And why an A-list star would agree to be on it.

This Friday, James Franco begins appearing on General Hospital, a casting stunt that’s attracted more attention to the long-running soap opera than anything since Elizabeth Taylor slapped on a turban and cursed Luke and Laura’s nuptials in 1981. Franco (Milk, Pineapple Express, Spider-Man, a number of charming, self-skewering Web videos) has been extremely vague and mysterious about what he, a talented, up and coming, A-list actor is doing slumming it on daytime, revealing only that it has something to do with a “performance art” film he’s making. Asked why he had chosen General Hospital over the six other serials still on the air, Franco replied, “I really don't know the difference between [soap operas]. The one difference is that General Hospital has developed this whole organized-crime thread.”

Despite its title, General Hospital is no longer a show about doctors, nurses, and their love affairs. It is a show about gangsters, gun molls, and their love affairs. Franco’s character (cleverly named … Franco), will be another one of these thugs, as the ABC trailer promoting his appearance makes abundantly clear, introducing him as an “artist whose canvas is murder,” and as a man so dangerous, “no one is safe, not even an expert killer.”

The number of people who know, let alone care, that General Hospital has become a show about the mob dwindles every day. When Luke and Laura were married almost three decades ago, 30 million people tuned in. Today, the show’s audience hovers between 2 million and 3 million. (This is not particular to GH—all soaps have seen dramatic declines in viewership.) As they have become increasingly marginalized, soaps have become weirder and more particular, like some species left to mutate on the Galapagos, maintaining vestigial elements no longer seen on mainland television. Sometimes the diminished status creates something socially useful. In 2007, Luke and Laura’s daughter Lulu had an abortion, to little fanfare, something that just about can’t happen on prime-time these days. Mostly, however, GH has taken advantage of the lack of audience to create a lawless, backwards universe, where killers are heroes and children are praised for bludgeoning their stepmothers to death.

Of course, it’s a daytime soap’s prerogative to create cheap, outrageous, morally dubious plot lines. General Hospital, on the air since 1963, has done it all: amnesia, long-lost twins, and dead people coming back to life. The mob has played a part on GH since the late ‘70s, but for more than 20 years it was held in check by do-gooder citizens more worried about an evil weather machine threatening to freeze over their city than about drive-by shootings. But for the last decade, Port Charles, where GH takes place, has been overrun by gangsters, becoming a stomping ground for firefights, hostage crises, and serial killers. Two years ago, two female characters who had been on the show since they were children were brutally murdered by a serial killer, the psycho son of a mob boss; this year, the 11-year old son of another mob boss was shot in the head by a sniper. It’s safe to say GH has become the most morally confused, violent show on television.

Since the mid ’90s, the series has revolved around two mobsters, Sonny Corinthos and Jason Morgan, who are like the Pacino and De Niro of Soapland, which is just as dubious a distinction as it sounds. Corinthos, played with a mannered intensity by Emmy-winner Maurice Benard, was introduced in 1993 as a shady, connected, two-bit strip club owner. He has since acquired an empire. From the beginning, Sonny’s life involved violence—early on, his girlfriend was shot in the shower by his enemies—but it didn’t get really serious until 1996 when his pregnant wife, the daughter of a rival Mafioso, was blown up by a car bomb right in front of him. (This car bombing is infamous in the soap world for being intercut with the marriage of Sonny’s true love to another man, thus launching GH’s last great love triangle.)

Since then, the manic-depressive Sonny has done many untoward things, including shooting the mother of his child in the head while she was in labor. (It was an accident, insofar as he was trying to shoot someone else). He frequently screams at his minions to murder people, like, five minutes ago. This week he threatened his ex-wife’s husband’s life, growling “You should thank [your wife], that's the only reason I've tolerated you.” Last week he told his son, “You did good,” which would be sweet, except he was soothing the remorseless teenager for killing his stepmother with an ax handle, after it was revealed that she had been responsible for putting a coma-inducing bullet in his brain. For the record, we are supposed to like this guy.

We are supposed to like Jason Morgan, the “expert killer” mentioned in the James Franco promo, even more. Jason is Sonny’s “enforcer” and has been since 1995 when he woke up from a coma with no memory of his former life as a nice wannabe doctor. He has since killed a lot of people while wearing a leather jacket, and, on occasion, we have seen him do it, or at least seen his eye in the rifle sights. Played by the hulking Steve Burton, Jason doesn’t say much, often looks like he’s smelled something bad, and always carries a loaded glock. He doesn’t quite revel in killing people, but he doesn’t stop doing it either. And within the moral code of the show, we’re supposed to admire him for not feeling gleeful about murder. “You do what you do out of loyalty to Sonny,” soothes one of Jason’s many fans. That and a nickel should get him 25-to-life, but instead it has earned him the admiration of just about every character on the show.

To be clear, these two mobsters are not the show’s villains, or even its anti-heroes: They are just its heroes. They are the most glamorous, admirable, lusted after, manly men in town. The show signals this by giving them some ameliorating qualities to balance out all the bloodshed. They refuse to deal drugs. Sonny has donated millions of dollars to the hospital. They ran a nice coffee shop until it burned to the ground. (Coffee is the “legitimate” front to their business.) Jason is really nice to all his girlfriends. (Even the one who lost her uterus because she was shot in his arms by a bullet intended for him.) In Port Charles, when there’s a hostage situation, a kidnapping or the outbreak of a deadly virus, you don’t call the cops, unless you want some ineffectual idiots to get in the way—you call Sonny and Jason.

GH has taken these morally complex, if not bankrupt, characters and insisted, over and over again, that they’re the good guys. It’s as if The Sopranos wanted you to know all of the terrible things that Tony did and not only be interested in him, but have exclusively warm fuzzy feelings for him. This tall order is mocked on the General Hospital message boards by posters who refer to Jason as St. Jasus, a jab at the show’s continued insistence that Jason’s just a big-hearted, thoughtful sweetheart who rarely does wrong, even though he refuses to quit killing people for a living.

To make this swill go down easier, GH ensures that most of the people they kill are nobodies or evil somebodies, not beloved characters worth the trouble of reanimating. Also working in Sonny and Jason’s favor is that fact that in soap-opera land, no one is ever definitively dead. It would be a lot easier to like Tony Soprano if, for instance, that time he had Adrianna capped, you knew she might turn up in a year or two. Death means something a whole lot less final in an alternate universe where any body, even if you’ve seen it buried, can start breathing again.

But the real reason GH gets away with all of this has to do with the strange morality of daytime TV. Like the daytime talk shows where audience members chide swingers for forsaking the nuclear family, soaps have a reputation for being conservative because the characters aren’t afraid to talk about “values.” Everyone always wants to stay together for the kids, men always want to do “the right thing,” motherhood is the most fulfilling thing a woman can do, every chick on the show has been imagining her wedding since she was a little girl and longs to be “taken care of,” and when things go pear-shaped, characters deliver soliloquies to God. Apparently, after almost 50 years of talking this talk, soaps can walk over and kill almost anyone, execution-style.

Soaps don’t live up to conservative or liberal values, just the devil’s. Any given character is pretty much guaranteed to be an adulterer, to have lied to the people that he or she loves most about something very important, to have been married and divorced multiple times. It would not be a surprise if he or she had killed someone, though likely in self-defense or a fit of crazy. Murder, blackmail, and rape are common. Luke raped Laura long before the two of them became the ultimate super-couple. An acquaintance of mine who was briefly hired to pen scripts on a soap was given a dense document explaining the various convoluted connections among characters. Children were denoted with an M, A, or R to indicate if they were a product of marriage, affair, or rape.

This is all to say, almost every character on a soap has done something unforgiveable. In this company, Sonny and Jason are not an order of magnitude, just many degrees more depraved than their neighbors. GH’s viewers, already, necessarily, in the habit of forgiving these people, cheaters, liars, and manipulators to a one, are expected to extend their mercy to unrepentant killers. Many of them can comply.

Given the soaps’ obvious weaknesses—mediocre production values, flat acting, and absurd, drawn out storylines—it requires a huge suspension of disbelief to enjoy them at all, far more than is required to watch even the most middling prime-time show. If you’re willing to buy it when a character you mourned comes back from the dead, or to stick it out when wannabe lovers exchange tortured glances for the 34th week in a row, or give it a chance when the actor playing a part changes from one day to the next, who can quibble about a hit man with a heart of gold?

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