YMMV / Port Charles

• Cliché Storm: Ellen and Matt's relationship, which managed to display no less than five tropes—Black Gal on White Guy Drama, Tragically Disabled Love Interest (he's paralyzed), Likes Older Women (she's at least 10 years his senior), Teacher/Student Romance (he's an intern while she's an attending), and Defrosting Ice Queen.
• Nightmare Fuel: The entirety of the Tainted Love arc. While Time in a Bottle introduced the supernatural to the soap with the time-traveling elements, Tainted Love was more overtly fueled by horror, with Jack fighting his thirst as a fledgling vampire, and Caleb's obsession with Livvie.
• Retroactive Recognition: Chris was played by a young Nolan North.
• Spiritual Successor: As a soap opera that started out realistic and then became Gothic and supernatural, with a particular focus on vampire lovers, the series has a great deal in common with Dark Shadows.
• The Un-Twist: When the "General Homicide" murders kicked off, Julie Devlin was the prime suspect, as the first victim was her father, whom she'd had a vicious argument with. Witnesses reported seeing her at other crime scenes and she was promptly arrested. The murders stopped while she was in prison, then resumed once she was acquitted and released. Everything culminated in a bomb being planted in the hospital and a close-up of Julie's watch mirroring the countdown to detonation. All this and it was still a shock when Julie was revealed to be the "General Homicide" killer.
  • Then it was "untwisted" even more when the real killer turned out to be resident psycho (or rather psycho resident) Greg Cooper, who kicked off the show by holding the interns hostage—he didn't know which one of them had replaced him in the residency program and as such, intended to kill them all to get his revenge. It turned out he had somehow managed to periodically sneak out of the mental hospital he was incarcerated in order to commit the murders. Julie's supposed guilt was the result of the Stockholm Syndrome/Brainwashed and Crazy she developed after he kidnapped her (for some reason, he developed a particularly sick fixation on her).