Days of Our Lives Review 2024 Tv Show Series Season Cast Crew Online

Soaps are a guilty pleasure; they’re escapism and take many of us back to a time decades ago when we watched tv with our grandmothers. (Sometimes we were too young to understand what was happening.). Ryan’s Hope was an early favorite, then Guiding Light became an after-school ritual.

Sadly, there are only four soaps left, and for the past ten or fifteen years Days has been my favorite (though General Hospital rarely makes me groan in disappontment). As an agnostic, I was aware of Days’ Christian leanings, but it only seemed to take center stage on holidays and never overly intrusively. I mean, how better to describe a dead character’s reentrance than “a Christmas miracle?”

The latest storyline: The Return of Demonic Possession is a desperate attempt to recapture magic and ratings from the mid 1990s, when the show was at the height of its popularity. In recent years, Days’ ratings have dipped but the writing has been relatively strong (soapwise) and, more importantly, mostly rooted in reality. Sure, there is the occasional character who returns from the dead, but, hey, actors leave and come back, right? Contracts are messy.

But one has to really work to suspend disbelief to buy into Marlena’s possession. And who wants to work that hard for escapism? What’s more disturbing than the idea of Satan in a pants suit and a shag haircut is that it’s not one storyline; it’s a guiding philosophy that’s bleeding into every corner of the show. A minor character recently made a disparaging and ham-handed political comment about her voting preferences. It’s the most blatant political reference I can remember hearing on any soap opera-indeed any show that’s not actively pushing a philosophical agenda.

The viewer can’t help but be aware that every single character on the show is buying into the same philosophy: the writers’ rampant fundamentalist, Hobby Lobbyist tendencies. Bad writing is when every single character sounds exactly the same. There are white, black, Latino, straight and gay characters on the show, but I can’t think of a single non-Christian character. There was for a brief time a very minor Jewish character, but she was a devil’s advocate, a Puck: conniving, irritating, and unpleasant. There was no effort to dignify or humanize her. Even the characters on the show who don’t ordinarily wear their lifestyles on their sleeves are rolling over and accepting the God versus evil plot turn. One “secular” and supposedly scientific character (a doctor) who has never mentioned religion before refers to herself as an inherent Christian as she accepts the concept of a devil running loose in her town (and in her friend).

The drama plays as sophomorically as Johnny DiMera’s drama ABOUT the drama with plenty of cheeky devil puns and horror movie references. It’s not eerie just because you keep reminding us that we should be frightened. What’s discordant is having a show’s entire raison d’être pulled out from under us overnight. If we’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or reading an Anne Rice novel, we expect things to get supernatural. When we watch a soap opera in Anytown, USA (Dark Shadows excluded) and expect our daily dose of adultery, lies, and betrayals, and things suddenly turn, uh, demonic, it’s not scary. It’s just weird.

The writers may have miscalculated the breadth of an audience for a show that appeals to one demographic. When I was a child I watched Davey and Goliath until I realized I was being proselytized and the characters suddenly weren’t very cute anymore. If Days wants to be a religious pamphlet dressed up as entertainment, many people will walk out on the sermon.

The creative team needs to bury this nonsense deeper and more permanently than some of the “dead” villains they recently zombified. Then, like magic, my 1-and-a-half star rating goes back up 1 or 2 notches. There’s your Christmas miracle.