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The Sonny and Alexis Factor
By SonnyandAlexisGal, 6/15/03
So there I sat, watching one of my many (many) Sonny and Alexis edit tapes, marveling all over again at how right together Sonny and Alexis seemed. But why was that - exactly?
Sonny was a dangerous, honorable, incredibly complicated man. He was a mobster. He had been an abused child. His business dealings often came into direct conflict with his huge heart. His distaste for violent solutions always left him or someone he loved vulnerable to those with no such reluctance in that area. And, whenever he tried love, he would be happy for a brief moment before his heart would be dashed to bits once again. In short, this was a richly-layered character, brought to life by a richly-layered actor named Maurice Benard.
Alexis was something of an enigma. When she first showed up in Port Charles, it was basically as the right hand to Stefan Cassadine, the latest dark lord in a long line of Cassadine dark lords. His “cousin” Alexis was the legal eagle – someone so professional and so on top of her game that she could easily intimidate the weak in her path and intrigue those who weren’t. She could feel uneasy about a deception on the one hand and then scheme to perpetrate one on the other hand. When she pulled herself away from her megalomaniacal family, she walked the straight and narrow – at least as far as she could as a practicing criminal attorney. Love wasn’t an easy thing for her, either. She loved Ned Ashton but instinctively resisted his attempts to dominate her life. She could be arrogant and cruelly opinionated and short with people. She could be kind and incredibly generous. To put it succinctly, here was another three-dimensional character, portrayed by one of the few actresses around with the ability to bring all of those dimensions to life – namely the wonderful Nancy Lee Grahn.
Someone at GH had the foresight a few years ago to bring these two characters onto the same playing field and what a good move that was. In Alexis, Sonny met a woman who wasn’t afraid of him. She held him to a certain standard of behavior and, instead of resisting her expectations of him, he enjoyed living up to them, respecting her all the more because of those expectations – because of what she saw in him that most people wouldn’t bother to look close enough to see in him. In Sonny, Alexis met a man who was every bit as complicated as any man she had ever dealt with – a man who constantly challenged her. But his reputation belied the inherent humanity inside. He could be explosive and selfish and dangerous but, at the same time, he was as warm and caring and as loyal as anyone she’d ever met.
Over time, they came to not only rely on each other’s wise counsel. They came to trust and care deeply for each other. Alexis became one of the best friends that Sonny has ever had – someone who wasn’t afraid to tell him the truth about himself – someone who expected him to do better – someone who watched out for him even when he couldn’t do it for himself. Sonny became the person to whom Alexis could lay her soul bare – someone who could watch her hyperventilate or melt down or pass out and still respect her afterward - knowing that he would listen to her and accept her and understand her in a way that no one else ever had.
You see, it’s all about their relationship, isn’t it – how it began and how it matured and how it changed them both – decidedly for the better. I don’t know about you but that’s the kind of stuff that I want to see on my soaps – relationships aka two people relating to each other. No other medium – not feature length film, not episodic television - can match daytime’s effectiveness at telling these kinds of stories – stories that allow us to really connect with the characters involved – stories that allow us to be flies on the wall, if you will – watching as events and the resultant feelings slowly unfold right before our very eyes.
And all of my favorite soap couples happened as a result of this kind of storytelling. It may be too slow-moving for some but, as far as I’m concerned, it is the ONLY way to fly – especially in a medium where you are allotted the time to tell the story slowly rather than in a slapdash manner. Two characters cannot just be arbitrarily pronounced the next super-couple, dropped into scenes together, made to jump into bed, look into each other’s eyes, wax poetically about how much in love they are, expecting the audience to just go along for the ride. I, for one, have to feel it or I’m not interested. That’s why I have absolutely nothing invested in and couldn't care less about Jason and Courtney, Sonny and Carly, Alexis and Ned, Alexis and Cameron, Ric and Elizabeth and dozens of other soap couples who’ve been manufactured and placed in front of me day in and day out – couples that I saw coming right from the gate.
Some of you may recall that Laura was married to Scotty when she fell in love with Luke. Their love story wasn’t thrown together over the course of a telephone conversation or a cup of coffee and a danish or a peek at Nielsen or Arbitron ratings. It wasn’t put into place because the two actors involved had been popular on another soap, at another time – as other characters - and so it was assumed that they would be just as popular in their current personas. It was so unexpectedly powerful and such a fan favorite that even his brutal assault of her was re-worked and swept aside so that the two characters could become a couple just to capitalize on the whatever-it-was that sparkled so brilliantly between them. It was something that was wisely allowed the breathing room it needed to make its mark. And it did.
That’s what appeals about Sonny and Alexis - the unexpectedness of it all. On the surface, who would ever have thought of Sonny and Alexis together? But, when it happened, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Maurice/Sonny and Nancy/Alexis had chemistry to burn. It was there on our television screens. When they were in a scene together, everyone else faded from view. All we could think about was the two of them. As performers, Maurice and Nancy set the bar way up high and challenged each other to reach it again and again – and reach it they did. As characters, Sonny and Alexis did the very same thing and the result was a soap opera goldmine!
Was it necessary to pull Sonny and Alexis apart after their Night in PH4? Well, for the current GH headwriters, it was but that was only because they didn’t have the depth to see anything that wasn’t right in front of them – anything that wasn’t locked away in a drawer full of old GH scripts. They swooped in like vultures and decided to do what was easy and didn’t require much in the way of imagination - a quick hit. They decided to re-visit the tale of the mobster and the wild and wanton girl-child - you know – the story that we saw first and WAY, WAY, WAY better with Sonny and Brenda. In order to make it happen with Sonny and Carly, though, they had to strip Sonny of many of the characteristics that made him someone that we respected even when we didn’t like what he was doing. They had to strip away his sense of fairness. They had to strip away his sense of honor. They had to strip away his pride. They had to strip away his loyalty. They had to strip away a great deal of his instinct and his power. The only way to get Sonny and Carly together was to let his baser impulses have control over his better ones. Presto! Chango! Poof! There you have it – Sonny and Carly!
And to get him away from Alexis, they had to rob her of many of the traits that made her such a well-rounded character. She had to begin to listen to what she was being told rather than what she knew in her own heart to be true. She had to lose her self-confidence. She had to do what attorneys cannot afford to do – to leap to judgment before considering all of the facts of a case. Worst of all, she had to lose her fiercely guarded independence and become the typical helpless soap female who can only find her way because of some man in her life.
And then to ensure that GH viewers would be held captive by the pairing of choice, those in charge had to see to it that Sonny and Alexis became enemies. In this way, they could be prevented from ever appearing in scenes together. In this way, no one would be able to see how potent their chemistry truly was while the characters around them faded into the wallpaper the way they always did when the two heavyweights were onscreen together.
Look, let’s face it. Sonny and Alexis would never have been the ‘happily-ever-after’ kind of couple. They’re just not made that way. Theirs would always have been a seesaw style, roller coaster ride of a relationship. He would do things that she would never approve of. He would keep things about his business from her that would infuriate her to find out about. Stefan might have come back into the picture, asking her to do things that Sonny would neither have approved of nor understood. Let’s not forget - at their core, we’re talking about a mob boss and an officer of the court. Their relationship would always smack up against those two roles. Add one part Cassadine intrigue and multiple parts their daughter Kristina to the mix and we would have the makings of one hell of a saga. It would be a union of soaring peaks and hard-to-navigate valleys and any and everything that falls in between. And their core friendship, mutual trust, and respect would be thing that would see them through.
And I don’t need validation from anyone else – not Nancy and not Maurice – to feel justified in this opinion. While swarms and swarms of folks believing as I do is certainly nice, it is most definitely not required for this GH viewer to know what’s true for me. All I have to know is that I saw it. It was real. I felt it and I want to see and feel more of the same. That’s enough for me – all I need to keep going!
What has robbed us of the Sonny and Alexis story, you ask? Why, the GH headwriters, that’s who – Guza and Pratt. It is they and they alone who have dragged us (in many cases, kicking and screaming) down memory lane – back to a time on GH that many of us didn’t want to experience the first time around – a time that many of us refuse to experience now. Actors are actors and – regardless of how good they may be as performers – they are essentially powerless without a good story. As Maurice himself said, “if it's not on the page, it's not on the stage.” It is the STORY that's key!
That’s what’s needed on GH – a good story. I propose the story of Sonny Corinthos and Alexis Davis and their baby daughter -
The greatest story that’s STILL waiting to be told!
