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For the 12 years he dazzled audiences as spy-turned-supersleuth Robert Scorpio, GENERAL HOSPITAL's Tristan Rogers was quietly proceeding with a "secret mission" of his own. Rogers was making mental notes and observations on the art of producing a successful soap along the way — lessons he hopes to put into practice today as he aspires to get a new soap he created produced.

According to Rogers, his soap would be set in the fast-paced, colorful worlds of the music and tabloid journalism industries, and would employ a lot revolutionary ideas in production as well as story. If this sounds like deja vu, that's because Rogers joined GH at a heady time, back in 1981. Then, GH's legendary former executive producer Gloria Monty rescued the show from cancellation and made it the highest-rated soap in under a year's time — and did so by modernizing the show (and ultimately, the entire genre) with innovative writing, directing, and production techniques that were revolutionary for their time. Two decades later, as the soap genre continues a protracted decline in the ratings, Rogers is aspiring to break new ground and revitalize the medium once again.

A year after Rogers left GH, enough time had passed for him to gain some perspective. "I turned my attention back to soap opera, looking at it for what it was, what I had accomplished in it, where soaps had come from, and in particular, why GENERAL HOSPITAL had been the success that it was — and why it really didn't last that long. No one ever really asks, 'What happened?' So I've sat down and really pieced together the events that brought about the rise of the show and the demise of the show: Why we didn't last as long as why we should have lasted (as No. 1). I discovered a lot of things about how it was put together, the changes that it brought about and why a lot of the changes were resisted by everybody else. We stuck out like a sore thumb back then because of what we were doing and I think everybody looked at the show and said well 'Yeah, that's great but it won't last — pretty soon things will come back to the way they were.' And people were largely correct on that.

"A lot of people look back at that [time] and go 'Oh, yeah, it was all about Luke and Laura!'" continues Rogers. "It wasn't Luke and Laura at all: They were the tip of the iceberg. It was about a whole series of things that came together. Basically, Luke and Laura personified what the work behind the scenes had been, and how they just got up there and broadcast all the hard work that had been done. But the show had a number of unique characteristics: It had a unique story management and structure, which to this day has not been emulated by anybody else. And GENERAL HOSPITAL was the only soap that employed a star structure, we had a star system on that show. Gloria set about doing that; it wasn't accidental, it was by design. All the other soaps, back then and today, employ a a cell system of story structure, where each story for the most part tends to be a self-contained little island. GENERAL HOSPITAL stories weren't like that. When I became the police commissioner, I was involved in everybody's story. I minded everybody's business. I also had my own specific story that I was involved with."

In Rogers' estimation, the magic formula that Monty concocted didn't last because subsequent producer and writer regimes tried to hard to make their own mark, instead of maintaining the status quo. "I felt that we had a successful system that Gloria had set up. What we really needed was a caretaker for that system." Instead, "Every time we got a new producer, they reinvented the wheel. They brought their own ideas onto the show and very subtly we moved away from what GENERAL HOSPITAL's unique signature was. And the one thing it had gobs of back then was style. This was one of the things that was on my mind when I started to sit down and [develop my own show]. I looked at the whole genre and realized it truly has so much going for it. People now are all tied up with reality television, but I don't think that's going to last. Reality television absorbs ideas at a ferocious rate; it just chews through concepts. You'll sit down and come up with ten concepts before you get one that'll work. When you get to that point, where else do you go? Reality television is almost exhausted with what it can do, so your faced with going back. "But most people really aren't interested in the next step for daytime soap opera," Rogers continues. "I think I'm the only person out there who looks upon the genre as the glass being half full and not half empty. I see a whole new beginning for the genre, where as most people have passed over it. I think once this new concept of putting a soap together that I've developed gets out there, it's going to change [people's cynical opinions] completely."