Sri Rao is an Indian-American writer, who held the position of Head Writer for the second season of the spinoff series of General Hospital, titled General Hospital: Night Shift.
History[]
In 2022, Rao reflected on his tenure as the head writer for Nightshift. He acknowledged, Yes, it is one of the first things that I did in my career, and I really have to give the credit for that to an executive at ABC named Sara Saedi, who is a not with ABC any longer, but she was the executive in charge of General Hospital under Brian Frons back in the day. She reached out to me because she felt it was important to bring new voices to soaps and to bring younger voices to soaps -- well, I was a younger voice at the time! She felt it was important to bring new voices, younger voices, and diverse voices to the table, and she gave me a shot, which I was so grateful for. And I just wish there were more opportunities like that in soaps.
When asked if he was aware of the positive reception his work received from the soap community, particularly regarding fans' desires for him to lead the daytime version of General Hospital, Rao replied, I did! And I am so thankful to those GH fans that expressed their appreciation for my writing and who reached out to me and who were vocal about it. And still to this day, I still see occasional posts from people who remember my work on [Nightshift] and appreciate it. It means so much to me because I have such a fondness and respect for those characters and those storylines, the ones that I was writing on [Nightshift]. The fact that there was such a legacy for those characters and for those relationships from GH, I wanted to do justice to them, and I wanted to give them more juicy stories to work with and more interesting storylines to play out, and I am so glad that the fans appreciated it, because I was very much writing it as a fan myself. And then, yeah, I did hear those comments afterwards wishing that I had an opportunity to write on GH, and I also did really wish that that could have happened, and I tried for many, many years, but unfortunately, I never had that chance.
Head writing history[]
| General Hospital: Night Shift | Successor |
|---|---|
| Robert Guza, Jr. Elizabeth Korte (2007) |
Sri Rao (2008) |
