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If your affliction is an addiction to drama that’s so great, you need a fix every day, we’ve got just the Rx for you: General Hospital. The longest-running soap on American television airs five days a week on ABC at 3/2c (in most markets). You can also stream episodes on Hulu.

What Is General Hospital About?

Set in Port Charles, NY, General Hospital follows the perilous lives of the locals, who are forever either hatching plots or falling victim to them. Though a good bit of the action swirls around the titular medical center’s doctors and nurses — among them head nurse and longtime heroine Elizabeth Webber (Rebecca Herbst)  — even more of the goings-on involve crime boss Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard), the roots of whose family tree run so deep, he has children with four different women. (Review who’s who in his expansive clan here.)

At any given time, danger could erupt on General Hospital. In just the last few years alone, Mayor Laura Collins (Genie Francis) discovered that her old pal Heather Webber (Alley Mills) was running around offing people as The Hook Killer, Laura’s husband Kevin’s twin brother Ryan Chamberlain (Jon Lindstrom) added a few stiffs to his body count, and an explosion at the Floating Rib eatery put Laura’s daughter Lulu in a coma. (That one was courtesy of one of the show’s many mobsters.)

What Are the Stories Like?

Anything can happen on General Hospital. Back in the days of Laura and Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary), the former couple tried to stop a mad plan to freeze the world. An alien from the planet Lumina once made himself at home in Port Charles. And OK, so characters come back from the dead as often as they leave the room and return to it. In 2024, Sonny’s right-hand man Jason Morgan (Steve Burton) rose from the grave for a second time.

Despite how it may sound, most of the storylines on General Hospital are pretty down to earth, dealing with family dysfunction and high-stakes face-offs. A good time is always had when viewers pay a visit to the Quartermaines, a bunch of anything-but-poor relations that are as wealthy as they are quarrelsome. Metro Court hotelier Carly Spencer (Laura Wright) has a uniquely in-your-face way of dealing with former spouse Sonny and her kids. And Dr. Portia Robinson (Brook Kerr) desperately wants to believe that there is room in unsafe Port Charles for her sweet daughter Trina (Tabyana Ali).

Who Is in General Hospital?

Whether you’ve ever watched a daytime drama, you’ll recognize a lot of familiar faces on General Hospital. Kelly Monaco, who plays adventuresome mom Sam McCall, won the very first season of Dancing With the Stars. James Patrick Stuart, who plays conniving Valentin Cassadine, has appeared on everything from Seinfeld to Frasier. And Finola Hughes, who plays police chief Anna Devane, recurred for years on Charmed as the Halliwell sisters’ mom, Patty.

General Hospital is also a launchpad for the superstars of tomorrow. Back in the 1980s, it started the careers of such future Very Big Deals as Demi Moore, Rick Springfield, John Stamos and When Calls the Heart mainstay Jack Wagner. In 2024, the news broke that another actor was about to become a household name: Nicholas Alexander Chavez exited his role of Spencer Cassadine after being cast in Season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s acclaimed Monster anthology series.

What If I Miss an Episode?

Don’t worry. If your DVR is having “one of those days” and forgets to record. You can always catch the episode you missed on Hulu. And for what it’s worth, Soaps.com recaps every single episode like clockwork and, at the end of each week, does a deep dive into all the twists of plot in our Soapbox column.