With only a few months back on the job after the WGA writers’s strike last year, Chris Van Etten and Dan O’Connor are out as General Hospital’s head writers.
New General Hospital Head Writers Named
GH has named veteran soap writers Patrick Mulchahey and Elizabeth Korte to be the soap’s new head writing team. Both scribes have decades of soap writing experience, with Mulcahey writing for various past and current soaps, including Santa Barbara, Guiding Light, The Bold and the Beautiful, and of course, General Hospital. The last time Mulcahey worked for GH, he was an associate head writer from 1998-1999.
Mulchahey began his soap career in the 1970s on Search For Tomorrow before being moved to the short-lived Proctor and Gamble soap, Texas. A stint at Santa Barbara came next followed by a long career at B&B where he was a script writer and a story consultant until 2019.
Korte has been a member of the GH writing staff since 1994 and was even co-head writer for a brief time in 2001. In 2007, she worked with former GH scribe Bob Guza on creating the show’s spin-off series, General Hospital: Night Shift.
Another GH Writing Upheaval
After One Life to Live was canceled, Ron Carlivati moved over to GH as head writer, but lost that job in 2015 to Jean Passanante and Michelle Altman. When Passanante retired in 2017, Van Etten replaced her and was joined by O’Connor in 2019. Like Carlivati, who now heads up the writing team at Days of Our Lives, Van Etten and O’Connor were OLTL transplants. They joined GH with Executive Producer Frank Valentini in 2012.
What direction the show takes now remains to be seen, but many fans are hopeful that storylines that have not been working, including the Elizabeth Webber and Hamilton Finn pairing, will now be scrapped. Expect to see Van Etten and O’Connor’s scripts airing through March.
General Hospital airs weekdays on ABC. Check your local listings for times. Remember, you can always find the latest GH spoilers, recaps, and news on Facebook at General Hospital Daily. Also, meet fellow fans and talk all things GH with our Facebook community group.
