Michael

Totally. I wish they'd actually accounted for WHY people didn't question Sarah's whereabouts sooner. If Maggie couldn't get a hold of her other than the odd text message, why didn't she contact Rex? Why didn't Roman or Kate happen to ask Rex, "Hey, how are things with Sarah?" during the months he was gone?

I guess they're getting story out of it now, but that exit was so weird and abrupt. Why couldn't they just have had her finally object to one of Xander's 12,000 crimes and go off to visit Melissa and clear her head for a while?

But every single pilot script that the big networks order gets published in the trades. Especially when they're based on known properties. It's as much news for the public as it is news for the industry. I'm not even trying to defend... ABC or Kelly Ripa or anyone, but it's the way things tend to work.

They bought a pilot script to see if they would want to move forward with shooting a pilot, after which they would've decided whether to write and produce more episodes or not. That's the traditional way that TV development works. (It's become more common for high-profile projects to get a straight-to-series order, where they start writing the whole season rather than waiting for the pilot to be shot and picked up.) It seems as if they didn't think the pilot script was right for them or prohibitive to shoot or -- well, whatever reason they had, and who knows if they ever gave it a fair shot in the first place. But you'd never have multiple episodes of a primetime revival of a beloved property filmed before word got out to the media.

FYI the Covid compliance costs (extra team members on set, testing, etc) should be coming out of the established budget. Few shows have received a budget increase to account for those additional costs. I'm sure it's being factored in as budgets are being created for new, high-profile shows, but that factor has been a hit to most established/running shows. Y&R still looks cheap as hell, though. And this is coming from a Days fan!

Yeah, I remember them being available, and then there was that huge wipe and everything was gone. So frustrating.

That's my blog! It still irks the hell out of me how many old clips are gone. What I wouldn't give to watch that coronation massacre now and again... They actually had Ciara and Ben reference the Virtual Eden story on Beyond Salem, which got me nervous that Ron would decide to do a redux.

This is so interesting, because I found TB to be a shockingly good recast for SJB precisely because she has kind of a harder, masculine energy, despite being so petite. There's something rough about her physicality and performances that I think really fits Carly. LW has generally done a great job and has obviously endured in the role, but there's always a SLIGHT missing link for me with regards to how Carly came to be so... "polished" is the wrong word, but it feels like she progressed between actresses without me really seeing it onscreen.

Thanks for clarifying! The two distinct points make perfect sense on their own.

You're making my point for me, though. I'm not disagreeing that Sami and EJ, as a pairing, generated great interest. I was responding to statement such as "Sami and EJ were a thousand times more interesting than Sami and Lucas." That is not a quantifiable thing. You CAN definitively state something such as, "The ratings for Sami and EJ's wedding were ten times higher than for Sami and Lucas's wedding," or "Sami and EJ's fan event drew ten times more people than a Sami and Lucas event," but you can't measure something like 'interesting' or 'compelling' in a concrete way. It's your (perfectly valid!) opinion that Sami and EJ are/were a more interesting pairing than Sami and Lucas, and that's fine. For the record, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I enjoyed Sami and Lucas a ton, but I didn't like how Hogan's quick turn into making Sami more of a traditional heroine wound up transforming Lucas into an Austin-lite character. I agree that Sami and EJ had great chemistry and made a big splash, but I found the storytelling for them wildly inconsistent and unfocused, likely because there were almost yearly writer changes and because... Corday. But I have no way of definitively declaring that one pairing was objectively superior to the other. And there were probably a ton of less vocal fans (like me) who didn't really care which one emerged as the victor, because I don't necessarily watch the show for couples and just want the storytelling to be interesting. Did Sami and EJ garner more outside press for the show? Very possibly, and that's a statement you could make, given the "data points" (as you put it) to back it up. Of course the show wants people to be talking about the show and its content. But you took my example about reactions to Daniel on Twitter and totally twisted it -- mentions and conversations do not necessarily equate to something being "better," which is exactly what you say in your response before completely contradicting yourself. You're right that, in a broad application, "interesting" means something has garnered attention. There are plenty of things that have outraged and annoyed people into posting on social media that would technically count as being "interesting." And while you say you aren't interested in declaring something better or worse than something else, that's exactly what your posts about EJami vs Lumi seem to be aiming for. You say EJami are/were "more interesting," and then you go on not to give examples of why/how that's the case, but instead talking about how and why her pairings with Austin, Lucas, and Rafe didn't work and why her pairing with EJ did. Whether or not they worked isn't the same as whether or not they interested people or got attention, so I hope you can see why people (not just me) are confused as to what point you were trying to make.

What are these data points you speak of? You seem to want to establish something objectively, but "more interesting" is not something that we can objectively measure. Also, Sami and Lucas's heyday (2003-07, roughly) pre-dates Twitter or social media as we know it. Sami and EJ's relationship largely coexisted with the rise of those venues for fan feedback. So it would be tough to do a one-to-one comparison on that, anyway. And a million people a day tweeting that they hated Daniel Jonas didn't mean he was objectively a better or more interesting character than, say, Bo. People were mentioning his name because they hated him. X number of tweets or whatever mentioning EJami don't necessarily speak to their overall impact (and I don't know if tweets are what you're referring to, because you haven't gotten more specific than "data points").

That wasn't really how the post-2000 stuff with Mike played out. I don't believe they ever said he was abusive in any way to Jeremy, just that Jeremy was an a-hole and they implied that he and Mike weren't super-close or that he felt like he hadn't gotten enough attention or something (which felt at odds with the fact that he seemed to have left the show to go back to Israel to help raise Jeremy). But it was all pretty vague, and when I watched it, it never really felt like an indictment of Mike as a father. In 2010, RC wanted to return for Alice's funeral but had some other commitment, so they shot his stuff separately. Because he wasn't filming at the same time as the other returns, he couldn't attend the actual funeral, so they had Mike get into a car accident on his way into Salem. He mostly appeared at the hospital and had scenes with Lexie, Jennifer, Bill, and Carrie. He and Carrie seemed to get some sort of closure on their relationship, but it was bittersweet. It wasn't anything amazing, but it was done pretty respectfully and certainly wasn't some kind of punishment toward Mike/RC. He got a final solo scene to say goodbye to Alice, too (I think as he was leaving the hospital, but he might've made it to her grave).

I read Jean Rouverol's book three or four times in the 2000s. It's excellent! Obviously outdated now in terms of some of the specifics, but it's great. Totally worth picking up if you find a copy.

Thanks for posting that! Must've been such a weird time for viewers, with the amount of cast turnover going on in those years...

Thanks for posting that. I'd never read it, but it's interesting how even-keeled JER comes off there. As ridiculous as his show got, I really and truly believe that he knew EXACTLY what he was doing during that first Days run. It just had such an energy.

WUT.

Thanks for sharing the episodes and that interview, guys! Those John/Marlena fans asking questions really come across as so obnoxious. It's also funny to see feedback from the early days of Nicole, calling for a recast or for her to go entirely.

Another DOOL history project on my blog: I've started a revised history of the show, minus SORASing -- but substituting age-appropriate characters for the ones who appeared onscreen. (For example, Kristian Alfonso still shows up in 1983, but she isn't playing Hope, who's still only 9 at that point.) I've done 1965-79 so far, and the rest will be coming shortly...

I got my hands on 13 of the 14 "Soaps and Serials" novels that were published in the 80s, retelling stories from the first decade or so of Days, and did a blog post with recaps, reviews, curious findings, etc. The write-up is here, for anyone who might be interested.

I would be, too!

That's actually an incredibly interesting interview. Corday comes off as... Corday, hyping whatever the current thing is as The Best!, but Langan's answers are sort of fascinating. He comes off as both pompous and insightful, and only one of those is a thing I'd have gleaned from his onscreen work. I thought it was interesting that he was sort of openly disdainful of Belle as a character and how Storms infused the writing with something perhaps unintended -- not that I wanted him to stick around, but it makes me wonder if Belle would've gone in a different direction had that happened. Every writer stuck so closely to that "Belle is sweet and perfect!" thing, and it did neither the character nor any actress in the role any favors.

Something possessed me to watch the series finale tonight, and I had forgotten about that little moment where Bill says to Fletcher, "I miss Ben," and Fletcher responds that he misses him, too. The actors put a LOT into that small exchange, and it got to me. I just wish there had been time for more sentiments like that (er, minus the terrible foundation of Ben not being there to begin with).

Thanks for posting that. Really beautiful montage, even though it's difficult to watch tonight.

As popular as Reva had been in the 80s, I think there was some kind of weird network/P&G/show decision in the late 90s where they went, "Who's the Erica Kane/Marlena Evans of this show?" and crammed Reva/KZ into that role. It was so blatant and awkward. I thought KZ did a lot of great work, and she actually fit very well in the Peapack version of the show as this down-home kind of gal, but all the high-concept, "she's so sexy" stuff struck me as such an attempt to do what was working on other shows.

Weird that the caption says "their infant daughter" even though the story up above clearly states that she had a boy, Doug.