How GH (accidentally?) found its way back home.

Well…I’m in awe.  GH managed to pull off one of the most romantic weddings in at least a decade.  With Patrick and Robin’s “scrubs love” wedding:

There were no secrets hanging over their heads.

The couple wasn’t forced to marry to form a life saving alliance – nor one to protect the other from prosecution.

There were no jilted lovers hiding at the back of the church waiting for the chance of stolen lovelorn glances.

No baby’s mama drama.

Nary a gun-totin’, trigger-pullin’ mob boss in the crowd to disrupt the nuptials.

One sweet, but failed, prior attempt and now nuptial bliss.

This wedding was all about the fact that these two people love one another unconditionally and want to be together. Who knew that still happened in daytime?  Who knew that something as ‘basic’ as a wedding between equals could be so exciting?  The audience knew, and the writers have finally listened.

In addition to the fact that the wedding went off without a major hitch, there was something else that made Robin and Patrick’s wedding so special to me.  Daytime is rife with 2 dimensional hotties who literally look great on paper, but can’t convey a meaningful emotion to save their soap lives.  Newbies are hurled at daytime viewing audiences like cheap baubles,  Cracker Jack prizes – if you will.   We are supposed to be too stunned by their beautiful outsides to notice the emotional stunted performances causing our own insides twisting with disgust and annoyance.

They come from no where, are tied to no one, and when they are linked to core families, their characters are changed so drastically that they may as well have been cast as products of completely unknown soap families (ah hem… ATWT… Dani Stewart… uh?  WHO?… Exactly)   I should also add that when they’re tied to core families, their arrival is often a signal that the core characters we care about will be pitifully used to introduce them and are then  shoved into the soap attic while the writers delight in playing with their new toys.

What made the Scrubs wedding extra special is that Robin and Patrick are legacy characters, Robin being a GH regular (more on than off)  since the grand 80s.  Their families have been around forever, even if hottie Dr. Noah Drake hasn’t been on screen consistently, for more than a decade.

There’s something special about the soap children of characters we loved becoming adults and marrying.  There’s something special about the fact that the writers took the time to develop Patrick as a character, and Robin and Patrick as a couple, even if it’s only because the writers were busy focusing on the mob storyline for Sonny and Jason.  If Scrubs was an afterthought, this should be sufficient notice to the writers to consider taking a look back at what other storylines they told in the shadows of the dark opera that plays out front on GH.

Stories like that of Robin and Patrick (LnL2, Lulu and Johnny, and Spinelli and Maxie, Mac and Me… just kidding) don’t ‘detract’ from the writers’ beloved mob storylines, they give weary viewers a place to rest when the mob stuff becomes too much to bear.  I would love to see more of the Scrubs romance, and any of the other couples mentioned above.  In the coming future, I would love to see this show strike the same balance it did this past week.  I would find myself far less resentful of the Sonny and Jason fiasco if there was something more to the show than these two pathological characters and their pathological lives (sugarcoating who they are and what they do doesn’t change anything for me – they kill for a living and then call it self-defense when those they’ve chosen to do business with do the same).

I past all of that.  This past week, I remembered what GH use to be during its heyday.  I thought about Anna and Robert, Tony and Tania, Tony and Bobby, Frisco and Felicia, and yes, Luke and Laura.  I thought about the love/hate relationship between Alan and Monica that was always more about love than hate.  I remembered actually wanting to tune in day after day to see what was going on with GH’s lovers.  Seeing the Scorpios back together, I  thought about other GH families (and poor Maxie, a motherless child, who seemed to have peace for a brief moment in time when she watched her cousin Robin being embraced by her own mother).  Anna back as the Scorpio family matriarch?  What I wouldn’t give!

Robin and Patrick’s wedding gave all of that back to me.  If that’s all I get, what a pity, but I’m happy to have had it.  Tough times are ahead in the land of “scrubs love” but even that has me more intrigued than all of the natural disasters, fire bombings, hotel massacres, and church shoot outs the writers have penned for this soap in the past decade.

If I can’t appeal to writer camp based on their love for the history of GH and the great cast it has at its disposal, how about appealing based on the economics of producing the show?  Any drama is about the humanity of the show’s characters.  It’s about making the emotional connection to the audience.  Developing Scrubs,  “Maxelli”, LnL2, and others is a damned bit cheaper  than paying technicians and pyrotechnics to blow things up and tear things apart.  Think about it.