If you don't want to hear about my total disgust and disappointment where General Hospital is concerned, stop reading now. Don't say I didn't warn you! If you want to remain entirely speculation-free, stop reading now. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Okay, so I checked out a solid week of GH last week because this was supposed to be the great climax to the S&C storyline: great outpourings of grief and guilt, a "shocking" twist to the ridiculously predictable, Emmy reels out the ying-yang. And yeah, just as I predicted at least three weeks ago, it turned out to be so absurdly BAD that it's almost embarrassing to admit to ever having been a General Hospital fan. It was bad enough that GH was overflowing with bad dialogue and hammy acting; it was even WORSE than you could smell the stench of gimmickry and falseness from a while away. But the real insult to GH was that it had the utter misfortune of following both All My Children and One Life To Live -- both of which blew GH so far out of the water that it may take the danged show 20 years to land.

First, a couple of words about OLTL. It's not a show I watch, though I'm vaguely familiar enough with the characters to have some sense of what the show is about. When I heard they were going to do a week of live shows, I'll admit that I smelled a gimmick -- and it WAS a gimmick! But it was a gimmick that worked. It didn't matter that I couldn't really keep up with who was who and what was what and why people were crying and/or scheming -- it was the pure excitement of seeing actors doing it LIVE that I found so danged compelling! Get it right or you're screwed! I loved the fact that some of the actors were visibly nervous; I loved the fact that you could SEE who the consummate professionals were. And the week of live shows reeled me in JUST ENOUGH to make me check out this week's shows, just to see what happens.

That said, it was AMC that really blew me away. The past week was right on target in every possible way. The writing was perfect, the performances were all right on the mark, the heartstring-tugging that the writers did was just enough but not TOO much, the emotional impact of Dixie Martin's death on the residents of Pine Valley was neither overplayed NOR underscored.

If you made the mistake of watching AMC before you watched GH, boy, I feel for you. I taped both shows and usually I watch GH first since it takes less time to rewind to the beginning of THAT show than AMC, but last week I went for AMC first. BIG mistake. Oh man, big, BIG mistake!

Now, you'd have to blind as a bat not to see the similarities in both GH's and AMC's central storyline: young woman drives herself off a cliff. Both women leave behind a child. Both women leave behind an ex-husband with whom they wanted to reconcile. I mean, if there's a blueprint for these things, both AMC and GH shared it. But instead of laughing at the similarities of both storylines, I was honestly left wondering why the heck it WORKED SO WELL on AMC while GH blew it completely. Again.

I don't like Carly Corinthos, and that's no secret. As for Dixie Martin, well, I've alternately liked and loathed her and certainly wasn't going to shed any tears if she died. I didn't go into either show really giving a crap that either of these two women would be "dying." I pretty well knew GH wouldn't live up to even my lowest expectations, since the show has been almost unwatchable for MONTHS now and there was no way on earth I was going to believe that GH was going to be able to live up to the intense hype that preceded last week's episodes. I didn't know WHAT to expect from AMC at all. The show can be brilliant, but I wasn't sure how they'd handle a sudden, tragic death. It could have gone either way: overly emotional (and therefore cheesy) OR it could have been in perfect pitch.

Well, as indifferent as I was towards Dixie Martin, there I was -- literally sobbing into a Kleenex and trying not to sob too loudly lest my husband or one of our kids would come into the living room, point a finger at me and laugh in my face. But I cannot stress enough how flawlessly-written the episodes were.

Tad Martin sitting in the airplane, waiting to go to Zurich to reunite with a pregnant Dixie and bring her home to her troubled son, JR. Leafing excitedly through a baby name book and musing aloud about what they would name their unborn daughter.

Cut to his biological mother, Opal, on Brooke and Edmund's doorstep, sobbing. No mention yet of what happened, just the heavy, heavy hint of disaster.

Tad on the plane, ready for take off, his head full of hopes and dreams, and then Brooke standing there with an armed guard, not knowing how the hell to tell this man that Dixie and their unborn baby were dead. The news finally being broken to him, and the subtle changes in Tad's facial expression, his hand at one point absently taking the baby name book and tucking it out of sight.

If you thought it was impossible for someone to actually convey with his eyes the literal SOUND of a broken heart, you were wrong! Michael E Knight, whom I have always loved more for his comedy than his drama, was dead-on PERFECT. The shock on his face said more than a million tears ever could, and even his flashbacks to some of his and Dixie's sweeter moments didn't come across as heavy-handed pleas for our sympathy. "I just forgot every woman I've ever met in my life," Tad said upon seeing Dixie. 'Scuse me. Verklempt.

(It's an interesting aside that a lot of AMC fans were miffed that Brooke was going to be the one breaking the news to Tad, just as a lot of GH viewers were miffed that Alexis would be a part of Carly's "death." However, it's pretty interesting that, AFTER the show, a lot of AMC viewers were heaping praise on Julia Barr and saw how perfect it was FOR Brooke to be the one to break the news. I thought Barr was excellent, and she is an actress and Brooke is a character that I dislike with a white hot intensity you'd think I reserved only for certain GH cast members ;)

On GH, every single aspect about Carly's death rang false. If TPTB have been breaking their backs trying to get us to like Sonny and/or Carly and/or Sonny AND Carly as a couple, they went all out last week in trying to pimp sympathy for Carly, specifically. It would have been INFINITELY more honest for the writers to acknowledge the fact that (regardless of the actress portraying her), Carly was NOT well-liked and that the vast majority of Port Charlesians were probably throwing parties when they heard that she was dead.

Instead, TPTB took the predictably dishonest route, cramming person after person in Bobbie Spencer's house, every last citizen determined to find Carly because suddenly, they cared. And I'm sure TPTB were hoping that just as suddenly, WE would care. The truth of the matter is that if you didn't like Carly BEFORE she pulled a Toonces, you didn't like her any more AFTER she pulled a Toonces. The deliberate and unashamed pimping for our sympathy was hollow on the day Sonny learned that Carly was missing; it was downright irritating on the day of her funeral, when she showed up with freshly-crimped hair and a bruise on her head to ask what the heck everyone was doing at the church.

What's worse, that Carly was NOT DEAD was probably the worst-hidden secret in daytime history. If you didn't read it through scoops and spoilers, you sure as hell figured it out the very second she peeked in on Alexis and Sonny and dropped Michael's birthday card on the floor on her way over to Zander's for a revenge fuck. The whole scenario SCREAMED of dishonesty, yet TPTB spent the next week or so trying to convince us that what Carly saw was horribly unfair and that dagnabbit, we should FEEL for this poor woman yet once again, if you weren't a Carly fan BEFORE the show, this crap pretty well accomplished nothing but to INTENSIFY your dislike for her. No tears or lumps in the throat for non-Carly fans. We were left with more of a question mark hovering over our heads: tell me again WHY I'm supposed to care that she's gone?

Second key difference: AMC has always known how to write for teens and children, whereas GH has shown a particular ineptitude in this department. Nowhere was this clearer than in the reaction to Carly's death. First, we have the younger characters of Lucky and Sarah sobbing over Carly's death one moment and then shoving their tongues down one another's throat in the next: "It's tragic!" "Kiss me again, you fool!"

We had NuMaxie (who gets increasingly irritating as time goes on) using Carly's disappearance as an opportunity to get close enough to Lucky to MAYBE get some of his cologne to rub off on her denim jacket.

We had Nikolas breaking open the Cassadine piggy bank to get more people to dive into the water and search for Carly. Why? I mean, I get that suddenly EVERYONE in Port Charles was supposed to love Carly and want her back, but there were some people involved in the storyline whose sympathy and concern seemed ESPECIALLY out of place. Nik's was probably the most glaring.

Most outrageous of all was the conversation between Bobbie and Sonny, discussing when and how they should inform Mikey that his mother was dead. She's been gone all this time, she's ready for burial and you still haven't told the kid?? Bobbie's line about sending him to the park with Leticia on the day of Carly's freaking FUNERAL was laughable. It was one of those moments where you wish you had a direct line to the idiots in charge of this show so you could buzz them up and say, "Listen, why don't you just get this over with: have Jacklyn Zeman and Maurice Benard cut the crap and just say the lines, 'Let's not tell Mikey that Carly is dead since she's back from her hiatus tomorrow.'"

ANY SCENE INVOLVING A CHILD AND HIS DEAD MOTHER SHOULD BE A GUARANTEED TEAR JERKER AND GENERAL HOSPITAL EVEN FUCKED *THAT* ONE UP! Amazing!

Compare this to Adam Chandler breaking the news of Dixie's death to JR, who has had a troubled past and believed his mother was the only one who wholly and truly accepted him for who he was. I didn't care much for Jonathan Bennett when he came on as the JR recast but I have to give the guy his props: his reaction to the news was PAINFUL and went right to the heart!

All the years of anger and frustration and pain and hatred came rushing to the surface as he reminded Adam of every horrible thing he ever did to Dixie and how he treated her as worthy to bear his child but NEVER worthy of anything else. Adam standing there, helpless, telling his son that he would give his life to bring Dixie back, only to have JR yell at him, "I don't want YOUR LIFE! I want my Mom!" before dissolving into tears and heartbreak. Even the hug that JR and Adam shared at the end of those scenes didn't seem forced or strange: JR needed to be held, and Adam was the only one there to offer his arms. It was a really wonderful scene and if that wasn't good enough, AMC did NOT back away from JR's drug problem. The show included a scene between JR and his sister, Hayley, discussing how good it would feel -- albeit temporarily -- for him to get high and forget his pain for a while. And yet it didn't sound like a PSA stuck in the middle of a show. It was real. It was genuine. It felt RIGHT.

But I think the key difference between the way AMC and GH handled such similar storylines is the acting. There was such a hollow, empty vibe to everyone's performances on GH. You could almost HEAR them saying, "Listen, I don't want to overdo this cuz we all KNOW Carly's coming back on Friday." At times, it almost looked like they were visibly embarrassed by the gimmickry and predictability of the scenario.

Listen, despite the oh-so-obviously-FAKE rumors that Tamara Braun might not be returning, we all danged well knew she was coming back. The intense hype that preceded the "death" storyline made a joke of it before it even happened. "Guess who's going to show up at the funeral??" Gee ... (adopting my best Church Lady voice) could it be CARLY?

Cady McClain, the actress who portrays Dixie, always leaves an IN when she decides to leave the show. Anyone who watches AMC knows that. Therefore, the possibility that Dixie isn't really dead but just in hiding somewhere is very real.

But despite the inevitability of Tamara's return and the possibility of Cady's EVENTUAL return, the scripts should not reek and stink of a door being left open. AMC played Dixie's death for real. AMC treated it like the end of the world that it was to Tad, to JR, and to David. GH, on the other hand, treated it for exactly what it was: an actress on a brief hiatus whose character had to be temporarily written out. And because of that, the actors played the scenes that way: as people twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Tamara and Carly to come back.

(Forget that TPTB could have used her absence as a chance to develop OTHER storylines involving OTHER characters. They're not that smart. Even in her absence, they continued to hype and push the inevitable S&C reunion for all it was worth).

And while the storylines began at the same time, only NOW is Dixie's memorial service being held. Contrast that to GH, where in the same amount of time, Carly went over a cliff, had her body identified, had a funeral, stayed at the hospital and already showed up at Sonny's penthouse. It's laughable -- not just because it reeks of rushing things, but because GH is playing this as real DRAMA. Yep, the utter predictability that's unfolding before our eyes? We're not supposed to chuckle and laugh at it. We're supposed to be moved and overcome with emotion.

Shyeah. Right.

So if you want to see a really GREAT episode of General Hospital, head on over to All My Children and scoop out a few episodes. If you want to see "Is she or isn't she dead?" done properly, head on over to AMC. If you want solid performances, phenomenal cast integration and honesty in writing, head on over to AMC.