#Days of my life soap opera tv#

They do what writers-from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Charles Dickens to Edgar Allan Poe to Alice Munro and Armistead Maupin-have popularized for centuries: they feed us, handsomely every day, with the nourishment of fiction. They are not Dancing with the Stars, and they are not low-carb cooking plans for the week. They are blissfully-for one hour or half-hour-not Trump or Kardashian. Fans of soap operas invest, loyally, with the characters and stars of the shows, and their sometimes infuriatingly paced and written storylines, precisely because they are of another world.

#Days of my life soap opera tv#

It is TV networks that have fallen out of love with soap opera, not viewers-and that is because viewers, like humans generally, like storytelling. We wouldn’t be expected to suspend our intelligence, and play make-believe that the presenters of these shows are in any way like ordinary people-and not highly paid celebrities and media professionals with retinues of assistants and agents, and a lot of money. We would not have to sit through quizzes and multiple daytime talk shows like The View and The Talk, all chewing over the same cud from that day's news and pop culture cycle. If TV companies followed the ratings, and invested in what they saw, there would be more soap operas in daytime, not the paltry few that fans have left. Viewers would far rather see evil twins returning to cause havoc on a soap than they would have one celebrity discuss the hardships of being a celebrity with another celebrity.

Instead, the shows are being starved to death in front of fans' eyes.Īnd yet the audience for the remaining soaps remains strong some of their ratings out-perform the daytime talk shows around them. Daytime is now-this viewer thinks for the worse-tundras of talk shows, with little desire for furnishing the bigger budgets that soaps demand. In place now: there’s Days, the last remaining holdout on NBC, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful keeping on at CBS, and General Hospital on ABC. RIP: All My Children, Guiding Light, One Life To Live, As the World Turns, Sunset Beach, Passions, and Another World-to name but a few. Gone are the days where whole stretches of morning and afternoon television were hour-long exotically planted forests of storytelling. Long gone is the heyday of the “stories,” when kids would come home from school to watch General Hospital with friends or a parent. Best case scenario, everyone agrees to return at a lower salary.”īut the way Days is being treated, and the way its cast is being treated, says everything about the precarious position of the daytime soap. Worst case scenario, they lose half their cast.

“If Days gets picked up, can offer the actors new contacts at a reduced rate and with a ‘take-it-or-leave’ it attitude. “It’s actually a shrewd-if cynical-business move,” one “insider” told TVLine. The producers have a reported eight months of episodes to broadcast, so its hiatus may be just that-a breathing space for all parties to firm up a plan going forward. It is conceivable that Days of our Lives may survive.

Nobody from Corday Productions, NBC, or Sony Television Pictures would tell TVLine what was going on. It’s not a cancellation, but-if this were Days of Our Lives-the screen would fade to black on a sea of very concerned faces. TVLine reported Tuesday that the entire cast of the show-55 years young next year!-have been released from their contracts, with the show itself going on indefinite production hiatus at the end of the month.