Remembering ‘Port Charles,’ 20 Years After the ‘General Hospital’ Spinoff’s End

At the end of the 20th century, broadcast networks were still giving the green light to daytime dramas, including Port Charles, a half-hour spinoff of ABC’s long-running hit General Hospital. The series, created by Wendy Riche, lasted only six years — GH has already run ten times as long — but it had made a lasting impression with soap fans by the time it ended two decades ago.

The challenge for soap operas in the 1990s was to hook younger viewers when VCRs and cable channels offered them more options than whatever their parents were watching on TV, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. And the failures of ABC’s The City, a retooling of the earlier soap Loving, and NBC’s Sunset Beach, a daytime drama from Aaron Spelling, showed how tricky a proposition that was.

So ABC pinned its attention and its marketing dollars on a spinoff that would, with any luck, appeal to General Hospital fans while getting younger viewers to tune in, too. (ABC even got Port Charles ads in school gymnasiums and locker rooms and on college campuses’ satellite feeds, the Times noted.)

“We knew that The City was probably not going to last,” Riche told We Love Soaps in 2010, recalling Port Charles’ origin story. “I was having lunch with Pat [Fili-Krushel, then president of ABC Daytime] at some event. We were talking about The City and what to do with that timeslot. I said, ‘If I were a programmer, I would start the ABC lineup with a half hour of the west wing of General Hospital with the interns in a learning hospital, and cap the day off with General Hospital. I would interface the characters in Port Charles with both wings of General Hospital.’ Pat thought that was a great idea. She thought about it for a few hours, ran it by upper management, and told me to write it up. I sat down, wrote down some characters and storylines, sent her back some pages, and created the show.”

To bridge Port Charles with its predecessor, Riche and the other producers brought Lucy Coe (Lynn Herring) and Kevin Collins (Jon Lindstrom) over from General Hospital and brought back former GH character Scotty Baldwin (Kin Shriner). Joining those veterans would be younger faces playing interns at the hospital.

The spinoff debuted on June 1, 1997, introducing Michael Dietz, Lisa Ann Hadley, Mitch Longley, Nolan North, Jay Pickett, and others as interns in the world of General Hospital and Debbi Morgan as the resident in charge.

ABC/Courtesy: Everett Collection

Unfortunately, Port Charles wasn’t immune to the decline of the daytime drama format. By 2000, ABC was losing viewers in the among 18-to-54-year-old female demographic, per Entertainment Weekly, so the network had Port Charles take a page from telenovelas.

Following the format of those Spanish-language series, Port Charles writers started scripting 13-week storylines, or “books,” with each focusing on a different group of characters. The hope was that the accelerated plot — which would give viewers narrative payoffs at the end of each day, week, month, and book — would draw in more than the 2.4 million viewers who’d been tuning in.

“This is designed for mini-closure each day,” Angela Shapiro, who was then ABC’s president of daytime, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “The daytime drama genre came [into being] long ago, when audiences’ lifestyles and experiences were a lot different. We’re trying to address a contemporary audience.”

Port Charles also took a turn to the supernatural in later seasons, incorporating angels, werewolves, and vampires, with Lucy turning into a vampire slayer. “The inspiration for a vampire storyline comes from romance,” Riche explained. “It comes from unrequited love. And that you have to be together, but you cannot get together. That’s one of the major elements of soap opera storytelling. It comes [from] our hearts, as women, loving that kind of storytelling. Loving the kind of man who would do anything for you, even if [it] meant not being with you.”

Ultimately, however, those attempts to boost viewership couldn’t save the show. ABC called time-of-death on Port Charles in the summer of 2003, announcing that the soap would end that October 3.

“This was an extremely difficult decision,” Brian Frons, who was the ABC Daytime president by that point, told the press. “We were very pleased with the creative execution of the show, but the 30-minute format in this time period posed significant financial challenges, which ultimately led to this decision.”

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Even so, Riche considered the show a success. “Port Charles was a beloved show, but it just didn’t make sense in the numbers, the dollars,” she said. “That’s where Disney came in. Because it was less expensive to do another kind of programming in that period. And that was a very bottom-line decision, which was obviously disappointing to the cast, to the crew, and most importantly, the fans. … It might have been as big [as General Hospital] in 30 years. But to expect a show in six years to be as big as a show that had been on for 40 years in that genre when there are fewer people watching, it’s not the right comparison.”

Port Charles may be gone, but it’s certainly not forgotten. In 2013, General Hospital revisited the spinoff’s vampire storyline, with Lucy reverting to her slayer persona after coming face to face with new characters played by Port Charles alums Kelly Monaco, Michael Easton, and Ian Buchanan.

“That show was so ahead of its time,” Ron Carlivati, then head writer of General Hospital, told TV Guide Magazine. “And this is a nice nod to the fans who supported all those wild chances we took.”