DAYS: When SORAS Goes Bad – Not Age Appropriate

T I remember the good old days when a kid was born on a soap opera, we’d see the baby for about a month, then no baby. The baby was always with the sitter or nanny, always heard but not seen. After a few years of the child always being outside, with a friend, or in the holiday episode, then said child was sent away to boarding school. Usually coming home for the holidays only a couple of years older, until that blessed day when little Joey or

Tommy comes home as a teenager that has been kicked out of boarding school. Then we get to see high school Tommy with all that teenage angst that we all know and love, and then depending on the storyline or the actor, we either get to keep the same high school kid for many years, or the kid goes away again and in a year or so, teenage Tommy comes home once again as a full grown adult.

Now, we get a baby, then months later that baby is a toddler. It doesn’t stop there though, within months of being a toddler, that kid starts elementary school, maybe even middle school. In the case of Days of Our Lives, just a month ago, Theo, Ciara and Chase were all 12, now suddenly they are all 15.

They are the same age as Joe Johnson even though he was just kicked out of boarding school months before T,C and C became high school students. Now, I realize this is a soap and we have to suspend reality, but come on, with everything going on in Salem right now, do we need a new crop of teenage angst with new teenagers?

I mean, do we really care about Joe, Ciara, Chase or Theo? I don’t think so. What with Hope sinking into depression and madness, Bo dying, when we just got him back, and let’s not forget we have crazy Andre DiMera back. Salem has a lot going on, we really don’t need a high school story, especially since I don’t think DOOL has a big teenage audience.

These days, kids are much more likely to watch “reality” TV, so having a high school storyline isn’t necessary. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I’ve already started fast forwarding every time I see Joe, Chase and Theo. I only watch Ciara when she has scenes with her parents, but I still hang on to the remote just in case.

I don’t mean to be petty, it’s just that there are only 4 soaps left, and if they are going to continue, we need better storylines and I think the writers should cater to the loyal watchers who have been with them for years. I already had to mourn the loss of As the World Turns, and I really thought I would never recover when All My Children was cancelled.

I’m appealing to the Days of Our Lives writers to please bring back old characters like Sami or Stephanie, bring EJ back, but for goodness sake, don’t waste time on the teenage storyline.

Send them off to college in a couple weeks, and recast them again as adults if you must, just please don’t make us all suffer through teenage angst, it’s boring. I know that it’s tempting to want to do a bullying storyline, but since there are only 4 soaps left, you should know, that they already did a fine cyber bully storyline on The Young and the Restless, we don’t need to see it again.

We get it, bullying is bad, cyber bullying is worse. I’m just saying, there are enough things going on in Salem right now, having a teenage storyline will just be a distraction that no one wants.