


“It’s nostalgic and I find comfort in it,” she continues. “We hear the music and it makes me think of my mom,” Carranza says. When her mother passed away in 1992, just as Gina had given birth to her own daughter, she repeated the tradition of watching "Days" with her baby. Gina Carranza, 45, of Leesburg, Virginia, began watching "Days" with her mother in 1970, at the tender age of one. Thirteen-year-old Camryn says, “it’s good mother-daughter time.” And her husband Mike, 50, “loves the escape that the crazy story lines offer.” “It is one of my best memories of her,” Lang says, who records the show and watches either at night or on the weekend with her daughter and husband.

Lisa Lang, 46, of Roxbury, New Jersey, started watching "Days of Our Lives" as a high school student in 1983 as a way to spend time with her grandmother.

It’s not stardom, it’s true intimacy and it’s true support,” she says.įor viewers, watching the show is often a family affair passed from one generation to the next. “But the American public has had a chance to know my character and my husband’s for thousands of hours in thousands of situations. She explains that a typical film star with four movies to her credit might produce 8 or 10 hours of entertainment. Hayes, who started on the show in 1968 playing Julie Olson, eldest grandchild of the original matriarch and patriarch, is now, with her real-life and on-camera husband Bill Hayes, one of the show's elder power couples. Susan Seaforth Hayes, 72, the only actress to have appeared on "Days of Our Lives" for all six decades of production, points out the sheer amount of time that she has shared with her viewers. “You are embraced literally by the show and you embrace it.” These people become your family, “ says Dwight Blocker Bowers, curator in the museum's division of music, sports and entertainment. “Daytime dramas come into your home every day. The crew also pledged to provide elements of the show’s opening sequence, including the iconic two-feet-tall hourglass and the original audio tape of late cast member MacDonald Carey saying, “like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”Īmong the reasons fans cite for their loyalty is a kinship with characters and the escape from reality provided by the far-fetched, exotic stories. The donation was organized as part of an on-going partnership the museum has with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “love, lust and drama,” marked by episode 12,714 airing today, members of the "Days" cast and crew gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to donate show scripts and props to the National Museum of American History. Credited with creating intimate, family-like characters and compelling story arcs involving groundbreaking social issues, "Days" claim millions of viewers in more than 25 countries each weekday.
DAYS OF MY LIFE SOAP OPERA SERIES
More than 70 series have aired since the 1960s, and "Days" is just one of four remaining on the air. Somehow managing to endure for five decades and five generations of the fictitious Horton, Brady and DiMera families, "Days of our Lives," NBC’s longest scripted daytime drama, is, in fact, your grandmother’s soap opera.
