General Hospital vs Scientology

Michelle Stafford

I watched General Hospital for a week when I was in high school. A (female) nurse named Bobbie was pretending to be pregnant with Scottie's baby to stop his marriage to Laura. Several months later, I tried to watch it again and was shocked that Laura and Bobbie were now friends and Scottie was nowhere to be seen.

Bobbie and Scottie

Later still, of course, Lara fell in love with Luke even though he raped her. The two frolicked on a tropical island where a mad scientist had a device that controlled the weather. He was going to use it to freeze Port Charles.

I'm not kidding.

That was the first I had heard of how strange soap operas were. They had alien abductions, demonic possession, spy rings, mafia hits.

And now Scientology

Showbiz411 is reporting that Scientologist Michelle Stafford is leaving General Hospital over its barely disguised attack on her "church".

...a few months ago, “General Hospital” started a story about a cult called Dawn of Day. (Dawn of Day, not coincidentally, is an 1881 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that would drive Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard crazy.)

The soap cult is very similar to Scientology: members are being roped in to pay big fees for “classes,” they have a charismatic leader who’s insinuating himself into various characters’ lives. This isn’t the first time “General Hospital” has attacked Scientology. For several years they featured a clinic for the criminally insane called Miscavige, obviously named for David Miscavige, the real life Napoleonic leader of Scientology. There are no coincidences here.

The article suggests that it was a ploy to get Stafford to quit. She's going back to her old job at The Young and the Restless which means they'll have to can Gina Tognoni who had taken over her role when she left five years ago. Tognoni had won an Emmy for it 2017.

Gina Tognoni

If you look on YouTube, you can find old episodes of soap operas from the '50's. A lot of them were only fifteen minutes. Don Knotts was in one. It was interesting to me that most of them consisted of scenes with only two people carrying on long conversations. They don't do that now. I turned on an episode and it was all crowd scenes.

I might be less impressed if I actually watched them, but I don't know how they do it, making an hour show five days a week.