The soap boom spawned a nighttime soap parody, "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman", which made a quick star out of Louise Lasser, who played the eponymous heroine. A rising soap opera toward the decade's end was "Ryan's Hope", which capitalized on the everyman success of the film "Rocky" (despite "Ryan's Hope" debuting earlier; the show's success came a while after the movie's release). The serial was about an Irish-American family running a pub in New York City, and earned critical acclaim from television critics for its realistic portrayal of an "ethnic" middle-class family in a contemporary setting. The show's matriarch, played by Helen Gallagher, won two Daytime Emmys by decade's end. Also during the decade "General Hospital", a soap that spent most of the decade with bad ratings (It was almost canceled in 1976) saw a rise in popularity around late 1978 due to its more youthful focus. However, it would not yet become a ratings giant until the 1980s.