The Glorious Spectacle of John Oliver on 'General Hospital'
The comedian, a soap fan, got the "juicy" role he always wanted, and TV viewers got a pop culture crossover for the ages.
Recent days have brought weary Americans a pop culture event they can all get behind.
I am not talking about the sparsely attended semiquincentennial festivities in the nation’s capitol, which should have been a unifying patriotic spectacle but were instead a humid dumpster fire marred by extreme heat, apocalyptic thunderstorms, and the president’s delusional blather.
Nor am I referring to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s much-hyped wedding, which was held Friday night at New York City’s most romantic basketball arena.
I am, in fact, talking about John Oliver’s guest appearance on General Hospital, a three-episode arc that began last week and saw the Emmy-winning TV satirist play a shadowy intelligence agent known only as “Z.” Sporting jet-black hair and a dark blue suit, Z first appeared in the final minutes of Thursday’s episode, arriving via helicopter with heavily armed guards at his side. He rushed to assist Josslyn Jacks (Eden McCoy), an agent for the World Security Bureau, freshly injured in a firefight. “Everything’s going to be ok,” he told her. “I’m here to help.”
Oliver’s unlikely journey to daytime TV began back in March, with a lighthearted segment on Last Week Tonight devoted to his love of soap operas. Though he had perhaps 10 minutes of screen time in total on General Hospital, Oliver got to do it all — even getting slapped across the face by Carly Spencer (played by Laura Wright). And, particularly for someone who has not trained as an actor and who spends most of his time on TV seated behind a desk, Oliver delivered a convincing performance as the enigmatic Z.
“General Hospital was everything I hoped it would be. It’s a true honor to be a small stain on the history of this illustrious show,” Oliver said in a press statement.
He even earned praise from his co-star. “A lot of times, people like to come on and make fun of what we do, and I’m not a big fan of that. Our job is as important as anyone else’s, and we don’t consider it a different type of acting or anything like that,” Wright told Variety. “So, I was so impressed with the writing that honored what he does well while also staying true to what we do, and how he showed up and delivered. It was incredible.”
Many celebrated actors, including Julianne Moore, Michael B. Jordan, and Brad Pitt, got their start in daytime TV. But the reverse scenario — big-time celebs doing soap opera cameos — has also been a thing for decades.
It arguably began with Elizabeth Taylor, who loved General Hospital so much that she reportedly called up the show’s producers and asked to create a role for her. At the height of the show’s popularity in the early ‘80s, she appeared in multiple episodes as the villainous Helena Cassadine, who crashed Luke and Laura’s wedding in 1981 (watched by 30 million people) and put a curse on the supercouple. At the time, movie stars of Taylor’s stature rarely deigned to do primetime TV, much less daytime. But a soap fan, no matter how wealthy or world-famous they might be, is still a soap fan. And, as Taylor said at the time, “I am wild about that show.” (You can watch some very charming outtakes from Taylor’s GH stint here.)
The best-known example from recent-ish history is James Franco, who also had a recurring role on General Hospital as “Franco,” a performance artist/serial killer. The Freaks and Geeks actor, then at the height of his fame, was trying to become Hollywood’s answer to Marina Abramović by consciously subverting his star persona.
As an A-lister appearing in the lowbrow world of daytime TV, “I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief,” Franco argued in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, “because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.”
Franco fully committed to the bit, appearing intermittently as “Franco” from 2009 to 2012, creating an exhibition of his character’s work for an episode of General Hospital that was taped at the Pacific Design Center in LA, and making an experimental documentary about the whole experience. (“Franco” the character even lived on after he left the show, and was finally written off GH in 2021.)
Oliver is clearly more interested in having a laugh (and maybe scoring a Daytime Emmy nomination) than a side hustle as a performance artist. In a segment on Last Week Tonight on March 8, Oliver declared his “genuine” love for soaps and confessed he was jealous of sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who has had a recurring role on General Hospital since 2016.
He argued that the genre — where a woman might be possessed by the devil, vanquish an enemy with a swarm of bees, or perish by falling into a volcano — is undeniably fun, making it a magnet for celebrity cameos. But Smith has done much more than a one-off appearance: The famously opinionated analyst has appeared in dozens of episodes as Brick, an associate of the Corinthos crime family.
“Over the last 10 years, he has car-bombed an enemy’s limo, tampered with evidence in a custody case [and] forged records to say that the Turkish orphan was actually a member of his boss’s family,” Oliver said, admitting he was jealous.
“I want to be part of that world. So, to all the soap operas out there, let me say this: I’m officially offering myself to you. Write me a role and I will be on your set so fast, it will make your head spin.”
Oliver laid out a few conditions: he wanted to play a character, not a version of himself, and he wanted the character to have a ridiculous name. Also, he added, “I want to do something juicy, like murder, or slapping, or being slapped, or being someone’s long-lost something, and ideally I’d like a dramatic close-up of my face.”
“Call me, soaps. I am available. I’m willing to travel, and I want this more than you can possibly understand,” he concluded.
Some people might wonder why Oliver, who has won a whopping 23 Emmys for his work on Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show, might bother appearing on General Hospital, the longest-running soap opera still airing on American TV.
Yet for all the praise he’s received for his brilliant topical comedy, Oliver also has a taste for the ridiculous and lowbrow. He is an avowed fan of Bravo and The Real Housewives, particularly the extra bonkers Salt Lake City incarnation of the reality franchise. (He once described the cast of RHOSLC as “the most ridiculous monsters on TV” — an accurate assessment.)
It’s also not hard to understand why a bit of campy escapism might appeal to Oliver, a man who spends many of his waking hours immersed in the news, trying to find funny ways to talk about grim subjects like congressional redistricting and the decimation of USAID. Even — perhaps especially — for someone with his keen intelligence, soap operas offer a respite from the banal horror of the headlines.
It’s fitting, if coincidental, that Oliver’s arc on General Hospital bookended this historic Independence Day, because the daytime soap opera is a distinctly American innovation, a highly addictive, heavily serialized narrative designed to sell consumer goods to a captive audience of homemakers. Originating on radio in the 1930s before moving to TV, the soap opera offered escape to millions of women (and some men) during dark periods like the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam. Soaps might not have the cultural reach they once did, but the genre’s anything-goes storytelling remains as irresistible as ever.
A world where literally any outcome is possible as long as someone can write it — what’s not to love about that?
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
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