Another shocking exit has been announced on General Hospital, with the behind-the-scenes firing of head writer Ron Carlivati.

According to Deadline, Carlivati was replaced in an attempt to help revive the soap once again, and he had been replaced by vets Jean Passanante and Shelby Altman, who will begin on August 10.

Carlivati was a part of a team brought into the soap back in 2012, and he was credited by fans for helping to save the soap from cancellation at the same time that fellow long-running soaps One Life to Live and All My Children were axed by ABC. Carlivati and his team won a Writers Guild Award for Best Daytime Serial of 2014.

His being let go from the show comes on the heels of departing star Anthony Geary, who airs his last role as the iconic Luke Spencer after 37 years on this coming Monday's episode, blasting his exit storyline in an interview. At the time, Geary didn't name names, but hinted that he was disappointed with how things were handled because of so many characters being brought back in a storyline he felt was far too cheesy for a goodbye.

"I loved that they brought back Emma Samms [Holly], Genie Francis [Laura], Jonathan Jackson [Lucky] and Nathan Parsons [Ethan] so I could work with them one last time, but I did not like the conceit that brought us all together," he said. "It was ill-conceived, cheesy and showed a lack of imagination. We saw Luke shoot Frank in the back over 20 years ago. And by the way, that character was old then. He would have been in his hundreds by now."

"The audience saw that little boy dead on the operating table, and his organs were harvested. I do not understand the value of disassembling two of the best stories we've told," he added. "I guess the point of bringing the child back from the dead was so Luke could be redeemed, but I never felt he needed that. I hate redemption. I'm sure there are audience members who didn't want him to be a child killer and so they're pleased, which is fine. But I was not thrilled."

Geary also hinted that he had a long-standing issue with Carlivati as well, saying that the writers didn't trust the actors to do their jobs properly.

"...Acting is an interpretative art and that's really forgotten on our show, where the actors are expected to be slavishly devoted to the stage directions in the script. I get scripts where I'm literally told where to take a deep breath and what line to cry on and when to turn my body. Sometimes the writer's stage directions are longer than the scenes themselves," he said. "...There's a mistrust of actors on out show, as if we're going to misunderstand the material. To be told to weep on a certain line is absurd. I don't know when the hell I'm going to weep, if I weep at all, until I'm actually playing the scene. You don't plan that s--t out!"

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General hospital, ABC, Soap Operas