Days Of Our Lives

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Days of our Lives is one of the world’s longest-running soap operas, having been on air in the United States since 1965. Created by husband-and-wife team Ted Corday and Betty Corday, the show combined the hospital soap opera with the family serial drama, with most early stories written by William J. Bell. The show began in half-hour episodes before switching to the familiar hour format in 1975.

Days of our Lives initially featured a family of doctors, The Hortons, led by Tom, who was Chief of Internal Medicine at Salem University Hospital. Set in the Middle America town of Salem, the show’s exact location remains unknown, with a US State never having been mentioned in addition to the town’s name. Tom and his wife Alice, a homemaker, had five children, and in addition to the Hortons families such as the Hunters, Bannings, Andersons and Merritts were added to increase interaction and allow for more complex plots. Over the decades the show has gone through various central theme changes, with the seventies pioneering for soap operas with risqué storylines, and the nineties taking a step further with supernatural-based threads (proving much less popular). Believability has become a problem for the show, with Jack Deveraux (Matthew Ashford) having recovered from death three times.

Despite the general consensus in recent years finding Days of our Lives to be farfetched and implausible, with its increasingly extreme story lines, the show was credited with a realistic and true portrayal of contemporary American life when it first appeared. A Daytime Emmy (excellence in American daytime television programming) winner for “Outstanding Daytime Drama Series” in 1978, the show was awarded “Best Drama” by the Writers Guild of America in 2000.