God bless Twitter.
Apparently, thanks to a loose-lipped (or would that be loose-fingered) soap star, major news hit the twitterverse this afternoon… and it could give fans who’ve been fretting about Katie Couric’s much ballyhooed new show killing GENERAL HOSPITAL a ray of hope.
Robin Strasser — who plays ONE LIFE TO LIVE’s divalicious Dorian — sent out a tweet reading, in part, “Ron Carlivati to GH as script writer – hopes 2 b co-headwriter?”
For those not in the know, that translates into: Ron Carlivati, the current headwriter of OLTL, will apparently be heading over to sister soap GH and joining their writing staff. Recently, GH ousted controversial headwriter Bob Guza, replacing him with relative unknown Garin Wolf.
Not long after, several sources confirmed the news, adding that Carlivati — whose current soap will last air in January of 2012 — would continue writing OLTL until the end. What was unclear was whether he’d join GH after OLTL wrapped or perhaps pull double-duty.
Fans had mixed reactions to the news, with some looking forward to Carlivati — whose work on OLTL has been widely praised — and others assuming that the scribe might be joining the Port Charles-set sudser in order to pen its final months.
Why, one might ask, would fans jump to so pessimistic a conclusion?
Because experience has taught them to be wary of supposedly “good” news coming out of ABC regarding soaps.
Earlier this year, ABC’s PR department made a big show of announcing that Lorraine Broderick had been hired as the new headwriter of ALL MY CHILDREN… only to several weeks later announce that both that show and OLTL had been canceled and would be replaced by two reality offerings, THE CHEW and THE REVOLUTION. Last week, ABC trumpeted the news that Katie Couric would be joining the ABC daytime line-up with a new show that would, as of September 2012, bump GH out of it’s longtime 3 p.m. perch. Asked what this meant for the future, the network said that when the time came, they would “consider all their options.”
For now, many are cautiously optimistic that Wolf and Carlivati might be able to right the deeply troubled ship that is GH, which, as of January, will be able to rebrand itself, sadly, as ABC’s last, best hope at not completely obliterating what was, until this year, a decades-long legacy. 