‘General Hospital’ at 60: What Happened in the Very First Episode
Don’t Miss a Thing!
For exclusive news and updates, subscribe to our General Hospital Newsletter:
Two long-running, hospital-set soaps — ABC’s General Hospital and NBC’s The Doctors — debuted on the same day on April 1, 1963. The Doctors ran for nearly 20 years, but General Hospital has lasted three times as long — and counting! Six decades into the soap’s run, and ABC is honoring the show with a primetime special, General Hospital: 60 Years of Stars and Storytelling, airing on Thursday, January 4, at 10/9c.
The General Hospital that started that day in 1963, however, is very different from the show fans see today, and not just because it aired in black and white and not color. For starters, General Hospital was a half-hour show at the time; it didn’t expand to its current, hour-long format until 15 years later.
And whereas today’s General Hospital boasts a cast of nearly three dozen, Episode #1.1 focused on only five characters on the seventh floor of the titular medical center — particularly Dr. Steve Hardy (played by former MLB player John Beradino) and nurse Jessie Brewer (Emily McLaughlin).
As that first episode starts, Jessie is dismayed to find her that 18-year-old patient Angie Costello (Jana Taylor) has closed the blinds and covered the mirror in her hospital room. Jessie and Steve both say that Angie is “lucky to be alive” after getting into a car accident with her drunk-driver boyfriend. But Angie is distraught that the accident has disfigured her face, despite Steve’s assurance that the hospital’s plastic surgeon “perform[s] miracles these days.”
And Angie is just one of the patients keeping Steve working late, as his fiancée, Peggy Mercer (K.T. Stevens), is dismayed to learn when she shows up on the seventh floor, ready to go out with him for a night on the town. Eventually, Peggy grows tired of waiting for the dutiful doc, and she leaves in a huff (“Your patients will always come first, won’t they?”). On her way out, Peggy gives her and Steve’s theater tickets to Jessie, who’s married to Dr. Phil Brewer (Roy Thinnes), an intern at the hospital.
Phil, for his part, arrives on the seventh floor soon after… and makes eyes at a hospital attendant on his way in. He finds Peggy’s tickets at the nurses’ station and tells Jessie that they should go to the show. Jessie reminds him that he has a case presentation the following morning and he intended to study for that presentation that night. But Phil snaps at her, saying that they are “entitled to a little fun once in a while” and she has to let him decide what’s right for him. Jessie looks none too happy as they head out for the night.
Later that night, Steve checks in on Angie one last time before he calls it a night. She confides in him that she had a hardscrabble childhood with an overbearing father, but all she had to do to feel better was to look in the mirror. “You know what I’d see?” she asks the doc. “A pretty face. A really pretty face. Maybe beautiful, even.”
Now, though, Angie is worried that she’ll no longer be beautiful — and that her boyfriend won’t want to show her off. Steve gets Angie to say that she trusts him, and he says the General Hospital staff can help her if she lets them.
Satisfied with that conversation, Steve heads for the elevator, agreeing when a nurse remarks that it’s been a long day. “But I think it was worth it,” he says, tossing away a flower that Peggy had gotten for his jacket.
Just after he leaves, however, a terrible clatter startles the nurse. Angie has smashed the mirror in her room, and now she’s collapsing into a heap of despair. End of #1.1!
General Hospital, Weekdays, ABC
General Hospital: 60 Years of Stars and Storytelling, Thursday, January 4, 10/9c, ABC
