Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 17:58:06 -0400 
From: Liz Fox <lf01+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: DOOL History
Distribution: na


DAYS OF OUR LIVES

from "Soap World"  by Robert La Guardia 1983 (printed without permission)


Last spring Susan Seaforth Hayes gave a stirring speech when she
received an award for achievement in daytime television during a
gathering of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

"I practically grew up with you," she said, addressing members of Days
of Our Lives, tears streaming from her eyes.  "You were there during the
most improtant moments of my life.  Mac and Frances, you were like my
second mother and father.  I fell in love with my leading man.  Wes
Kenney, our producer, came to my wedding.  You beautiful people - you
are my family!"

It was an emotional moment as Susan summed up what Days of Our Lives has
always been for the core cast:  a place to call home,a family. 
Countless viewers feel the same way about the show and could also burst
into tears at the very thought of it, especially the way it was during
its ragingly successful years, the late sixties and early seventiees. 
Days was and still is the epitome of old-fashioned family soap opera,
but  with unique elements that enable it to appeal to the modern soap
opera viewer.

BACKGROUND
 
Days of Our Lives had its roots in radio and early television soap
opera, in the dramas of Irna Phillips, like The Guiding Light and As The
World Turns, which Ted Corday had directed for years and controlled in
partnership with Irna.  Ted Corday was not a writer but had an
extraordinary instinct for the look and feel of a genuine soap.  His
concept for Days of Our Lives was an accurate, creative statement
summing up all of his years behind the scenes of bestselling soaps.

When Betty and Ted Corday first came to Hollywood in 1964, they set up a
production company with Columbia Pictures and created and produced their
first soap  opera, Morning Star.  That show failed after six months, but
Ted and Betty were already devising  his next Corday Productions soap
for NBC, with some assistance from his old partner Irna Phillips and
Writer/director Allan Chase.  An hourglass motif was invented and Irna
Phillips came up with an epigraph:  "Like sands through the hourglass,
so are the days of our lives" - a clever way of incorporating the show's
title into a statement.  During those months Ted Corday worked hard to
develop the kind of show he wanted and was the main creative force
behind it.  "I remember Irna Phillips came to California once to meet
with us all, but I don't think she had much more to do with the show," 
says Joe Behar, who directed the pilot and has been with the show ever
since.  "As far as I knew, Ted was the man who made all the decisions."

Ted Corday was very much the authoritarian male, which is probably why
Days of Our Lives had a One Man's Family feel about it and why Dr. Tom
Horton was his most important Character.  The part went to Macdonald
Carey, who was at that time, the first movie star to join the cast of a
television soap. (Interestingly, his career had begun on radio on soaps
such as Stella Dallas.)  Ted cast the other parts and conducted the
first rehearsals with characteristic meticulousness and an obsessive
love for realism.  Joe Behar recalls that one of Ted's suggestions in
the early days was for everyone to call the actors by their charcter
nams rather than their real ones, undoubtedly an idiosyncrasy that Ted
inherited from Irna.

Days of Our Lives premiered on November 8, 1965, and suffered from poor
ratings for more than a year.  Ted, who had been seriously ill for some
time, persevered against the burden of failing health and what appeared
to be an indifferent audience to his show.  Less than a year after the
premiere, not knowing if the program would succeed, Ted Corday died.  He
left behind  him not only the legacy of DOOL  but one of the most
brilliant careers in broadcasting.  His widow, Betty, had to take over
as executive producer of the show while caring for their two sons. 
Things couldn't have been worse.  The network was beginning to talk
about cancellation.

In 1967, Betty Corday hired WIlliam Bell as the new head writer.  Like
Ted, Bill Bell's roots also went back to Irna Phillips and Chicago; in
fact, Bell still lived there.  He had written dialogue with Irna for a
number of her soaps, including GL and ATWT, and collaborated with her on
AW.  The problem with DOOL, when Bell first became head writer, may have
beem that it was too mild at a time when audiences were discovering sex
and bizarre psychology in other media.  What William Bell did was to
bring the sexual rage of the novels and movies of the time to Ted
Corday's new Oakdale of the sixties, then included special fantasies of
his own.  Bell's version of DOOL was exactly right.  The new show went
high in the Nielsens and stayed there for the next eight years.

After William Bell left DOOL to create Y&R in 1973, his former
sub-writer, Pat Falken Smith, took over as head writer for several
years.  On January 22, 1976 Time magazine put Susan Seaforth Hayes and
Bill Hayes on its cover and  in the story on the soaps ("Sex and
Suffering in the Afternoon") called DOOL the best soap.  It was a
wonderful morale boost for the cast and good for the soap world in
general but, ironically, for the first time in years DOOL had already
begun to lose its hold on the audience.  The fault seemed to be NBC's;
after DOOL had expanded to an hour in 1975, the network had
counterprogrammed it against the newly expanded ATWT, whose viewers had
always been fiercely loyal, but the truth is that DOOL was having the
same problem as other soaps which originated in the sixties.  The
demographic makeup of the audience itself was changing.  The show now
had to face a quandary:  how  much of the old show, if any, did it have
to discard (along with some of its loyal fans) in order to attract the
millions of new and younger vioews out there?  

DOOL is still a family soap opera run by a family (Ken Corday has
recently joined  the show as one of the producers) - a family that cares
deeply about its own roots and its creation, carried on from generation
to generation.  It is therefore unlikely that the Cordays will ever drop
the Horton family and the core themes, abandoning millions of older
fans, and do what ABC did with General Hospital [how ironic - this was
published 8 years ago and this line still holds true!].  But they have
nevertheless chosen a middle ground of moderate change.  For the past
six years DOOL has been speeding up the pace of scenes, introducing many
new young characters and spicing the story lines with more action.  The
Hortons are still the true heart of the show, and a great tradition has
been intelligently maintained.  Now numberless viewers still receive
reassurance from the sands of time in the opening hourglass
introduction, which still seems to say something about the importance of
continuity in families, fiction and life itself.