It was a very good year. Or was it?

24Apr07

The path that lead me to this post was so spectacularly twisting and turning that it’s best condensed thusly: Character study Michael “Sonny” Corinthos; diversionary debate with self about which character actually ate GH; research by way of watching old Sonny and Brenda clips; reading old Year in Review recaps to sort chronology; wow the show was so much better then than now; what was my favourite year, 1994 or 1995?; comprehensive read of recaps of said years for comparison; finally reach the conclusion that you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have this post.

Now this is GH specific, but only because I started from a GH place. However I think I’ll be just as interested to do a similar study of Days if anyone wants to nominate a year (should I take bets now on how likely it is that that year will be 1987?).

The good old Year in Review is on the one hand truly, truly funny no matter the show, because when you string the occurrences of any particular soap year together they are never short of hilarious no matter how much of a fan you might be.* On the other hand they are an interesting exercise in looking at the balance of a show over a particular year and seeing the good bad and indifferent. Also, fabulously nostalgic.

So, let’s take 1994. A Labine year, part of the mid-90s general GH fabulousness.

I watched the whole year in 1994, and rely for the purposes of this half-baked analysis on the combination of my own memory – keep in mind on that front that 1994 was a university year for me, so much beer was consumed – the official ABC recap for the year, and the Soapzone daily recaps which started halfway through the year.

1994 was not all fabulous. Going back through the recaps I could feel my finger reaching for the fast-forward button at the mere mention of several stories. In fact I started to become depressed and was heading towards the conclusion that I’d actually injected a lot more quality into 1994 GH than had actually been there. Thankfully right before I was going to pull the plug on the whole experiment and start looking at the Great Marble Debate of 2007 in a new light, I caught a note in a recap about a conversation between Ned and Mac and the whole positive flood of 1994 feeling returned for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.**

To summarise the year, on the positive side, it was the year of the BJ’s heart story, and the first half of Monica’s cancer story. On the negative side, it was the year of Miguel.

Just taking those three, it’s interesting to note that we have two major medical stories there, and at the beginning even Miguel worked at the hospital. I’m just saying.

Couple-wise, on the positive side it was the first major year for Sonny and Brenda, Ned and Lois, Robin and Stone (the year they were just rebellious teens getting chased by bears), and Kevin and Lucy. On the negative there was Miguel and Lily, and on the meh fence in the middle the departure of bland couple number one, Paul and Jenny, and the creation of bland couple number two, Jason and Keesha, and of Justus and Simone and their non-relationship.

There was the ELQ Incinerator story, over-lapping with the Bradley Ward murder mystery and eventual revelation of Edward as Bradley’s father.

It was the year of L&B Records, of Eddie Maine and Ned’s two wives, the beginning of the Luke/Sonny friendship, the take down of Frank Smith, Puerto Pico, Damian’s bet with Lucy and the subsequent implosion of Bobbie and Tony’s marriage, of Katherine/Damian shenanigans, of Lulu’s birth, and Who is Georgie’s Daddy? It was the year Karen and Jagger got married, found out Scott was her father and left town, all, I think, on the same day. Of Ryan escaping from the loony bin for the second to last time and crashing Mac and Felicia’s wedding with a bomb. It was the year that Foster met Annabelle and Reginald poisoned Katherine and Lucky and Sly started their worm-farming business almost solely as a means of throwing another spanner in Kevin and Lucy’s plans for sleeping together.

Now here’s where I hear you say, as I did: ELQ’s toxic waste incinerator, not exactly a barn-burner, that one. Other than in terms of the self-righteousness of several characters, of course. Except.

But.

However.

It involved everyone. Almost practically everyone in one form or another, interlaced with other stories, wound up with other sagas. There were all the Quartermaines onscreen at the time, Edward, Lila, Monica, Alan, AJ, Jason, Ned, Lois, plus Katherine, Lucy and Damian who all had some sort of stake in ELQ, all the Wards, Mary-Mae, Justus and Keesha, Laura with on-flow to the rest of the Spencers, Miguel, Simone and various sundry others either in support or, largely, in opposition to the whole idea. But it also had impact in other places because most of those characters weren’t stuck in only one story, so it impinged on the L&B Records thread thanks to Ned’s ongoing duelling marriages, and the fallout from that reveal – Lois found out about Ned’s double life because she saw a press conference he gave on the incinerator project – into Bobbie’s revenge on Damian after the whole seduction for a bet, which had him winding up in, shock, horror, the hospital.

And at the same time that was going on Monica was getting cancer and the investigation into Bradley Ward’s murder was also landing on the Quatermaine/Spencer/Ward doorstep, or backyard, as the case may be. Luke had a toe in all of these things because of Laura, but then was trying to bring down Frank Smith with Sonny, who was also caught up in L&B. Mac and Felicia were playing private investigators from behind the bar at the Outback, while watching Ned sing and Lois jump out of Katherine’s birthday cake. Saint Jason was wearing reindeer sweaters and being anti-incinerator in defiance of Edward. Lucy bought a live duck to the Quartermaine Thanksgiving and they all wound up eating pizza.

You see what was going on there? Family shenanigans, corporate and environmental wheeling and dealing. A little mob activity that was largely anti-mob and in which the grey hats were at least mainly on the same side as Sean and the cops. A couple of major medical stories with long term impact, plenty of shorter term visits. Lots of romance, tons of humour, a prominent black family, friendships abounding. Ned talked to Mac because they were friends; central to the whole Eddie Maine saga were the friendships between Ned and Brenda, Brenda and Lois, and Lois and Sonny; Kevin knew about Felicia’s pregnancy first because they were friends; Tony went with Felicia to find Frisco because of family and friendship; Lucy’s friendship with Luke and the subsequent hi-jinx annoyed the hell out of Kevin; Laura and Tony bonded over being married to lunatic Spencers; and Sonny only knew Jason in passing when he dropped by the gate house to give incinerator updates or played tag team with AJ in trying to discourage Brenda from being involved with Sonny in the first place.

The whole damn canvas was integrated. It was taking a village to try to raise Robin with contributions of varying value from Mac and Felicia, Sean and Tiffany, and Brenda and Sonny. When BJ died it impacted on Tony and Bobbie and Lucas and Felicia and Maxie and Frisco and Mac, and Lucy even though it had been years since she was married to Tony.

The mob was there but bad, Sonny was really only mob-adjacent and still regarded as a bad guy by those who didn’t know him and a grey hat by those who did, the cops were still the good guys in the last of the halcyon days of the lengthy Scorpio-Devane-Jones-Donnelly-Scorpio reign over the police department (sure Mac still runs it, but no one cares any more and I thought that actually giving him the job in the first place was a bit dubious).

Laura’s friendship with Mary Mae was rather too sappy for my tastes, but it served to bring the Wards into the community and the canvas in a far more successful way than they had previously attempted with the Eckerts, or subsequently with any number of one off characters.

Lucy was comic relief with a gigantic heart and an ability to carry silly as well as heartfelt stories, and the same applied to pretty much all the Quartermaines as well. Actually, come to think of it, that applied to pretty much the whole canvas. Everyone had their moments of comic relief and their moments of drama. Now that’s barely allowed.

The kids acted like goddamn kids.

Guys like Luke and Sonny and Ned and Edward and Alan and Kevin were flawed, and they knew it and acted accordingly, and everyone else knew it and acted accordingly. To throw out some sweeping generalisations: no one was perfect, no one was treated like they were perfect, and layers abounded.

After going into this spiral of nostalgia, I have to conclude that despite my initial reservations, 1994 was a very good year. It was a very good year because while there were several knock-out stories and several great couples – two things that GH still proves capable of from time to time – what really made the year were those things it used to combine so well but now can’t seem to manage: integration, balance, senses of family and friendship, romance, sex, humour, and adventure mixed up with the drama.

And for that, I am even willing to forgive them Miguel.

What year shall we do next?

*eg ELQ exec and all round rich boy Ned Ashton pretended to be low-heeled pharmaceutical salesman Eddie Maine in order to sing in a band and bed and wed it’s manager, Lois. While tag-teaming with their mutual best friend Brenda to prevent Lois from learning the truth, he simultaneously recorded an album, championed an ELQ toxic waste incinerator project, and was blackmailed into bigamously marrying Katherine Bell to prevent her from revealing his Uncle Alan’s role in a murder. He spent several months running between Katherine’s bed in the main house and Lois’s bed in the gate house until Lois figured out the whole thing and popped out of a cake at Katherine’s birthday party to announce it to the world. Ned then pursued Lois until he finally got her to forgive him, somewhat, under the combined influence of Puerto Rican sunshine and the not so dulcet tones of a mop-headed former boy band member and possibly the worst actor of all time. Katherine, meanwhile, got poisoned by the butler.

** Then, when I was halfway through writing this piece current GH decided to make Mr Craig Jerry Jacks in a move that defied everything resembling or even bearing a passing resemblance to logic, and 1994, even with the reveal of yet another illegitimate Quartermaine heir, started to positively glow with goodness again.

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