There are two certainties in American life: death and taxes.
And a third, if you watch daytime TV: someone in Port Charles is getting amnesia, waking up from a coma, or discovering their evil twin.
Usually all three before lunch. "General Hospital" just notched its 62nd anniversary, which means it has officially outlived the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, and roughly nine of my past relationships.
The show premiered in 1963, back when a hospital drama could get away with one plotline about a nurse and a doctor having feelings.
Now it's got mobsters, secret islands, cryogenically frozen villains, and a weather machine.
The characters have been through approximately 47 hostage crises, 19 explosions, and one incident where a guy named Stavros was kept on ice like a Costco chicken.
Sonny Corinthos has been running the local coffee import business for three decades and hasn't aged a day.
Meanwhile, actual fans are out here aging in real time.
My aunt has watched this show since before I was born.
She started as a teenager and is now collecting Social Security, and Jason Morgan is still out here getting shot in the head and walking it off.
That's a documentary about whatever the writers are drinking.
Let's talk about the hospital itself, since it's right there in the name.
General Hospital has to be the most dangerous medical facility in the Western Hemisphere.
People go in for a routine checkup and leave with a new face, a fake identity, and a paternity test result that ruins three families.
If this place existed in real life, the state would've shut it down, paved the parking lot, and put up a Waffle House.
In an era where every streaming service cancels a show after two seasons and a vague tweet, this thing has survived network shakeups, budget cuts, and the entire collapse of the daytime soap genre. "Guiding Light" is gone. "As the World Turns" is gone. "All My Children" got resurrected online and died again.
General Hospital is out here like a cockroach in a nuclear bunker, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
It also launched more careers than most acting schools.
Demi Moore, Ryan Reynolds, Amber Tamblyn, Ricky Martin.
The dude was on this show before he was Livin' La Vida Loca-ing across the globe.
Somebody in casting deserves a raise and possibly a statue.
The real magic is that the show knows exactly what it is.
It's not trying to be "Succession" with stethoscopes.
It's a place where a woman can be buried alive, develop amnesia, become a nun, and marry her own brother's ex-husband, and the audience just nods and asks what's for dinner.
That's art, arguably. **The take:** Sixty-two years is longer than most marriages, most mortgages, and every single phone I've ever owned.
The show will probably outlive us all, and honestly, it's earned the right.
Final Thoughts
Somewhere in Port Charles, a coma patient is about to wake up with a new face and a grudge.