to see "their" tree. For months now, since returning from being "dead" and from falling for Chloe, he has been darn near invisible. I hate to see such a great character, and a great actor playing him, go to waste. Now, however, there is a revived Cassadine/Spencer fight going on, and I want him in the thick of things. At the moment he's peripheral to the real action, and they don't seem to know quite how to write him into the story. Once again, as on numerous past occasions, he is in danger of becoming a cartoon character, and I do not want to see that. So I keep my fingers crossed that things will look up for Stefan, but I don't invest a lot of energy in watching for clues that he's coming back into his glory.

Many of the GH stories this spring simply didn't hold my interest. Either people were acting in ways unrecognizable to me (Carly) or rehashing the same tired scenes over and over (Roy and Bobbie, for example). People I don't care a fig for were getting tons of airtime (Gia and Nik, Lucky and Liz). Situations that showed great initial promise fizzled, such as Laura's cosmetics venture. Instead of getting lots of slow bonding between Laura and Carly mixed in with great comedy from Elton and fun stuff about Laura dreaming up all-natural cosmetics or some other business-related story that made sense and maybe even echoed Genie's long-ago gig as Tyger Hayes in the Bare Essence miniseries and nightime drama, we got the inane "Face of Deception" junk, which required overlooking way too much that made no logical sense at all.

The bottom line is that there hasn't been much to invest in for me lately. Now that summer is here, I hope that changes. Maybe seeing the stories unfold daily and spending time regularly with old "friends" like Laura, Stefan, Scotty, Lila, and the rest will help me overlook the weaknesses and celebrate the strengths of the soap I have spent a lifetime following. I'll let you know in the fall.

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