During its run from June 1997 to October 2003, the 30-minute General Hospital spinoff series Port Charles was a favorite of the critics, but never was the breakaway hit that ABC had longed for. In its attempt to fill the slot that belonged to The City and compete directly with The Young & the Restless, the ratings remained quite low. Attempts to spice the series up by switching the focus to gothic intrigue in the vein of Dark Shadows and switching to a telenovela-esque storytelling sequence of 13-week arcs or "books" that resolved quickly and moved on to the next, which helped cut cots and meant the actors would only work half the year. Yet, ABC judged the show too expensive to maintain, so the series ended on a cliffhanger.
Is there anyway the show could have survived? Did the decisions made along the way doom it from the start, should something different have been done at the outset, or was it a mere failure of nerve? Was this an example of what Roy E. Disney meant when he castigated Michael Eisner for not providing ABC with quality programming?
Is there anyway the show could have survived? Did the decisions made along the way doom it from the start, should something different have been done at the outset, or was it a mere failure of nerve? Was this an example of what Roy E. Disney meant when he castigated Michael Eisner for not providing ABC with quality programming?
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