We realize that many current General Hospital viewers weren’t watching the show the last time Dr. Jeff Webber was a regular. But for those of us who were avid fans as far back as the late 1970s/early 1980s, we truly had no idea who this guy answering by his name is supposed to be. And, no, not because it’s a recast.
We’re soap fans. We can do recasts. Alley Mills, for instance, is killing it as Heather Webber. And even Genie Francis wasn’t the first actress to play Laura Webber Baldwin Spencer Collins. We get recasts. What we don’t get is personality transplants. Or, at least, we don’t like them.
Back when Jeff was played by a pre-MacGyver/pre-Stargate Richard Dean Anderson, Jeff was a sweet, loving, upstanding guy. Yes, he and Monica Quartermaine (Leslie Charleson) were divorced, but it wasn’t acrimonious. (The fact that she was in love with his brother, Rick Webber, may have had something to do with the marriage ending).
Yes, he’d had an affair with Heather and broke up before knowing she was pregnant with his child. But that wasn’t his fault. When Heather did finally get around to telling Jeff, lying that the baby had died and not mentioning that she’d actually sold him on the black market, Jeff felt so guilty that he even considered getting back together with Heather.
But then she tried to drug their son, Steven Lars, then known as PJ Taylor’s, then adoptive mother, Diana Taylor, when she accidentally drank the LSD herself and ended up in a mental institution. Good guy Jeff still kept visiting Heather. Though he didn’t notice that she would periodically sneak out at night and, once even tried to murder Diana. But that’s the kind of sweet, trusting guy Jeff was!
And while Heather was scheming to get both Jeff and PJ back, Jeff was in love with one Annie Logan (Susan Pratt). Annie loved Jeff, too. But she was a virgin and intended to remain so until she and Jeff got married. So what did Jeff do? He took a lot of cold showers, that’s what Jeff did. Because, again, that’s Jeff!
Now, one could speculate that Jeff was so frustrated by Annie keeping him at bay that he snapped and decided that, from then on, he would sleep with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
That’s the only way we can explain this version of Jeff (Billy Moses). He cheated on his wife with Hayden’s mother. He cheated on his wife with Reiko. And he gaslit Elizabeth Webber Baldwin (Rebecca Herbst) about seeing them together and killing the woman for literally decades. Not my Jeff. So not my Jeff. Bring back my Jeff!
General Hospital airs weekdays on ABC. For an in-depth look at the show’s history, click here.
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