Deidre Hall Chats About DAYS Comeback
Deidre Hall’s onscreen return to Days of Our Lives can’t come soon enough. In an interview with We Love Soaps, Hall discusses her return to Salem, her book Deidre Hall’s Kitchen Close-Up and the return to family values at DAYS.
WE LOVE SOAPS TV: When you mention the core value of the old DAYS, which DAYS are you referring to? The show has gone through so many creative transformations from reality based storytelling to supernatural fantasies. Which do you think viewers want to see?
Deidre Hall: It’s family at its core. It’s Alice’s kitchen. It’s multigenerational stories. It’s sitting your kids down and wagging your finger at them. It’s listening to your grandchildren. It’s standing by your husband when he can’t stand for himself. It’s the loyalty, the dedication, and the comfort we are longing for right now. It’s those kinds of values.
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15 January 2009
2 hours 25 min
@ConqueringBlue: As my grandma would say "Right on the money honey!"
The fact is and you can quote me on this is that when soaps get away from the traditional storytelling the OUT THERE story telling will only take you so far. Because you see you have too keep upping the outrageous plots just to try and keep people interested. Along the way you have moved squarely away from character-driven story to plot-driven madness. So you end up writing to the next "event." It may get you a few more eye-balls in the short-term and has in the past, but in the long run those viewers become bored with the show when as you say they can today get better in primetime with less commitment. That means those viewers mostly are not the ones who fell in love with the show and its families and characters, but just tuned in to see the craziness and the outrageous plots. And when they are done with that or have seen enough they go away.
But the long-term fans the ones who care about the characters and know their histories are the ones left trying to put the pieces back together of a broken soap that has lost its way just for the sake of ratings. Which has often destoryed characters and has decimated history.
But all one needs to do is look at the greats and when a soap was ailing, what did they do? Return it to the model that got the genre popular in the first place and the fans enjoyed that.
If anyone needs any further education here the gods can tell you for themselves.
Bill Bell: http://bit.ly/pG6VQo
Agnes Nixon: http://bit.ly/nEaNc2
And for whom it may concern! I only quote the greats not the second rates!
14 June 2009
10 hours 8 min
ghdoolfan you hit the nail on the head. I am not interested in turning back the clock on days and suddenly it is 1973. What I want is for the show to be more character driven and that the characters are written in a realistic less black and white way. Have Bo or Roman have to make a tough moral decision and be wrong. Have Stephano give EJ's heart to save Brady. Have Carrie and Austin and Sami redux where Carrie does something to Sami this time. Give Austin a real choice this time. Maybe he would like the strong independent Sami instead of the goody goody Carrie. (That happened one time when Steve and Alice returned to Another World and that time he chose Rachel.) John has to choose to save Marlena or Brady. Will figures out he is gay and is torn between his new love and feelings he has had for Chad all along. Chad rejects Will out of hand and continues dating Abbey but secretly returns Will's feelings. Things like this. Those things can be just as exciting for the viewer but also be worth thinking and talking about.