Like Sand Through the Hourglass, So Are the Days of Our Lives

When I was in high school, Days of Our Lives came on from 3:00-4:00 every weekday afternoon. I got out of school at 3:10 and my sister and I would be home most days to catch the last half hour of the show (after school activities…pshaw!). It was the perfect entertainment for a melodramatic teenager: love affairs gone awry, crazy villains controlling people’s minds, unbelievable story lines. So of course, on furlough, I figured it was the perfect time to revisit these old habits.

Besides, even though it’s been 10 years since I watched the show, I should be able to catch up on all the action with a few episodes, right? Everyone knows that nothing really ever changes on a soap opera.

Well, yes and no.

Hope and Bo are still around, and although Bo is having psychic premonitions, nothing much seems to have changed. Except that Hope is now on speaking terms with Stefano, a man who, if I remember correctly, implanted a chip in her brain to make her think she was someone else, almost ruining things with Bo. What a jerk.

Some character I don't know is trying to convince a pregnant teenager to give the baby to her. Kate is ending an affair with a much-younger man after battling cancer (that’s new!). Sammy, Carrie, and Austin and their never-ending love triangle (made even more awkward by the fact that Sammy and Carrie are half-sisters) have entirely disappeared

.

And still, no one is gay. Things in Salem are complicated, but not that complicated.

If anything can speak to the nature of Days of Our Lives, I think it’s SoapCentral’s attempt at making sense of the relationships on the show. They’ve created a quite thorough set of family trees for the main families on the show. The family trees get so complicated, that they've written a key to help people better understand the relationships between characters. It looks like this:

Key
m. Married
c. Child
a. Affair
r. Rape

A category for rape? Wow. They don't have a category for what happens when someone is born after Stefano creates a baby with stolen egg and sperm, but I guess that’s probably another discussion entirely.

The familiarity of Days was a bit comforting, I have to admit—the melodramatic story lines, the familiar faces, the fact that nothing, ever, really happens in a single episode. And at the end of the episode, listening to the same theme song they used ten years ago, watching the hourglass spinning as the credits rolled by, I could be thankful that no matter how bad my life was, it was always a little better than the mess I had just witnessed.