It seems almost ironic that the opening title monologue for the long-running series Days of Our Lives speaks of "sands through the hourglass". In truth, as it approaches its 50th anniversary, there is something glacial and unchanging about US television's second-oldest surviving daytime soap opera.
It began on November 8, 1965, in an America which, largely, no longer exists. Two years earlier another long-stayer, General Hospital, had premiered. Created by Ted and Betty Corday, Days spent its first decades building a family credential on the immutable love of Dr Tom Horton (MacDonald Carey) and his wife Alice (Frances Reid).
Despite births, deaths and many, many marriages, the Horton family survives as the show's central focus five decades later, its family tree peppered with memorable characters, from early bad girl Julie (Susan Seaforth Hayes) to her far more proper policewoman daughter, Hope (Kristian Alfonso).
Leaning back in a deep, cushioned sofa, in the dressing room she has inhabited since 1974, the show's longest-serving cast member Suzanne Rogers – better known as Salem's salt of the earth Maggie Horton – acknowledges the show's traditional values are very present in its storytelling.
"We are going at such a pace that we're missing all of the delicateness of what our life used to be," Rogers, now 72, says. "The sweet moments that our life has in it, even today, but everyone around us is going so fast that we can't share them with someone else."
Even though the show has modernised – in soap opera terms, that typically means plots involving international espionage, the sinister schemes of supervillains, such as Stefano (Joseph Mascolo) and Andre DiMera (Thaao Penghlis) – it still clings to traditions such as the Horton family gathering around their Christmas tree each year to place ornaments on it.
"You've got to know where you came from and you've got to know the experiences that all of your families or your relatives or your friends went through in order to learn what to do for the future," Rogers says. "Why do we love to watch old movies? It brings up something in us that maybe we have forgotten."
Few actresses spend four decades in a single role. "You go through these ebbs and tides all the time, it's like a rollercoaster," Rogers says.
There are also frequent opportunities to shape the narrative, as Rogers did when she was diagnosed in 1984 with the muscle disorder myasthenia gravis. A year later Maggie contracted the same illness. "It takes a toll but that's what I think acting is," Rogers says. "I think acting is delving in all these dark places. If you don't feel it, the audience will not feel it."
Across Days' 50-year lifespan, some storylines have been more memorable than others, notably the love triangle between Roman Brady (Wayne Northrop, later Josh Taylor), Dr Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) and John Black (Drake Hogestyn). Evans would go on to be possessed by a demon, and become a pawn in Stefano DiMera's endless schemes to bring ruin to the people of Salem.
Days also pioneered the idea of "supercouples", fashioning memorable pairings out of the eccentric Eugene (John de Lancie) and Calliope (Arleen Sorkin), the suave Anna (Leann Hunley) and Tony (Thaao Penghlis) and what is arguably the show's most successful pairing Bo (Peter Reckell) and Hope (Kristian Alfonso).
"I think we all have characters that we want to root for and stories that evolve with the times," the show's executive producer, Greg Meng, says. "We push the envelope on some of those things [as we] did recently with gay marriage. Not that others haven't done it but we took it all the way through and made it a big deal."
Nonetheless, Meng notes that Days endures because it has a "strong core based on strong midwestern family values."
Those values are "constantly tested", he says. "And we've [re]-defined family ... family who we choose to be with, family can be more than blood or whatever. And in the end, love conquers all. When we stick with that basic formula, involving characters we want to root for, I think that's part of our longevity."
There is also an intangible nostalgia in play, cosying up to a format on television which is largely unchanged since its birth, in stark contrast to elsewhere on the dial where programs are churned like a merry-go-round. Daytime soap operas are frequently criticised for a failure to evolve, but they are that rare television format where evolution is risky.
Part of the charm in Days is a lineage which connects the show's present storylines to its genesis, and the presence of characters such as Maggie, Marlena and Andre, who have been woven and re-woven into its narrative across the decades.
"I think there's tremendous value [in sentimentality]," Meng says. "I know 16-year-old kids watching reruns of Gilligan's Island which they've just discovered, and their parents are watching because they have fond memories of those characters."
Marking the anniversary, Meng says, is a delicate dance.
"We felt we had to acknowledge the 50th anniversary, of course, but we're not looking at it as a be-all-end-all, it's just a great other mile marker that we're hitting," he says. "It's really designed to hit the 50th but [also] go beyond. It just gets better and better.
What
Days of Our Lives
When
Arena, Tuesday, 12.45pm
