Monday, February 21, 2011

Love in the Afternoon

I have been, up until today, surprisingly detached from the forthcoming nuptials of my all-time second favorite couple EVER on General Hospital. It's weird, really. I spent the entirety of my college years wanting Sonny Corinthos and Brenda Barrett to make it to the altar. And six months ago, when she returned to the show and they fairly quickly entered into a (re)whirlwind romance, I was bizarrely underwhelmed. It felt forced. It felt weird. It felt awkward. And the most strange of all, it felt almost completely free of the scorching, white-hot chemistry that the two actors always seemed to possess. And so, while I had been aware that this wedding was fast approaching--it was hard not to really, since they talked about it all. the. time.--I just couldn't muster any real enthusiasm.

Until the last few episodes. When all of a sudden this whole mess of a show (and, frankly, I think the show has been spiraling into a vortex of suckitude for the better part of a decade) suddenly morphed, as it's wont to do, into one of it's tragically brief periods of awesomeness. General Hospital has been, since the late '90s, wildly erratic. Months of story lines so poorly and nonsensically written as to be painful to watch tend to give way for a week or so into something so gloriously soapy and old-school as to be, in a word, delightful. Now, granted, many of the individual elements of this show, many of the individual elements of this wedding, even, are still horrible. But somehow, they are all mixing together beautifully. It's like vanilla flavoring, I guess. It's really foul by itself, but thrown into the batter it turns out to be pretty awesome.

It's not over. It could end up horribly, horribly wrong, as it so often does. But for right now--and we're only at the "does anyone object?" part--it's SAH-WEET. To quote the imcomparable Soapdish, "THIS is what I was talking about. THIS is soap opera." What it is, y'all, is good, old-fashioned Love in the Afternoon. Enjoy it while it lasts.

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