One day last week I happened to catch a few minutes of Days of Our Lives. In one of the scenes I saw, Dr. Marlena Evans (played by Deidre Hall, who was fired from the show a couple of years ago but has evidently been rehired) was confronting her villainous daughter, Sami, about something or other, which provoked accusations from Sami that Marlena cared about no one but herself and her lover, John Black.
This scene could have been taken from virtually any episode of the series since about 1993. There's nothing especially noteworthy about that, seeing as how most soap opera story lines are best measured in geologic time. What I did find surprising--what I found, in fact, downright eerie--was the fact that no performer employed on the show seems to have aged a single solitary day in the last 20 years.
Marlena, Sami, Kate Roberts, Dr. Lexie Carver--they all continue to sport their Clinton-era faces. At first, I figured this feat must have required some combination of surgical intervention and soft focus, but even the non-babe characters--your Abe Carvers, your Victor Kiriakises--look exactly the same as they always have, and I can't see them going under the knife to preserve their looks. The only explanation I can muster is that the rapid aging rates of the show's young characters, who often enter their teens a handful of years after they're born, has somehow screwed with the space-time continuum and arrested the movement of those sands in the hourglass.
I expect it feels like a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you never have to age. On the other, you spend your whole life acting out the same scenes with the same faces. Sort of like purgatory, but with more evil twins.
You steal your thoughts from my head.
Posted by: BFF | January 25, 2012 at 12:23 AM