Days: February 2023 Discussion Thread

[Contessa Donatella]

I liked that, too, and I have hated that they let Challie be so isolated that neither of them had anyone to talk to but Johnny or Alex. Allie needed to have Nicole to talk to in the past months & I thought we should see Allie talk to Nicole before leaving for New Zealand. But, very apparently the show did not keep up with that relationship. A pity. 

Nicole was good again today as a thinking human being, not just a bed warmer. Finally EJ is going to get onto Stefan drugging him & then it will really hit the fan. 

The show, in the Salem dimension, was good again today. We had the brothers, Eric & Brady, communicating again & today taking action, which they must have planned on yesterday's show. I'm not sure why they decided to tackle both the Rolf problem & the Stefan problem but it's welcome action. 

[carolineg]

I found the devil stuff way worse.  

Agree about Craig/Leo too.  The dead/not dead stuff isn't overtly offensive like that story was.  

It's just dumb.

And lol! I low key forgot Ron wrote the cryo crypt stuff with Lulu and the stuff with her embryos, but GH let him!  He also wrote the Lucy the vampire slayer stuff.  GH takes itself much more seriously and is much more grounded in reality, but some wacky things have happened in PC too.  There was an alien once lol.

[Contessa Donatella]

And, the blasted Ice Princess has found its way back into story, too! 

[carolineg]

Yeah, they are obviously two different shows, but as a GH fan I was never put off by Days silliness and I don't think it's jarring to watch both shows.   If anything it's much easier to watch Days because the characters are mostly the same and have been for decades lol.  GH has been great, but there are so many characters and so many of them are brand new with wacky backstories so I sometimes get confused if I miss episodes.  

Anyway, I do understand everyone's frustration with Days on here and most make valid points, but I just don't personally find it much worse than it has been for the last 20 years or so.  It has a lot of issues, but I don't find it boring and there have been plenty of regimes and writers that have made Days boring which I think is worse than ridiculous and improbable.  I don't think Ron is particularly good, but as I have said before I do think he has some good ideas.  The execution just fails more often than not.    I really think if Days could figure out how to edit/pace stories correctly it would seem so much better.  It feels like a shoestring budget show while GH still feels like a real production with money.

[Contessa Donatella]

More agreement, plain & simple. 

[Faulkner]

DAYS has never been a show I’ve loved, even though I watched (and was entertained by) the first Reilly era. Soaps already require a healthy bit of suspension of disbelief even when they are more grounded. Sci-fi/fantasy breaks the spell for me, especially when the sci-fi rules are so often inconsistently applied. It’s not like watching something like Doctor Who, which can be silly but is a contained story that breezes by in an hour and dazzles you enough with wit and cleverness that you don’t consider the logical inconsistencies. 

For me, RC lazily uses sci-fi as an out when he can’t come up with compelling story complications. Let’s have people run around in masks and pretend to be other people in order to break up couples instead of organic conflict rooted in story. Nothing is believable or worth getting invested in. And it doesn’t help that the show is so shoddily made.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Faulkner

[j swift]

It's an exceptionally silly detail that the ladies are in their white outfits in the cryo-pods.

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[MichaelGL]

^THIS

[Soapsuds]

Spot on!

But when has Ron Carlivati ever written a compelling story on Days?

Edited February 22, 2023 by Soapsuds

[ranger1rg]

I have to agree. Carlivati is a gimmick writer, whether it's laziness or a lack of imagination or both. For me, these gimmicks overwhelm anything good we might see, and we always know another gimmick is right around the corner.

[Vee]

It's true. And I don't have a problem with sci-fi on soaps in doses, or with craziness or camp. I've defended a lot of Ron's wilder stories on OLTL or GH (like the gay marriage fest on OLTL which was ahead of its time, or the 1968 time travel arc which was fun and above all short). But there has to be roots in character, and in rootable couples and their human motivations before the wilder storyline. That train left the station for Ron with most stories and characters years ago. These days he often just leans on the same bag of tricks, throws up his hands and waits for his longest-running stans to say 'it's just for fun, don't take it so seriously, it's a soap opera'. I say that a lot too! But not when everything is wall-to-wall masks or poorly handled rape or the Devil hopping 3 bodies in a week, or whatever else. That devalues the show and the genre. The key to doing weirder stories on soaps, be it sci-fi or horror or fantasy or whatever, is to ground it in character and stuff the audience already loves, believes and can buy into. DAYS doesn't do that much anymore.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Vee

[janea4old]

Okay but ... what about grieving?

[j swift]

My "rose" of the show from this week's episodes, (which were undeniably poor in terms of quality), is that unlike the past "wacky" plots, this week I appreciated the dynamic between the real and the absurd.  For example, the contrast between the cryo-pods and Anna's grief has grounded the drama in a way that was not as well balanced during the possession or the nu-Renee plots.

I realize that's not a strong defense, and I don't expect others to agree, but it was notable to me, so I wanted to share it.

[Paul Raven]

So much truth in that.

And Ron is not alone in this.

Evil twins, fake deaths,mind control etc all used to break up characters and create obstacles. So much easier than creating consistent characters whose personal flaws could be used to propel plots.

That's what old school writers had to do. It didn't always work of course but was far more believable and worth investing in.

The closest they got in those days were those ridiculous misunderstandings where one character assumed something and went off and got a divorce or had an affair when one simple conversation could have cleared things up.

[Contessa Donatella]

Lemme see if I follow ... is it the juxtaposition of "Caring Anna" making a traditional grief visit to a person in mourning with the other-worldly wacky techno-astronaut-like tubes? These are the choices we have: the one person who feels the need to reach out to Roman who she knows best of the 3 or a B-movie scifi lab probably hidden on a likely non-existing floor on the elevator? If so, I definitely get your drift & my reply, not to you, but to our higher soap power is why can't we ever have nice things?!!