General Hospital Is the Most Violent Show on Television

This Friday, James Franco begins appearing on General Hospital, a casting stunt that’s attracted more attention to the long-running soap opera than anything since Elizabeth Taylor slapped on a turban and cursed Luke and Laura’s nuptials in 1981. Franco (Milk, Pineapple Express, Spider-Man, a number of charming, self-skewering Web videos) has been extremely vague and mysterious about what he, a talented, up and coming, A-list actor is doing slumming it on daytime, revealing only that it has something to do with a “performance art” film he’s making. Asked why he had chosen General Hospital over the six other serials still on the air, Franco replied, “I really don't know the difference between [soap operas]. The one difference is that General Hospital has developed this whole organized-crime thread.”

Despite its title, General Hospital is no longer a show about doctors, nurses, and their love affairs. It is a show about gangsters, gun molls, and their love affairs. Franco’s character (cleverly named … Franco), will be another one of these thugs, as the ABC trailer promoting his appearance makes abundantly clear, introducing him as an “artist whose canvas is murder,” and as a man so dangerous, “no one is safe, not even an expert killer.”

The number of people who know, let alone care, that General Hospital has become a show about the mob dwindles every day. When Luke and Laura were married almost three decades ago, 30 million people tuned in. Today, the show’s audience hovers between 2 million and 3 million. (This is not particular to GH—all soaps have seen dramatic declines in viewership.) As they have become increasingly marginalized, soaps have become weirder and more particular, like some species left to mutate on the Galapagos, maintaining vestigial elements no longer seen on mainland television. Sometimes the diminished status creates something socially useful. In 2007, Luke and Laura’s daughter Lulu had an abortion, to little fanfare, something that just about can’t happen on prime-time these days. Mostly, however, GH has taken advantage of the lack of audience to create a lawless, backwards universe, where killers are heroes and children are praised for bludgeoning their stepmothers to death.

Of course, it’s a daytime soap’s prerogative to create cheap, outrageous, morally dubious plot lines. General Hospital, on the air since 1963, has done it all: amnesia, long-lost twins, and dead people coming back to life. The mob has played a part on GH since the late ‘70s, but for more than 20 years it was held in check by do-gooder citizens more worried about an evil weather machine threatening to freeze over their city than about drive-by shootings. But for the last decade, Port Charles, where GH takes place, has been overrun by gangsters, becoming a stomping ground for firefights, hostage crises, and serial killers. Two years ago, two female characters who had been on the show since they were children were brutally murdered by a serial killer, the psycho son of a mob boss; this year, the 11-year old son of another mob boss was shot in the head by a sniper. It’s safe to say GH has become the most morally confused, violent show on television.