As Luke and Laura walk down the aisle today for the second time on General Hospital, anyone old enough to remember their first wedding on November 16, 1981 can't help but reflect on how television has changed since that time.
Today, when people talk about the ability television has to bring millions of people together for a shared experience they invariably cite live coverage of a significant news event as the catalyst. Certainly, the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards can still be counted on to attract tens of millions of viewers. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and other reality shows build the kind of buzz that attracts a huge audience, including people who don't normally watch television.
But as baby boomers and Gen X'ers will tell you, scripted series once had the power to bring people together in record numbers. The birth of Lucy and Ricky's baby on I Love Lucy back in 1953 and the wedding of Rhoda Morgenstern on that character's self-titled sitcom in 1974 transfixed tens of millions of American television viewers, as have so many other shows depicting significant developments in the lives of television characters during the last fifty years. Few of them, however, have had the decades-long impact of the romance of Lucas Lorenzo Spencer and Laura Webber Baldwin, the star-crossed lovers on ABC's General Hospital who were married in a historically high rated two-part episode twenty-five years ago today and tomorrow.
Luke and Laura's big day was not the most significant television event of 1981. That distinction went to the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in January of that year. Nor was it the biggest wedding ceremony. The real-life nuptials of Britain's Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer commanded a spectacular worldwide television audience approximately three months before Luke and Laura tied the knot.
Nevertheless, the wedding of Laura and Luke was the biggest event in scripted television since the frenzy one year earlier surrounding the resolution on Dallas of one of the greatest cliffhangers in the history of primetime television, "Who Shot J.R.?" Viewers of that show, who had been kept in the dark about the identity of J.R. Ewing's assailant for several months, finally learned on November 21, 1980 that his sister-in-law Kristin had pulled the trigger. That episode of the most successful primetime serial in television history remains one of the highest rated entertainment telecasts ever.
Of course, the huge excitement this week surrounding the 25th anniversary of Luke and Laura's wedding is happening only because General Hospital is still on the air and the characters and their families are still a big part of the show. It's all smoke and mirrors to some degree, because Luke and Laura have not been present on the show's canvas for all of the last 25 years, and they are not still married, having been divorced in 2001. Laura has been in a coma for the last four years, and it is widely known that, in just a few days, she is going to slip away once again, because Genie Francis, the actress who portrays her, has only briefly returned to the show. That said, it's great to see Ms. Francis and Anthony Geary, the actor who plays Luke, reunited once again. They still have the same uniquely powerful chemistry that made them a pop-culture phenomenon during the end run of the disco era. They will be married once again (in a manner of speaking) on today's episode, witnessed by several of the same characters that were there in 1981.
This anniversary doesn't just remind us of a satisfying soap opera wedding. The whole Luke and Laura thing became the central component in the efforts of the show's executive producer at the time, the visionary Gloria Monty, to both rescue GH from the brink of cancellation and revitalize the then drab and dusty genre of daytime drama. Attracting young viewers was key to Monty's strategy, as it has been to the strategy of virtually every daytime and primetime programmer ever since.
Under Monty's direction, a massive youthquake rocked daytime. The genre hasn't been the same since. Veteran players on many soap operas during the last twenty-five years have cried foul, because they have been hastily marginalized by youth-fixated writers, producers and executives who don't understand that young people were just as drawn to the "grown up" characters during the heyday of GH (Rick, Leslie, Alan, Monica, Tracy, Edward, Lila, Jessie, Dan and Ruby among them) as they were to the "kids."
You probably remember (or have heard of) the famous September 28, 1981 cover story about GH in Newsweek magazine. What you likely don't recall is that Susan Brown, the actress who played Gail Baldwin (the stepmother of Laura's first husband Scotty), was quoted in that article defending the adults who still worked in daytime and the adults who watched them at home. "We still have an older audience," Brown asserted, "and they buy more products than the kids."
Brown's point was valid, but that train had already left the station, never to return. It all started with Genie Francis, who joined GH in 1977, long before Anthony Geary. I interviewed Francis ten years ago for another publication, and at the time she recalled, "When I was 14 years old, Gloria Monty told my parents, 'I'm going after the young audience for the first time, and I'm using your daughter to do it.' She was smart to do that. Look what happened!"
I also talked with Tony Geary at that time. "[GH] has a large young following, and I think a lot of that is because of us originally, and because Gloria Monty wanted to change daytime," he told me.
Geary expressed a greater understanding of daytime drama and its appeal to young people than anyone I had met before or since. "It surprises me, with a group of executives so damned determined to grab that younger audience, that they just keep filling the show with younger people, instead of going with a story that would grab them," he said of the team responsible for GH in the mid-Nineties. But his comment addressed an unfortunate reality that weakened all of daytime in the scramble to replicate the legendary and lucrative Luke and Laura experience. "It's not just a whole bunch of young folks that people want to watch," Geary declared. "They've got to be doing something!"
Indeed, with Monty at the helm, Luke and Laura did a lot, and much of it hadn't been done before. Monty filled GH with captivating stories of action, adventure and science fiction, all new to daytime television. If you are lucky enough to have enjoyed it all the first time around and are feeling nostalgic, or if you are too young to appreciate what all the fuss is about, don't miss SOAPnet's four-hour marathon of classic Luke and Laura episodes next Friday, November 24 beginning at 7 p.m. ET. The marathon includes the two-part wedding as well as the unforgettable episode in which Luke and Laura, then on the run from the Frank Smith mob, spent a night living out their romantic fantasies in a local department store. The marathon will be followed by a new special, Luke & Laura: The Love Story Revealed, a retrospective of the characters' long history together hosted by Geary and Francis.