6 posts tagged “days of our lives”

Ok, so Days of our Lives has been going through some shit, as a show.  Seriously, they've been through drama with the writers and the producers, and there were a few weeks where the show was really great.  I doubt it had anything to do with Hogan Sheffer.  He's pretty good, but he tended to be a bit - well, dull.  And Dena Higley is good, too.  I've heard her name is mud with One Life to Live fans, but then, they say that about everyone who isn't their current headwriter.

But Days has been bad for a long time.  But let's start after James Reilly left.  Because it's not fair to include his stuff (since, yes, kids, it WAS that bad) because well, that's EVERYTHING HE WROTE.

• Belle and Shawn got fired.  Ok, so I will be the first to admit that Shawn and Belle were a little boring and their "epic" romance was a little less than epic, but they are both children of supercouples.  And Martha Madison had chemistry with both of her Shawns.  But they decided to scuttle them off the show.  And it took away the one couple with rooting value.
• Ava Vitali didn't stick around.  Tamara Braun joined the cast, and she kept Steve and Hope and Bo and Kayla all hostage.  It was brilliant.  She even slept with John while he was married to Marlena.  BRILLIANT.  But then she left the show.  It was not brillian
• Lexie coming back.  Oy.  She seriously fucked with everyone, and was supposedly dead.  And then came back and they fucking made her chief of staff at University Hospital?  WHY?  Who would give that role to someone who, although she was being blackmailed, lied to Carrie about her ability to have a baby with Austin just so that Abe wouldn't find out that Lex was sleeping with TEK.  Who by the way, deserved to be let go - he sucked.
• The Las Vegas storyline from last summer.  Where do I begin?  Let's bring a Horton back to the show (they've been practically recurring since the Bradys came to town) but make him a total asshole.  Then let's bring Abe's son in and make him an ISA agent, even though he's a porn star.  Then, let's have them trafficking humans.  Through Salem.  Which is in the midwest.  Oh. And let's make Jeremy mean to his cousin Nick, who was cute and lovable.

There's more, but it's angered my blood and I don't have enough booze to calm down.

Oy.  So, Sami and Lucas have been THE couple on Days since like 1998. They push them together and pull them apart and it's been a great ride.  And then EJ came on the scene and blackmailed Sami into marrying him to end the DiMera/Brady feud.  At the wedding, EJ was shot.  By Lucas.  And so off he went to prison.

And we had several months of Sami and EJ having tons of sexual tension and being forced to stay married to each other.  Wonderful.  It proves that Sami can go with other people and doesn't have to be chained to Lucas and it's given EJ his redemption for the horrible things he did before the DiMera feud ended (including raping Sami).  But here's my biggest complaint: they brought back Lucas.  He got out of prison, and he came to the DiMera mansion and just basically started shouting at Sami about everything he always shouts about.  "You're a liar. I can never trust/forgive/love you again."

Next time, leave Lucas out and give Sami a chance to love someone else and be in a relationship with someone else.

Ok, so Marlena confesses to the crimes.  But everyone is like, "Why would Marlena do this!?"  Especially her husband, John and her daughter Sami.  So, she's in jail and there's some deal with a prisoner named Crystal Chablis that I don't remember anything about.  So, Marlena escapes jail and gets shot on the roof by a police sharpshooter.  Yeah.  So, she's dead.  But Sami swears Marlena is really alive.

So, we get all these scenes where Marlena is in her coffin yelling that she's still alive, but then they open the coffin and no, she's not alive.  John even stabs her chest to prove she's dead.  Except she really is alive.  Because they have the funeral.  And we see Marlena reciting the Lord's Prayer. As she plummets through a really crappy CGI inferno.  Next episode, she's walking through a tropical place that looks like Salem (it's really the Salem sets with potted Palm trees and sunlight) and there's Alice Horton to welcome her. 

You think that's crazy?  Turns out everyone who died in Salem is actually alive.  Yeah. On an island called Melaswen.  That's New Salem backwards.  And so they whine and try to figure out what's going on.  And then it's revealed that it was Tony who did all this and that what we saw the past YEAR was actually just Marlena's memories of the events, but that it was actually Tony who was killing, er "killing" everyone.  Yeah.  So then, somehow, Victor was also on the island even though he was killed by Jan Spears and not by Marlena/Tony.  Ok.  Then the island was blown up and the survivors were picked up by a Japanese Fishing Trawler.  I don't think they ever showed Alice during all this because Frances Reid is pretty much a frail old lady.  But still, Roman and Marlena don't make it back and are being held in Tony's Castle in Downtown Europe.

Do you now see why this was the most awesome and STUPID thing that ever happened to Days?  It's great that it was reset and some of the people are still alive.  Ok, actually, I would've been ok with Abe staying dead because he's so boring now days.  Oh, and when everyone got back they started this storyline where everyone was getting weird diseases but they totally dropped those except for Jack's mystery illness (which brought us Patch back to the canvas) and Abe's blindness, which was boring.  Like Abe.

So, after some horribly boring years on Days of our Lives, NBC got smart.  See, at the time, Passions had taken over for Another World and NBC was down to just 2 soaps having got rid of Sunset Beach not too long before Another World.  So, Days was it's last bastion of old-school soap. Who better than to hand the reins to than fucking James E. Reilly, the motherfucker who was writing Passions (and had it not been CANCELLED, still would be).

Jim Reilly was not well-known for being THAT great a writer.  In fact, his writing tends to be sloppy plotpoints that become ersatz with the show's history and turn crap in to more crap.  He also has a habit of timing the shows poorly.  Most soaps have 2-3 episodes spanning a day in the world of the story.  Sometimes this is altered for sweeps or special events, like weddings.  JER did none of that.  Often a day would last from 2 weeks to 2 months in real time.  On Days, Valentine's Day started around the real Valentine's Day and lasted until we in the Real World were still drunk from St. Patrick's Day.  Yeah, a month long day.

That's the background for the AWESOMENESS of the Salem Stalker Storyline, which was incredibly awesome and lame at the same time.  It started at the Basic Black fashion show when Bo and Hope were attacked.  The police sort of investigated, but not really.  Then, Abe Carver, the Police Commissioner (I can't remember if he was retired at the time or not) was shot on the way to a christening.  So, like Abe's been on the show forever and is one of the few black people in Salem.  But he points to Maggie Horton.  For some reason that's never explored.  Anyway, Maggie, Jack, Caroline, Cassie, Roman and Tony are all killed by the serial killer called The Salem Stalker.  Their deaths are completely shocking (well, except Cassie because she just was kind of there).  But this is where it gets AWESOME.

So Tony is mauled by a tiger owned by Doug Horton (why he has a tiger, no one asks) and ends up in the hospital.  Where Marlena enters his room and gives him a lethal injection.  Thus, the audience finds out it's Marlena who killed all those beloved people.  So Marlena goes around the hospital and in fact all over Salem with a letter opener (to kill with, natch) and whenever someone says they know who the killer is (because none of the cops are investigating, really) she fondles the letter opener until they reveal that it's just a hunch or they don't really know but that guy always seemed shady or somesuch.

Then, we start seeing ghosts and Celeste (Salem's resident psychic) makes a prediction that Jennifer, Hope and Lexie will all have new men in their lives.  This never happened.  Hope/Bo never broke up until AFTER the Salem Stalker shit was long over; Jennifer and Jack were reunited and she ALMOST married Frankie until Jack came back; Lexie cheated on Abe with Tek, but not really.  Stupid show.  So, the ghosts.  They come to greet their loved ones and it's all very sweet and Kate somehow had sex with Roman's ghost.  I think.

So, Marlena keeps killing.  She kills Doug and then Alice Horton who has been on the show since the first episode.  Now, here's where it gets REALLY FUCKED UP.  See, at this point people stopped watching.  No one cared or people were pissed about the killing off of characters who were entrenched in Days history.  So, rumor has it that NBC stepped in and made them re-write the rest of the story which I'm getting to.  So, Alice calls Marlena's husband John Black and tells him it's Marlena. Before Alice is choked by a doughnut.  In the hospital, she reveals under truth serum that she did it because Abe found out that she was going to stop Roman and Kate's wedding.  Which, she hadn't loved Roman for a while, Kate was her friend and she had no problem before then with them being together.

I'm going to leave it here for now and put the rest of it in another post tomorrow since it's SO LONG.

Some people like true crime shows because of all the delightful fact finding and craziness.  Some people like makeover shows because they like the feeling it gives them seeing people finally become happy about their own appearance.  And some people like the news because they are horrible masochists who enjoy watching stuff about all the murders, death, corruption and the occasional fluff piece about a rescued dog.  Me?  I love soap operas.   

My love for soap operas kind of started out weirdly.  I didn't like daytime soaps.  My mom lived for As The World Turns and Guiding Light.  I preferred Beverly Hills 90210 and then jumped ship to Melrose Place.  I was probably the only kid in my school who watched MP religiously and probably the only one who was watching when Dr. Kimberly Shaw took off her wig after returning from the dead.  Which was disappointing in that I didn't have anyone to talk about it with.  Because they were all watching, hell, I don't even know.  Full House, probably.

But then, I started watching Guiding Light with my mother and sister every summer and I got hooked on the Santos family.  Specifically Carmen.  She was everything I wanted to be.  Powerful, feared, bitchy and AWESOME. And ok, she was actually really evil and tried to kill her son's wife more than once, but still, AWESOME. Once she left the show, so did I. After that I stuck with whatever turgid drama I could get my hands on that wasn't daytime.

Then my best gal pal Lucy got me to start watching Days of our Lives right around the time that Marlena was revealed to be the Salem Stalker.  It took me a good week to actually understand any of what was going on, but once I did, I was hooked.  I started reading the internet soap fansites, searching for info on who was going to die next.  And that's I think the number one thing that I love about soaps: the format of soaps is so fluid anything can happen.  Literally, anyone can die, anyone can come back from the dead (for whatever stupid reason), anyone can take over the world with a weather machine, or hell, even 2 witches can cross magic beams and create an earthquake that causes a tsunami in New England.

So here's my list of reasons why I love soap operas:

• Anything can happen.  - Like I said above, plots can meander and sometimes be truly shocking.
• No matter what the crime, you can still be redeemed - It's true.  Look at One Life to Live: Todd basically raped women for ages and he's now kind of a hero on the show.  Or take Marlena on Days: She sort of killed 9 people and people in Salem still love her.  That's not something that can happen in everyday life.
• Plots move slowly - Miss an episode of Lost and well, you're kind of lost as to what's going on in the next episode.  Soaps conveniently remind you constantly of what happened in the last episode, sometimes recycling the exact same scene again.  And then flashing back to it five minutes later (this is especially true of James Reilly's days on Days).
• Plots that don't work? Re-written.  Characters that don't work? Recast or written off.  This doesn't happen in primetime because of the massive lead time needed to produce the bigger shows.  When a storyline ain't working on Grey's Anatomy, it could be 8-10 weeks before the viewers sees the episode where they change it.  Soaps don't have that problem.  They can re-write on the fly, recast seamlessly and still have the storyline work.  Sometimes (hey, I'm not blind...sometimes it just don't work).
• Self-contained storylines.  Don't like what's going on with one storyline, fast forward.  Primetime focuses on the ensemble, mostly, so all the characters tend to interact.  Not so with Daytime.

So, work crush?  Mostly gone by now.  I've never actually talked to him up close to notice his facial features in detail, but I did today and omg, his mouth and nose are so out of whack with the rest of his face, I don't know how I never noticed.  And he lisps.  And not in a good way.  So, the crush is mostly gone.  Mostly.  Ok, so I still am madly in like with him.  But. I'm no longer wanting 2.5 Jack Russell Terriers, His and His SUVs and a condo in Turtle Creek. 

In other news, I haven't done much of anything this past week.  Unplug the phone, sleep alone, stay way out of sight.  It's not as depressing as it sounds. I just don't feel like doing anything.  I have plans with Lance for Halloween, but after that, I'm not really looking to do anything.  And really, I only agreed to go to the Halloween party with Lance because he's coming in from Fort Worth and I don't want to seem like a big bitch and say no, I don't want to go (which I do want to go...just not sure if I really want to go because it's a halloween party or if I want to go to have fun).  Either way, I'm going.  So there's that.

My mom and stepdad (I guess that's what I'd call him.  I mean, they married after I was an adult, so I don't know that he's really my stepdad, but it's easier than saying my Mom's husband) went to Corpus for the weekend, so I'll be all alone all weekend.  Which will be nice.  I have so much cleaning and laundry to do along with just wanting to sleep, lie in bed all day and cry as John on Days of our Lives dies. 

Despite what this entry sounds like (and I realize it seems like I have no life, which I don't), I'm actually very happy right now.  I have a few new friends, a few old ones still around out there somewhere and I really am happy.  Now, if only I could just NOT be single.  That would make me ecstatic!