11,326

I sometimes wonder about things in idle moments. These things have absolutely no value other than curiosity. On and off again, I have wondered, for instance, how many episodes there are to a long-running soap opera. I always forget about it after a moment and never think to look it up.

Today, I remembered.

I looked up the number of episodes of the popular soap opera General Hospital (the only one I knew by name). It turns out that since it’s birth in 1963 there have been 11,326 episodes through June 18, 2007. That’s incredible of you consider that between April 1, 1963 and June 18, 2007 there have been 16,149 days. The show does not air on weekends, so if you subtract weekends out of that figure, there have been 11,535 possible days that the show could have aired. In all that time, it missed 209 possible slots for one reason or another. Percentage-wise, General Hospital has aired a new episode 98.2% of non-weekend days in the last 44 years.

I guess you get pretty good a memorizing scripts in that line of work.