You’ve got to love the slick promo and the voiceover guy touting GH’s Sonny and Dante meeting for the first time as family…and neglecting to also boom, “Sonny is a glorified copkiller.” I am, yet again, so freaking furious with this soap that I can barely keep from vibrating with anger.

I was going to start giving GH the benefit of the doubt. I really was. This week, I actually promised myself I would quit riding the powers-that-be so hard, because GH is just a soap and if I keep harping on it so relentlessly, I’ll develop an ulcer. It’s unhealthy, you know?

And the last half hour of the show blew my good intentions to hell. Pun completely intended.

Countless police officers are slain in the line of duty every year, and for GH to set up a confrontation between Dante and Sonny, where Dante is unarmed and Mirandizing him, and Sonny oh-so-dramatically pumps a bullet into him…is sick. It’s sick. Even if Dante wasn’t also his son, it would be a disgusting, senseless display. More so because not just Sonny, but GH itself, thinks the action is justified. The very narrative of this show is crafted to tell us that the mobsters are noble, and that Sonny will wriggle out of paying for this heinous crime like he’s wriggled out of so many others.

What kind of message is that? How do you continue to have men like Sonny and Jason set up as a show’s heroes after this? I think it’s easy to hand-wave it away when they talk about mysterious “shipments” and we see them posture about being mafiosos, but how do you come back from Sonny shooting a cop in the chest?

And my colleague Joe pointed out that Sonny was being arrested for a crime he didn’t even commit: Claudia’s murder. So there was no real threat to him in that instance. There was nothing to gain from taking aim at Dante. It was an act to salvage Sonny’s bruised pride after being betrayed, not an act of self-defense. And again, Dante was unarmed, trained not to draw on a suspect unless under extreme duress.

I was haunted when Dante hoped that Sonny’s kids never have to see him the way he was in that moment…because GH ensures that we see Sonny in these moments entirely too often. And insists that we see him as a sex symbol, too.

Last I checked, copkillers aren’t this country’s heroes. Why should they be heralded as such on our soaps?

Originally posted on soapoperaweekly.com