DC ExtraTime: "This is the True Story" Inside The Sands of The Hourglass...

BY DC CUEVA                        

■ @DC408DXTR  @ IG/YT/SC/TB/TK

If there is a bright spot to what has been a dark year of 2020, it has been that more & more of us have been spending our time at home at all hours of the day, working and getting educated virtually in addition to the usual routines we have to start our day and then when we would usually get home from work and school until it's time for lights out. It has seen internet usage skyrocket to new heights thanks to technology keeping us all connected, and viewing in television dayparts have increased also.

If you are one of those who are obsessed with reality television like we are here, then you know that part of the genre we love is influenced by daytime soap operas and the experience that Mary-Ellis Bunim had producing them before joining documentary producer Jon Murray to create their production arm that has brought us The Real World, The Challenge, Keeping Up with The Kardashians and other iconic reality shows. Much of what you see on those shows and everything else in the reality genre are influenced by daytime soaps: the arcs, the characters and the pacing of episodes are all influenced by that genre.

The soap opera genre is officially known as "serial drama" in having storylines that continue from episode to episode every weekday... and of course, the moniker comes from these shows being sponsored & produced by companies that market popular soap brands. It may not have the kind of large appeal and ratings that it once had as talk shows, courtroom-based series and other program genres have taken over the late-morning and afternoon time periods. But watching the soaps remains a favorite for the at-home housewives after all these years, with a few of them still on air decades after they began airing during the golden age of television.

Something that's been as much a decades-long staple of NBC as Today, The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, Dateline and its Olympic coverage has been Days of Our Lives, which began airing on the Peacock back in November 1965, and is into its 56th year as its longest-running scripted series. Days has documented generations of the Horton, Brady and DiMera families in the fictional town of Salem with the many twists and turns that have gone down there. And every soap opera fan has grown up with the little-changed title sequence voiced by the series' patriarch MacDonald Carey: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives."