Lately, I've been doing my cardio while watching Banshee, an old Cinemax hit that completely escaped my attention during its cable run from 2013-'16. Toplined by future The Boys lead Antony Starr, the show's about an ex-con who tracks down his former lover/heist partner after getting out of prison, and ends up impersonating Lucas Hood, the murdered sheriff of the town where she lives.
Banshee is not a good show, per se, but it's got the aerosol cheese consistency that's good for time spent in search of a distraction. It was also blessed with a killer premise, one that — along with the small-town setting — lent itself to some classically soapy plotting.
One of Banshee's central conflicts lies between our protagonist and a guy named Kai Proctor, a ruthless criminal who was exiled by the local Amish community before he solidified his grip on the town. Hood was hired to finally have Proctor sent to prison, but you know how this stuff goes: These guys are more alike than either of them would like to admit, and as time goes by, their proximity ends up compromising both of them in ways that keep the conflict in check.
I bring all this up here because I think it serves as a perfect example of how writing for this type of television is a little like writing a good pop song. The listener can feel where the chords are leading, but hearing everything click together is a big part of the fun — and so it is with dramatic television arcs that twist their characters together in knots that end up feeling as organic as they are inexorable.
This week, I'm contrasting everything I just said about Banshee against everything that's currently happening with Sonny on General Hospital. Fundamentally, what's going on between Sonny and Turner isn't all that different from the situation between Hood and Proctor on Banshee — you have an officer of the court whose ideals are tested, if not threatened outright, by the messy realities of their job, and on the other side, you have a lifelong criminal who's more complicated than they might seem.
The difference between the two is one of patience and intent. Banshee is mostly character-driven, with events proceeding naturally from a premise involving two powerful opposing forces. What we're seeing on GH, on the other hand, feels purely plot-driven — the result of people deciding that two characters need to be thrown together, and not really bothering to put in the work to make it make sense.
Now, I have to admit that any Sonny/Turner storyline would have been met with stiff resistance on my part, because we've seen him in this type of situation so many times, and he keeps getting older while his romantic scene partners seem to stay the same age. (My 18-year-old, walking in during some Sonny/Turner cuddling last week: "That man is 130 years old.") Still, at least on paper, this is a situation that can really work if it's properly established. If GH really, truly wanted to give us a tortured love story between these characters, it wasn't entirely out of the question — but it needed to be told patiently, and with long-term intent.
That is not what we've been handed, to put it mildly. I don't know if this is a scheduling issue that prevents the actors from taping together very often, or just a deluded belief on the showrunners' part that everyone in the audience finds Sonny as charming as every woman in Port Charles does, but the writers have done absolutely nothing at all to convince us that this affair makes the slightest bit of sense. The writing is so wafer-thin that I suspect Nazneen Contractor and Maurice Benard have given up and started phoning it in. Wouldn't you, if your character's "relationship" consisted mainly of meeting up in a sex pad to talk about how whatever you just did can never happen again?
GH took a step in the right direction this year by having Sonny go legit; unfortunately, that step hasn't come with any real difference in the way the show treats him. He's no longer a gangster, but he's still filthy rich, he still issues orders to guys named Vito and still has people on the inside in Pentonville, and he's still irresistible to women who are decades younger. How and/or why do these things happen? "Because Sonny" has been GH's answer for many years, and for a chunk of those years, it was enough. It isn't anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.
I feel like I say this next part in every column, but: What's really irritating about all this is that it doesn't have to be this way. It would never not be gross to see Sonny and Turner making out, but it really wouldn't have been that difficult to put those characters on a path where it would have made sense for it to happen. If we'd been able to see Turner slowly losing herself to Sonny through a series of difficult compromises, rather than just melting after he made her some lasagna, we could have been invested.
Sonny's war with Drew also didn't need to be so stupid. It would have been very easy to pit these two rich assholes against each other without ever resorting to plot-driven nonsense, but at some point, someone had the bright idea to conjure the umpteenth custody fight over Avery out of thin air, so now we have Ava and Sonny shrieking at each other about unsanctioned trips to the ballet. As others have noted, it would have been more fun to unite Ava and Sonny against Drew rather than the other way around, but if Drew and Ava needed to be paired, there were cleaner ways of making that happen. Drew knows Trina stole the Portia papers from his safe, after all; why not have him threaten her in order to secure Ava's support?
As Wubs pointed out in her column this week, GH is in a building period right now, and it's too early to confidently predict much regarding how the current crop of storylines will play out, or whether the ends will justify the means. What can be confidently stated, however, is that very little of what's happening onscreen is as close to compelling as it ought to be. All the momentum GH had coming out of the cold fusion saga has ground to a halt — partly because of all the complaints I just listed, and partly because most of these stories should have been far further along by now, in order to avoid this type of weekslong lull after the excitement of Spoon Island.
I think that's probably most of what I have to say about GH right now, but it's probably too soon to start dispensing bullets, so let's see if I can tackle some of the rest with a few shorter paragraphs…
Farewell, Charlotte
As I think most of us suspected, Drew didn't catch Charlotte laying in wait in his car. Instead, that honor fell to Scout and Rocco, who were sent by Danny when he was trapped in the Quartermaine stables. What happened next was legitimately a little surprising in a good way. Although I rolled my eyes when Carly was personally summoned to the Metro Court parking lot to deal with teenagers "making a scene," I ended up being really happy she was the one to find Charlotte arguing with Rocco and Scout, because it led to a Carly/Charlotte conversation that basically amounted to Carly recalling the similar stunts she pulled when she arrived in Port Charles, and how badly those went.
Carly recognizing elements of herself in Charlotte is a smart development; unfortunately, it seems destined not to amount to much, at least in the short term. With Bluesy Burke off to Vassar, Charlotte needs to exit the canvas, at least for a little while, which means Charlotte is off to boarding school. Carly made Charlotte tell Valentin what she did, and then she counseled Valentin that he needed to tell Lulu the whole story, which is an awful lot of Carly being right for one week — it was disorienting to watch, even if we intellectually understood it was all happening this fast in order to accommodate Burke's lapsing contract.
Burke has been good as Charlotte, but not so good that she'll be impossible to replace. I hope the show recasts fairly quickly, because this character is rapidly reaching an age where she can and should be a lot more impactful. GH should be laying track for the conflicts that'll help define her for years to come.
Hello, Monet
For months, I have openly advocated for Chase and Brook Lynn to break up, using the argument that their marriage was too dull to be allowed to continue. Turns out they're just as boring when they're in the midst of a divorce! Who could have guessed?
Last week was all about whether Chase would move back into the Quartermaine mansion in order to safeguard his parental rights to Phoebe, the idea being that if he moved out without filing for separation, it would look like he was abandoning his family or whatever. Granted, the Quartermaine mansion is a magical building that's always big enough to hold whoever wants to live there, but even if they can sleep in separate wings, it seems awfully strange to me that any divorce lawyer would argue that a couple who can't get along still need to live in the same house.
Like a lot of things on GH, this isn't really worth complaining about because it isn't even supposed to make sense. Last week's plot developments were lined up in order to accomplish two things: One, to introduce Chase's lawyer Monet Mitchell, who has been on the show for only a few days, but has already honored two soap traditions by A) fitting the "ruthless shark attorney" stereotype and B ) having a surprise connection to another character. Turns out she's Jordan's younger sister, and these two not only hate each other — Monet greeted Jordan by asking if her scars were "a new look" — but their entire family is apparently so estranged that Jordan didn't even know Monet was a lawyer.
Having a front-burner character for a son didn't do much to generate story for Jordan, so I'm not sure what giving her a sister will accomplish, but I guess we'll see. (Or maybe we won't: Rumor has it that Blythe Howard, who plays Monet, has already wrapped her stint.)
The second thing set up by last week's events was Chase's return to the mansion. He arrived just in time to find Hudson building a playpen and playing peek-a-boo with Phoebe, which leads me to believe we're getting some variation of the scenario I imagined a few weeks ago, with Hudson wooing Brook Lynn while Chase and Willow are re-entangled. Tracy and Michael are counting on Chase falling into bed with Willow, and things keep heading in that direction — last week, Willow shocked herself by having a horny fantasy about Chase in the Aurora steam room. But before anything really soapy is allowed to happen, we have to listen to Chase and Brook Lynn weep, whine, and wail about whether they're really splitting up. Their faces have become a reliable cue that it's safe to fast-forward.
I think that'll do it for now. Time to let the bullets fly! See you next week!
- Valentin counseled Willow that she could best help Nina by making herself "indispensable to the WSB," and she followed his advice by asking Baines what the Bureau needs from her in order to secure her mother's release. This happened on Monday, with zero follow-up
- Cody counseled Danny to get around Drew by treating him like a donkey
- Isaiah and Britt bonded over living through trauma and trying to find a way forward
- Baines told Anna that she could stay and get treatment in Port Charles, provided she let the WSB review her therapist's notes and sign an NDA agreeing to keep quiet about Cullum's true role in the cold fusion fiasco
- Those scenes included some of the most unintentionally funny "recap for the casual viewer" dialogue that Steve Burton has had to utter in a long time
- While kissing in public, Rocco and Scout talked about the need to keep their relationship a secret
- Turner and Jordan ordered some suspiciously fancy cocktails at the Brown Dog
- Jordan saw Sonny and Turner kissing in the parking lot
- Per Carly's request, Molly got Scout to agree to keep her mouth shut about finding Charlotte in Drew's car
- Anna and Britt had a tearful conversation at the gym that ended with Anna acknowledging that Faison hurt Britt just like he hurt Anna
- The Pentonville warden has a niece who works at GH, which means Curtis is allowed to hold Desmond in full view of the "NO CONTACT" sign in the visiting area
- Trina agreed to continue singing for Simon, but officially fired Brook Lynn, which seemed to come as an absurd shock to Brook Lynn
- Yuri shared Belarusian proverbs with Tracy over backgammon
- Willow enlisted Ava to try and free Nina by finding Brennan; in response, Ava tried to make Willow suspicious of Carly
- Drew tried to hire Kai to come and work for him at Aurora, which raises all sorts of questions about whatever Drew's actual position at Aurora could possibly be
- Sidwell tried and failed to get Alexis to represent him, even after warning her that Sonny was out to kill him
- Sonny's "associate" Vito paid a visit to a Pentonville inmate who later led two other guys in a Sidwell beating — one that expanded into a Curtis beating when Curtis tried to put a stop to it
- Turner told Jordan that Sonny "just goes to my head like no other man has," leading us to wonder whether Turner has ever met or spoken with another man
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