Soap opera Days of Our Lives’ move online creates a family drama

For the first time since 1965, the US soap opera did not appear on NBC this week, as it made the switch to a streaming platform.

The Days of Our Lives cast in 2014. Picture: NBC

Like many of its leading characters, the US soap opera Days of Our Lives has frequently seemed close to death only to revive in the sunshine of daytime television.

Yet for some devoted viewers this is the end of the road. On Monday, for the first time since 1965, the soap opera no longer appeared on NBC but instead on a streaming platform.

“I will miss it,” wrote a lady in Ohio, on a fan message board. “It has been part of my life for many, many years.”

Another said it had been “passed down from generation to generation and remained on NBC even after all other soaps were cancelled”. Now “some of those greatest longest fans will say goodbye”.

Yet the departure of Days to the streaming platform Peacock also prompted a flurry of activity.

Days of Our Lives veterans Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn. Picture: NBC

Deidre Hall and Thaao Penghlis on set. Picture: NBC Studios

Elizabeth Capobianco, 35, a nurse from North Carolina, flew 800km to her grandmother’s home on Long Island to install the streaming service so that she would not miss an episode. Because her grandmother’s television was rather old “it was a little more complicated than I expected,” she said. Her grandmother Sidnee, who is 81, asked how she would record the show. “I had to explain that they live here for ever. You don’t have to worry about running out of space. If you want to go back and watch an episode from three months ago, you can. It’s a whole new world for her.”

Sidnee typically watched the show at noon, and Capobianco had not yet heard from her. But because the show is now available from 6am each day, fans of the show she follows on Twitter began posting messages about the new episode early on Monday.

Days of Our Lives star Matthew Ashford.

On a Facebook group, new streamers exchanged questions and advice about this new world. “It’s weird,” wrote one in Florida. “There is a narrator telling the audience how the characters are looking, feeling and what they are going to do. Has this happened to anyone else?”

It had, said Nancy Hussey in Rhode Island. “Maybe it’s just the way it is?”

“Go to settings,” someone else replied. “We’ve had to do this.”

To make matters worse for some viewers, Friday’s final episode on broadcast TV was cut short at a crucial moment. Gabi, one of the main characters, was in the family crypt telling her dead lover that she was moving on when NBC cut to Charles III’s first official address.

– The Times