Daytime Drama

It's not my drama. I swear to you. I've been home sick all day with a fever and will be home for most of the day tomorrow. I'll have to pull myself out of bed to take X-man to school and to take him to an appointment at 2 p.m., but other than that I've been in bed - sweating. It's been pretty gross but it's not dramatic.

The drama part comes in the fact that I decided to download the NBC app for my iPad. I don't watch a hell of a lot of TV. Well, okay, I watch Castle and Grey's Anatomy... and that's it. Castle I'm fairly addicted to. Grey's I watch when I have time. Since I do all of my viewing online, I had only downloaded the ABC app. Well, today I was a bit desperate because I had the fever on and off all day and I was uncomfortable and sweaty and sad about missing all the things I was going to do AND being home when the weather was so beautiful outside.

Anyway, when I downloaded the NBC app, I was hoping to find a host of new shows that I've never seen before to try. I tried something called Suburgatory. It has this guy from She's All That and the Series Finale of Dawson's Creek in it. Except now, he's near 40 and has a teenage daughter of his own. That creeped me out. But I watched an episode. And, um, no.

The only other thing that caught my eye was the fact that Days of Our Lives is on the app. I didn't even know it was still on TV. And, yes, I know you might find this shocking and kind of inappropriate, but I watched Days of Our Lives pretty religiously from 1987 until 1989. I had a "super couple" that I liked. Then when the girl part of my super couple left, I felt that I'd only watch the Monday and Friday episodes because that's when everything important happens anyway. I did that until 1992 or so. Then I stopped all together.

What was strange was that all the same characters were still on. And I had a hard time imagining them all in the same gig for 22 years. So I started googling. And it was fascinating. That apparently there's someone new at the soap opera that's trying to bring back the old characters to bring back the fan base. That is -- people my age who grew up watching Days and would remember Jack and Jennifer, Billie and Bo and Lucas and Sami, etc., and may be home with their children now...

I find it all very curious. Mostly because I'm looking at people who have had so much darn plastic surgery and botox that they're all really odd looking.  Marlena looks more like her grandson's mother than grandmother. And the mother looks more like a sister. And I'm sure if I spent more time researching I'd find that the characters are really only 10 years apart from the actors playing their 18-24 year old children.

So I watched a couple of episodes. I had to fast forward through some parts. And I mourned a bit, the characters that I liked way back in my tween years... and then I wandered over to YouTube. Where I could see clips of my super couple. And what I found was -- hilarious. For two reasons, one, the couple I liked was rarely somber. They fought most of the time. He was a total neanderthal, and she was equally as hard headed. And like all pre-Buffy TV, he, as a police officer, had to sweep in and save her, as a nosy reporter, over and over and over again. I swear that woman got knocked out by a faint breath in her direction. Frail though she might physically have been, she was rather -- feisty.

When they weren't arguing and doing round-the-world soap opera craziness, they were having sex. They had a lot of sex. Probably not something an 11 year old should have been recording every day in middle school on her VCR kind of sex. They laughed and joked when they had sex. It was very loving and cute. Fight, make up, laugh. Get knocked out by evil guys.  Fight, make up, laugh. Swear undying love. Fight, make up, laugh. Get blackmailed. Fight, make up, laugh. Get revisited by former wives/husbands long since thought dead. Fight, make up, laugh. Accidentally shoot the other one. Fight, make up, laugh.

Until I came across this scene, which I had totally forgotten. (I still don't remember it, but now I've watched it and can't get the horror out of my head.) I'm kind of glad that at 11 I totally did not understand what I was seeing. Sure, it's a daytime version of it and it was the days of Depeche Mode's Master and Servant song. But um... wow.

The actor who played the cop 20 years ago has now been morphed into this weird non-emotional, secret agent character with an entirely different name. I liked him better when he was stupid and overly male. At least then he had a sense of humor and wasn't creepy (except for that scene that I linked above).

So that ends my foray into Daytime TV. I really should have been outside exercising that five hours a week. But hey, teenage hormones make you watch some really crazy stuff. (Speaking of, did you know you can download the pilot to 21 Jumpstreet at the iTunes store for free?) When I was 12, I had Johnny Depp on my wall. I'll admit it. Everyone else had Bon Jovi or the New Kids. I had Johnny Depp. And I feel okay about that decision, even now. ;-)