Days:September 2019 discussion topic

[beebs]

Still astounds me though that these same women claim they've been "watching since 1965", sat through two Horton women fall in love with immediate family (at least Doug and Julie were step-father-and-daughter, but still...), an entire decade where every woman was brutally raped every six months, a devil possession, and a partridge in a pear tree, but TWO MEN BARELY TOUCHING EACH OTHER ONCE A WEEK is a step too far.

Pandering to this lot is what's gonna get this show canned. Their ONLY chance at this point is if they really go hog-wild with the controversy, but I doubt that's gonna happen and instead we'll just get a bi-monthly cycle of "who did Rolf reanimate this week?" until the show ends. 

[Soapsuds]

I wonder if thats why her Days was so boring...boring as hell. All her stories were shut down. Remember all the promises she made in that interview with Errol? None of them happened...

[beebs]

Exactly. And the feeling I got watching it every day was that a story would start, barely start to build, then it would either be totally dropped or would disappear for six weeks, and be resolved in one episode. Remember the online gambling ring story with Will, Sonny, Chad, and co.? I remember it just starting up, the casting calls were made for the hackers and suddenly this one episode happens about a month in, where these never-before-seen clips started the show as being "previously on Days of Our Lives", and the whole story was literally wrapped up in the rest of that hour, never to be mentioned again.

The Johnny-goes-missing thing was another weird one. It seemed to be building that Johnny was going to be kidnapped or something big was gonna happen to him, and a full week into the story...oh he's hiding under the table at the pub, we just missed him! LOL STORY OVER. It just reeked of stories being squashed as they were going to air, and frankly, considering what she was able to do at AMC, I can't lay the blame for that at MMP's feet.

[DRW50]

 

I don't remember her AMC run having anything especially notable with gay characters, although it's been years. 

 

I will admit I just never got the hype with that team, period, so I'm biased. 

[beebs]

Not with gay characters, no, I just sort of meant more of a generally more provocative, modern type of story being told there, while at DAYS she seemed incapable of getting any story moving at all.

[Soapsuds]

Yes, I remember all of it. I remember how frantic they were over Johnny and poof solved...LOL...and I do recall the Will, Chad gambling story....which disappeared and then in one episode finished...LOL

[Vee]

It's an UO but I'll always defend the McPherson DAYS, which I thought started very well but succumbed to DAYS' usual Corday-style peppy and cheap micromanagement quickly. As others have said, it always felt interfered with, like many other HWs. I thought her (and others') AMC 2.0 was also the best soap of the 2010s. Still!

[NothinButAttitude]

Wasn't Marlene the writer during the time Madison James popped up on canvas?

[AbcNbc247]

Yes, but her story went nowhere too. It makes you wonder how much behind the scenes interference there was.

[beebs]

There definitely was there too. I remember how she was meant to be a powerful rival to Kate, and all she did was hang off Brady like an extra appendage and be scared of Ian. Remember her ex-husband Ian with the Phoenix on his cane (I think), and he was somehow tied to Stefano, and THAT got buried. I suspect that had something to do with the conspiracy against Sarah Brown, but that's, again, speculation.  

I consider that year a "lost year". The only thing that really lasted from that era was Sami as a businesswoman, John & Marlena being back in town, and Horton Town Square. You could feel so much potential and it was all just lost.

[AbcNbc247]

Like so many of Days' writing regimes, they started off strong and then they just fell apart. It's just they fell apart a lot sooner than others did. I actually liked Madison and I didn't want them to get rid of her. 

 

Ian, I barely remember what his deal was. He was the son of Stefano's father's mistress or something like that and he was plotting to steal the Dimera fortune so he faked written letters that said that Stefano wasn't EJ's real father or something. And that caused Stefano to turn his back on EJ. It was a very piss poor story that's better left forgotten. I can see why Joe Mascolo didn't like it either.

[beebs]

I remember everyone just wondering why, after Tony, Kristen, and Peter, suddenly NOW blood matters to Stefano? It was incredibly bizarre, especially for someone who was part of the writing team when Kristen, Peter and Tony were there like Marlene had been. 

[AbcNbc247]

From Wikipedia:

 

Mascolo discussed his disapproval in an interview with Soap Opera Digest:

 

"It was very difficult. The bottom line Stefano is will always be about family. So when they wrote that, I couldn’t figure it out. In all honesty, Stefano nor EJ would have had wanted it that way. As a matter of fact when James Scott (EJ) saw the business that Elvis wasn’t Stefano’s son, we both went, "No, that’s wrong." We didn’t want it that way."

 

Luckily, the damage was corrected pretty quickly

[Vee]

I've been over this not long ago, so I'll just say I initially loved Madison and the entire business story with her, Sami, Brady, Kate, etc. They forced Sami to grow up and it worked.

[MichaelGL]

I think the Kate and Madison rivalry had great potential. Madison as a character had potential.