You’d need more than 600 straight days to watch the longest-running series in television history, which has just reached yet another milestone

On April 1, 1963, General Hospital premiered on ABC, a half-hour American daily soap opera that is still running today, not only doubling its running time but spawning two spin-offs no one outside the United States has heard of. The series is a real institution in its country, and for good reason: it has just aired its 16,000th episode. And roughly speaking, it would take you almost two years without stopping to sleep or eat to watch the whole series. Hey, everyone spends their life on whatever they want.

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Kiss it better

Actually, the longest-running active series by years on the air would be the British Coronation Street, which began airing in 1960, but since it originally aired only twice a week it “only” has some 11,000 episodes. If you look at it very closely, there’s a German animated series that started out as puppets and airing different episodes in East and West Germany that, because of that quirk, tops 22,000 episodes (I’ve mentioned it before), but you’d have to add a lot of caveats.

In this 16,000th episode, the show’s team introduced a new character, Tristan Roberts, clearly based on a crew member who died in August of last year, actor Tristan Rogers, a tribute that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the soap opera’s viewers and fans. There are plenty of them.

The series made headlines this month because John Oliver, HBO Max‘s satirical host, played one of its villains after talking about soap operas on his brilliant show, Last Week Tonight and announcing that he wanted to appear in one. His character was absurd, his lines ridiculous and, despite it all, he treated it like the role of a lifetime, which is exactly how these roles should be played. After all, not everyone can say they’ve appeared in a series that would take you two years to binge from start to finish.