NBC’s “Days of our Lives” turned 54 on Friday and did something no soap opera has ever done: they jumped forward by a year.
Using the show’s famous hour glass from its logo, inventive and award winning headwriter Ron Carlivati put together a taut script, a little Hitchockian for s soap, to build up to the show’s final, shocking moment.
I watched it tonight on the NBC website, dodging commercials for various illnesses and their quesitonable cures.
Soap operas are daffy, of course, often running very close to self-parody. One of my favorite all time movies is “SoapDish,” in which Whoopi Goldberg, the fake soap’s headwriter, utters these words more or less about a returning character who was decapitated years earlier: “I cannot write for a man without a head!”
Luckily, Carlivati can, since most of his characters have been killed, and returned, and continue to be reanimated in hilarious ways. The long dead creator of “Days,” Ted Corday, could never have imagined such craziness. Neither could the also deceased creator of so many soaps, Agnes Nixon.
But that’s what it’s like these days. So Jennifer Horton somehow fell and went into a coma. Her husband stood beside vigil. At the end of the hour, Jennifer awoke and asked how long she’d been out. “A year,” her husband said, keeping a straight face. So all the cliffhangers Carlivati stacked up during the preceding hour– lots of baby announcements, etc. One character actually said, “God saved a wretch like me.” I hope she named her baby Grace, because the whole thing was amazing. Tune in on Monday.
PS I am curious if Trump is still president on Monday, November 12, 2020. I guess only Carlivati knows.
