We are halfway through our soap opera blog series, “I Met My Twin When I Married My Mother’s Neighbor’s Uncle’s Grocer’s Best Friend’s Attorney Who is Also My Fourth Cousin Once Removed.” Today we are turning to a show that is still going strong: Days of Our Lives.

Days of Our Lives has been on the air every weekday since November of 1965. Ted and Betty Corday created the show and produced it along with Sony Pictures Television. (The current producer is Ken Corday, their son.) The show profited from two pioneers in the field: Irna Phillips came on board as story editor and William J. Bell wrote most of the early stories. He would leave the show in 1973 to develop The Young and the Restless which we will discuss next week.

As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives have a lot in common. Like As the World Turns, this series was set in Illinois in Salem and also focuses on two families: the Bradys and the Hortons. Like Helen Wagner who played Nancy Hughes on World from the beginning till her death, Frances Reid began playing Alice Horton in 1965 and continued until she passed away in 2010, the same year as Wagner. Also, just like World, Days began a sixty-minute format in 1975, so did Days.

The Cordays and Bell agreed that this would be a hospital soap opera, featuring the lives of a family of doctors while following their personal lives through marriages, divorces, affairs and the medical situations that came up. Additional families and characters were added over the years. Many subplots over the years have dealt with characters who learn their birth parents were not who they thought.

The show was known in the seventies as a show that felt free to go beyond the typical soap opera boundaries; themes like artificial insemination, homosexuality, interracial romance, serial killers were part of the plots. However, the show is equally known for its somewhat ridiculous plots of constantly bringing people back from the dead, evil twins, continuous love triangles, amnesia, kidnappings, secret islands, and demonic possession.

The show won the best Daytime Drama Emmy in 1978 and 2013; individual cast members also took home Emmys many times.

Days is one of the few soap operas left on the air, but viewership has been declining since the 1990s. In the first few seasons, the show was at the bottom of the Nielsen ratings. By 1973, it tied for

first place with Another World and As the World Turns. In 1977 ratings began declining again; the popularity of daytime game shows was part of the reason. By 1980 it was number one again. In order to increase ratings, several popular actresses and actors who were let go to cut costs were brought back to the show during the 1990s. In 2020 the show aired its 14,000^th episode, and, currently, the show has been renewed through September 2023.

One thing that has not changed much since 1965 is the opening of the show. An hourglass appeared on the screen with sand trickling and a voice says, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.” It has only been slightly modified the past five decades. The theme song in the opening was composed by Charles Albertine, Tommy Boyce, and Bobby Hart and was the first soap to use an orchestra ensemble. After the first season, one of the stars, MacDonald Carey, voiced the opening and that was kept in the show after he passed away as a tribute to him.

My husband admitted to me that because several of the girls he hung out with in college watched the show, he began to get interested in it. I guess he is not alone. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall instituted a recess about 1 pm so he could watch the show. Julia Roberts said she was a big fan and asked to be seated near the cast at the People’s Choice Awards in 2002. Monica Lewinsky has revealed that she was so passionate about the show that she wrote a poem for her high school yearbook about the show. Novelist Brian Keene said he watched the show from 1983 on and took a break from writing to watch it daily.

A few fun facts about the show are (1) Deidre Hall and Andrea Hall were the first real twins to play twins on a soap opera. (2) Betty White appeared on the show in 1980. (3) In 2001, NBC became the first network to broadcast daytime shows with Spanish-closed captioning. (4) Drake Hogestyn has played seven different roles on the show. (5) Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth played Doug and Julie Williams and their onscreen romance turned into an offscreen romance. They married in 1974 in real life and their characters married in 1976. They are still happily together.

I know that there are a lot of fans for this show, but I do have to admit I don’t get this one. I understand the housewives of the sixties turning to soaps, but this one has had so many incredible and hard-to-fathom plot twists that I cannot take it seriously. I am waiting to learn that one of the characters is actually their own stepmother because they married so many of the citizens who married so many other of the citizens, not to mention the behind-the-doors affairs that are carried on as normal procedures. However, if you are one of the millions of viewers who love the show, I am open to persuasion.