Yesterday two long-time stars of Days of Our Lives (the only soap I bother to watch) left due to massive budget cuts. Deidre Hall joined the show in 1976, and played Marlena Evans Black. She left the show briefly for prime-time series Our House, which ran for two years, but then returned to Days. Drake Hogestyn joined in 1986 and played John Black. These two created one of the best (and longest lasting) supercouples in soap history.
The soap opera format may go the way of the brokerage firm, with only one or two surviving. The highest-rated soap is The Young and the Restless, but even it now draws approximately 5 million viewers, when soaps used to get as many as 30 million viewers for a big event (such as Luke and Laura's wedding on General Hospital).
Days has hit a real tsunami of bad news. One is the aging of the population who tend to watch soaps, and the fact that the demographic trends are not going the way the advertisers would like. Talk shows have become more popular and are cheaper to produce (there are very long cast lists for soap operas). Days is the only soap on NBC, so there are no soaps around it to draw viewers. The economy has forced some traditional soap advertisers to rethink whether that's the best place to spend their ad dollars. And a lot of people now watch their soaps either via their DVR or on YouTube where they can either bypass the ads or there aren't any at all.
I think in Days' case, and in the case of some other soaps as well, there are other factors at work. One is the aging of the stars on the show. I hate to say that, because I think Drake is still handsome even though he's in his mid-50's and Deidre is still a beautiful lady. But what happens in soaps with cast members who have been around a while is that they tend to end up in supercoupleship, their soap "kids" are grown, and there's not as much you can do with the characters. Look at Bo and Hope and Steve and Kayla -- they tend to end up as background because there's really nothing else you can do with the characters that hasn't been done at least twice before. (People can only die and come back to life so many times!) But Days has an even bigger problem, and that is that lately it has been the victim of really bad writing. I've been trying to hang in with this show because I've watched it for years, and particularly because I wanted to see John and Marlena through to the bitter end. However, the writing on this show is just horrible, and as I've always said about movies, if you don't have good writing then nothing else matters. You could throw all the pretty people and money you want at it and it won't work.
Speaking of pretty people, though, I want to put in a good word for some of the hunks on this show, namely Eric Martsolf, Jay Kenneth Johnson, and Shawn Christian. I sincerely hope that these guys get prime-time gigs or go on to something else bigger and better when and if Days ends its run. (JKJ has already appeared occasionally on Scrubs as a gynecologist.) There are some good actors and actresses on this show and it's a pity that the writing is so bad, but they always try to do the best they can with the drivel they're given.
So goodbye and good luck to Drake and Deidre, and to Days, I wish you good luck, tons of ad revenue, and better writers. :-)
