Why Soap Opera Lightening Rarely Strikes Twice – Especially on General Hospital

News that Lane Davies is returning to General Hospital — again — to be paired with Nancy Lee Grahn presumably — again, prompted fans to remember other times when a show attempted to reunite a super-popular couple from another soap…with less than stellar results. Here’s a history lesson from GH…and the rest of the daytime dial.

You Take Me Away To Another World

In 1975, there was no hotter couple on daytime television than Another World’s Steve and Alice. After surviving AW’s definitive love triangle of Steve/Alice/Rachel, the newly married couple was finally blissfully happy, even going so far as planning to adopt little ten-year-old orphan Sally. Alas, it was not to be. While on a business trip to Australia, Steve’s plane went down, and he was presumed dead.

The on-screen cause of Steve’s death may have been bad tailwinds, but the off-screen reason was an ongoing feud between actor George Reinhol and AW’s Headwriter Harding Lemay. When Lemay and Executive Producer Paul Rauch butted heads with Reinholt over their different takes on the character, Reinholt was fired. A few months later, his love interest, actress Jacqueline Courtney, was recast. Lemay and Rauch didn’t like how she played the good girl who’d been one-third of driving the show to the top of the ratings.

Cause We Only Have One Life To Live

Almost immediately, One Life to Live swept in to hire both actors, creating the characters of star-crossed lovers Tony Lord and Pat Ashley Kendall in the hope that lightning would strike again and the duo would become as big of a sensation in Llanview as they had been in Bay City.

They did not.

Reinholt left OLTL within two years, and though Courtney stayed on for over a decade, eventually even going to head with her former Rachel, Robin Strasser (Dorian), the re-pairing was a definite bust.

Around the Dial

Since then, Debbie Morgan and Darnell Williams (Angie and Jesse on All My Children, Angie and Jacob on The City), Laura Wright and Paul Anthony Stewart (Ally and Casey on Loving, Cassie and Danny on Guiding Light), and Beth Ehlers and Ricky Paull Goldin (Harley and Gus on GL, Taylor and Jake on AMC) couldn’t recapture their old magic when transferred from one show to another.

Dead on Arrival

GH hoped to strike gold when they re-teamed Days of Our Lives Kayla (Mary Beth Evans) and Steve (Stephen Nichols) as Katherine and Stefan. Both characters were very, very different from the people they’d been in Salem, which might have accounted for the pair, while not matching their earlier success, at least providing a relatively popular alternative.

On the other hand, when former Santa Barbara super-couple Julia and Mason were resurrected as Alexis and Cameron, they were…pretty much the same people. Alexis was even a lawyer and a feminist and a terrific enabler of toxic men — just like Julia. Alexis and Cameron squabbled. Alexis and Cameron bantered. And, in the end, Alexis and Cameron failed to make many fans care.

We don’t know what Davies’ character will be like this time around (find out this unexpected price tag for Davies working with Grahn). But Alexis is still Alexis — even more so. New head writer Patrick Mulcahey wrote some of Mason and Julia’s most memorable scenes. Will he try to recreate the dynamic that succeeded once…and failed once? Or will he try something completely different? Guess we’ll have to wait and see!