More than Bold: on exploring the soaps cancelled in the 2000s

 

I.                Branching out

For years, I followed only one daytime soap: Bold and the Beautiful, which I began watching in 2010. For most of those years, I was aware that other soaps existed, and I did stay on top of news about them, but I never bothered to sit down and make a study. That all changed in 2021. After CBS announced that Krista Allen would be taking over the role of Taylor Hayes on Bold, I saw in one of the Bold forums that a poster had put up a YouTube link to some of Allen's scenes in the 1998 season of Days of Our Lives. The link led me to Days YouTube, and there I discovered the entire 1998 season, which I devoured. Remember, this was the period of 'working from home', when you could, free of supervision, let YouTube playlists go on for hours and hours, and witness the unfolding on YouTube of a soap season, 250 episodes long, in all its sprawling glory.

 

One favourite channel owner of mine had uploaded hundreds of episodes of Days from the eighties and nineties, and even though most of the selections were biased towards the Days supercouple John Black and Marlena Evans (the owner was a huge fan of John and Marlena), the voluminous playlists helped me gain a comprehension of the Days saga, which is massive. The trouble was that the poster became a little too enthusiastic; she uploaded too many episodes and then attracted the attention of NBC who put pressure on Google; and after checking my list of subscriptions one morning, I found that her channel had been deleted. The lesson is that if you want to run a pirate channel, you need to fly under the radar.

 

One good outcome was that I had discovered that there were other great soaps besides Bold, which had been going downhill by my estimation since around 2019. Following the trend of soaps of the 2010s, a trend that was one of decrepitude and decline, Bold had deteriorated to such an extent that I had nearly become disenchanted with the daytime genre itself. Fortunately, my discovery of Days restored my faith. And after that experience, I became curious to know if there were other good soaps. Looking through the message boards, I found many references to long-running soaps that had been cancelled, and these hints led me to research further.

 

What I discovered is that a hierarchy exists. On the A-list, we see four daytime soaps that have been running for thirty to sixty years, soaps that are still running today despite poor ratings: Bold, which began in 1987, and Bold's sister show Young and the Restless, in 1973, both broadcast by CBS; and Days (NBC), which began in 1965, and General Hospital (ABC), in 1963.                        

 

In the second tier we find what I call the AAAGO soaps: AAAGO is an acronym of All My Children (ABC), Another World (NBC), As the World Turns (CBS), Guiding Light (CBS), and One Life to Live (ABC). The five ran for a long time: Guiding Light began in 1952, As the World Turns in 1956, Another World in 1964, One Life to Live in 1968, and All My Children in 1970. These were broadcast all throughout the 1990s, which was the last boom time for soaps, and pulled off the air by the early 2010s. After the culling, the AAAGO actors who had elected to stay on in the business went over to the big four.

 

Showing their age, the writers at the soap news site SoapSheKnows remember the AAAGO soaps fondly, and every now and then the site will commemorate an AAAGO soap and give a brief account of some of the more notable storylines. When I first came across these trips down memory lane, my interest was piqued: the AAAGO soaps sounded as good as Bold or Days in their prime. Wanting to know more, I once again set out to hunt soap seasons down on YouTube.

 

Possibly, CBS, which owns As the World, could re-release all 54 years’ worth of As the World - and that would be a lot - on streaming or DVD, but that is highly unlikely. If you are a soap fan, you must depend upon other fans to upload bits and pieces of a season on YouTube; this is the only way you can ever sample an AAAGO soap. Besides which, for all we know, the networks could have lost many of the episodes from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. That would not be unprecedented: the BBC, which is the UK state broadcaster, has lost a hundred episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s. It stands to reason, then, that the more recent an episode is, the more likely it is to have survived: someone out there must have recorded it.

 

These observations led me to conclude that the best decade for a tour of the AAAGO soaps is the 1990s, starting with the season of the year 1990, which was a good year for some soaps, a bad year for others.

 

II.           Tropes of the soap

 

Before we proceed any further, let us attempt to define what a daytime soap is and what are its 'tropes', that is, its essential attributes.

 

The daytime soap belongs to a theatre genre that is called the melodrama. As such, you expect in a soap plenty of what MBTI calls Extraverted Feeling (Fe), for a soap runs on pure emotion. The whole aim of watching a soap is to bring about what Aristotle calls catharsis, an upswell and expulsion of violent emotion, which is what, according to Aristotle, Greek theatre goers experienced when contemplating the tragedy. That makes a soap sound like a serious business, and so it is. The themes of the soap run deep. If you look at the titles, you see religious and philosophical connotations: Days of Our Lives, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Another World (the spirit world?) ... In that connection, it should be mentioned that Guiding Light began as a Christian show. I mention all this because Ron Carlavati, who became the head writer of Days in 2017, did his best to turn Days into what it was not, and that is a comedy show and one that dabbled in bedroom farce. In 2024, the last year of his run, Carlavati introduced a storyline that made use of plot device of a soap within a soap, and this story idea took over Days to such an extent that the Days executives were forced to take notice, and so Carlavati, to the joy of Days fans, got the boot.

 

The seriousness of the soap genre entails the following: when watching a soap, you must believe in what you see up there on the screen, at least at the time of watching. And that holds true of drama in general. Drama aims at making you care about what happens to the characters, because if you care, you believe; if you do not believe, you do not care.

 

You must suspend disbelief, then, and the need for the suspension of disbelief forces artists to treat art as a grave affair. This is why Larry Hama, the writer of GI Joe for Marvel in the 1980s, once said that the most important thing about writing a comic book is taking on a mantle of super-seriousness and super-drama. If you as a writer mock a genre by treating it ironically and going 'meta' (that is, breaking down the fourth wall), then you run adrift. The cult soap Passions, which ran from 1999 to 2008, veered dangerously close to parody: all the actors seem to have been instructed to act at the level of actors in a B-grade 1950s movie. In Passions a tone of quirkiness, jokiness, irony, pervades, a tone that is appropriate for a David Lynch series but not for a daytime soap. Having said that, Passions did work, but that was despite the makers of the show - among them writer James E. Reilly, who was most famous for his work on Days - pushing against the limits. With his art, Reilly took chances; he liked to live on the edge.

 

Passions aside, the formula for making a daytime soap is: write a crazy story and play it straight, and trust that po-faced performances by your cast will help the audience believe any plot, no matter how absurd.

 

This does not mean that the soap should forgo realism: quite the opposite. Money, clothes, extras, sets, all must be employed to make a TV police station look like a real police station, a courtroom like a real courtroom, a hospital like a real hospital, a church like a real church. The first sign of the waning of the daytime genre can traced back to when it was that the shows began to cut budgets and cut corners. This new thrift was illustrated by the change in the treatment of infant and child characters. The use of baby and child actors in soaps makes up one of the mainstays, because children play an important part in typical storylines: the soap audience likes seeing babies and their antics, and to exploit every mother's fear, soaps often utilise plots in which a baby is kidnapped. But because of budgetary reasons, soaps in the 2010s stopped using child actors, and so, instead of seeing a real live baby, we would see a doll wrapped up in a blanket, the actors pretending it were a real infant that cries and gurgles.

 

The recent parsimony led to the disappearance of that other soap staple, the church wedding. In the 2010s and then the 2020s, characters married not in churches but in living rooms, and because of budget cuts, the living room sets became smaller and smaller. And absurdly, for these ceremonies the services of a priest are not used; instead, a lawyer officiates. Or perhaps a character will obtain from the Internet a temporary licence to perform a wedding ceremony (this actually can be done in America).

 

Frugality and an aversion to the use of child labour helped accelerate the decline of the daytime genre because soap storylines revolve around women, marriage, and babies; that is, the soap relies on the same themes as the romance genre. Soaps borrow from many genres: action-adventure, spy, medical, police-procedural, horror, and science-fiction; a soap can even borrow from the musical - quite a few cabaret performances can be found in the soaps of the 1980s and 1990s. But if a daytime soap were to be a comic book, it would be a romance comic book, a genre that saw its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

 

One important difference between the soap and romance genres does exist, however. Romance stories end after the uniting and pairing off of the happy couple; but the daytime genre does not stop there. The soap will follow the heroine past her wedding day and accompany her throughout the remainder of her life. The heroine starts off young and innocent, meets an attractive man, has a romance, marries him, has children, and then must overcome any obstacles to happiness that a young wife and mother may encounter. Afterwards, her children grow into teens and then adults quickly (this is what soap fans call SORAS, Soap Opera Rapid Ageing Syndrome); and then, her children have romances and children of their own. Gradually, the soap heroine ages into a grandmother like Alice Horton on Days, a supporting character whose main duty is to dispense wisdom and counsel.

 

A number of incidents can derail the character on her hero's journey, incidents that are usually related to reproduction and childbirth. The heroine can commit adultery - one of the favourite subjects of the genre - or she could suffer a miscarriage or choose to undergo an abortion. Perhaps she will lose a child because of an accident or illness or worse - her son or daughter might be murdered.

 

Another frequent misfortune that a heroine may endure, and usually one that she must endure at least once, is violation. Soaps are obsessed by sex and sex crime. Characters, either male or female, may be coerced or drugged or hypnotised into having sex, and they may even be raped outright. In such unpleasant storylines, the dark side of the genre rears its ugly head. A few months ago, when watching the 1998 season of General, I was shocked to see the sudden, gratuitous, and brutally explicit rape of a 15-year-old girl. It came out of nowhere, blindsiding me, and after seeing it, I vowed that I would be taking an extended leave of absence from the show. Something that rankles is that writers, producers, and directors seem to believe that such outrages serve to 'improve', 'ennoble' a heroine.

 

The dark and grotesque obsession of soap writers with sex crime often leads a soap to send itself up - that is, to stoop to self-parody. For an example, I will quote here an entry from the Days Wiki that summarises the career of a minor villain of the early 1990s, Alan Harris. Even though I am tempted, I will not be inserting sarcastic comments, for the simple reason that there is no need: you cannot parody soaps, they parody themselves.

 

Alan Harris

 

History

 

Alan Harris was played by Paul Kersey from 1993-95. Alan came to Salem as Lucas' old buddy from West Point. Alan became infatuated with Carrie and even tried to rape her at Green Mountain Lodge. However, once Alan learned that Carrie had lost her virginity to Austin, Alan decided to go after Carrie's sister Sami. Alan dated Sami and eventually raped her. When Sami finally came forward, with this fact, Lucas and Carrie came up with a plan to trap Alan. Carrie attempted to trick Alan into admitting that he raped Sami. Carrie went to his apartment, but was shocked when she found a shrine to her in Alan's bathroom. Carrie saw a ski mask and realized that Alan was the person of attempted to rape her at Green Mountain Lodge. Sami learned what her sister was attempting to do and she raced to Alan's apartment. Alan took both Sami and Carrie hostage, but Austin and the police managed to save them.

 

A rape trial followed, and in an attempt to make Sami look like a liar, the defence made Carrie admit that her sister had lied about many things in the past. Alan was found not guilty and Sami vowed to destroy Carrie's relationship with Austin. After a good amount of time had past, Alan showed back up to get his revenge on Sami. Alan had a gun and intended to rape Sami again. Alan and Sami fought on the docks and Sami managed to get the gun from Alan. Sami shot Alan in the crotch, which maimed him for life. Lucas managed to get Alan drunk in the hospital and got Alan to admit to raping Sami and many other woman. Alan was sent to prison.

 

The ordeal does not 'improve' Sami - one of the female villains of Days - and turn her to the side of good. A few years later, she drugs Austin and rapes him. Pregnant by another man, Sami wants to fool Austin into thinking that he is the father of her child; she predicts that once Austin comes to believe that he is the father, he will feel compelled to marry her.

 

III.          The mascot

 

Returning to the subject of AAGO soaps, I will state from the outset that all of them deserve their reputation. They are all greats, and you can see the greatness in the opening credits of each episode, which is when we hear the theme. Every soap worth its salt boasts a catchy and hummable title song, and the AAAGO soaps are no exception: at odd moments during the day, I catch myself singing the theme of 1990 Another World, One Life, Guiding.

 

Having said that, I did not enjoy all of them. In contrast to the other soaps, Guiding and As the World were dark and dull, and I mean that literally: they look as though they were filmed in a cave. And that is even though the budget of the two matched, I am sure, that of Bold. But in comparison, Bold has an air of sleekness and prosperity, and every episode looks a million dollars.

 

Because of the reputation of the two shows, I was surprised by what I saw in Guiding and As the World, especially given that the latter was written by Douglas Marland, who is widely regarded as being one of the best writers in the business. After viewing the entire season, I grew to like Guiding a little more than As the World, mainly because of the presence of the two beautiful young actresses Beth Ehlers (who plays Harley Cooper) and Kassie Wesley DePaiva (who plays Chelsea Reardon). In addition, some of the male actors do stand out visually, and that makes them memorable. There is Michael Zaslow (who plays villain Roger Thorpe), Grant Aleksander (hero Phillip Spaulding), Rick Hearst (his younger brother Alan Michael Spaulding), and Robert Newman (hero Josh Lewis). All four men look odd, but odd is good: we in the audience remember odd. But all in all, I rank Guiding and As the World below the other AAAGO soaps; they lack the fun, colour, spontaneity, and excitement of the other three.

 

It should be remembered that even the best soaps go through bad patches. I am unable to watch the 1990 season of General Hospital for long, and I find the 1990 season of Days dark, gloomy, and depressing (two beloved veteran characters are killed off and another is raped). Both Days and General got off to a bad start at the beginning of the decade, but after a few years, both found their footing: General had improved by 1992, Days by 1993.

 

So, what went wrong with Guiding and As the World in the year 1990? The answer is that both were wanting for what I call the mascot.

 

A good soap should be distinctive; the principle is that the casual viewer, who is always pressed for time, should be able to tell one soap from another. Many TV shows compete for his time, and in 1990, he could choose between a dozen daytime soaps. These were the big four soaps, the five AAAGO soaps, and the three soaps that started life in the eighties - Loving (ABC), Generations (NBC), and Santa Barbara (NBC). If the viewer in 1990 were to watch the dozen, he would be using up his entire day, considering that the length of one episode is 30 minutes to an hour when it includes ads.

 

A daytime soap in the eighties and nineties faced stiff competition, and in order to stand out from the crowd, the soap needed a trademark character.

 

Soap operas, like superhero team comic books, are ensemble pieces, and as such, one character must stand out visually. In the case of Marvel's Avengers comic book, the mascot was the Vision, who like all mascot characters would be put in the box in the top left corner of the cover:

 

Eventually, though, in the early 1970s, Marvel decided to stick with just one prominent character for their corner boxes. For the Fantastic Four, that was the Thing. The Avengers had a trickier decision and ultimately decided to go with one of their more prominent members who didn't have a solo title of his own, the Vision. For many years, then, the Avengers' corner box was devoted solely to the Vision.

 

In the eighties, the mascot of Days was Steve 'Patch' Johnson; the mascot of Bold was Ridge Forrester; the mascot of General was the couple Luke and Laura Spencer (whose wedding in 1981 drew 30 million viewers). In 1990, the twins Vicky and Marley Hudson (played by Anne Heche) were the mascot of Another World; Victoria Lord (played by Erika Slezak) of One Life; Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci) of All My Children. All stand out. You would have been hard pressed to ignore Steve 'Patch' Johnson, who appeared on Days from 1985 to 1990; such was his notoriety, 'Patch' was parodied in a big screen movie (Delirious, a 1991 John Candy comedy). The actor portraying the mascot is usually so striking that even non-soap TV viewers remember him; think of Ronn Moss (who played Ridge Forrester from 1987 to 2012) or Anne Heche. This specialness is all that matters: Moss acts as stiff as a board and Heche annoys, but what counts is that the two stick in your mind.

 

You will notice that 1990 Guiding and As the World are bereft of mascotd, although Guiding does boast a charismatic and extraverted heroine in the person of Reva Shayne (Kim Zimmer), who returns to the show in the 1990 season after a long absence and then kills herself by driving her car off a pier. 

(I hasten to add that Reva's death is temporary. In the best soap tradition, her body is never found, and her grief-stricken family believe that she is dead; but she returns years later. This is the fate that befalls many a soap heroine. In 1990, Days' Hope Williams died at the climax of the Cruise of Deception storyline but came back to life and returned to the show (suffering from amnesia, of course) in 1994).

 

In 1990, As the World lacks a charismatic master villain as well as a mascot. It is the big-league villain that makes a soap stand out, and usually that villain is in the terms of MBTI an Extravert, an Intuitive, and a Judger: think of Days' Stefano DiMera (ENTJ) and Victor Kiriakis (ENTJ), One Life to Live's Mitch Laurence (ENFJ), and Guiding Light's Roger Thorpe (ENTJ). 

These characters possess a great deal of charm and charisma, and while they are irredeemably wicked, repeated exposure gives the audience an insight into their thoughts and schemes. We come to know them. And a miracle is achieved. Despite the awfulness of the master villain, we associate his presence with stability, comfort, warmth, reassurance - in other words, all that is what MBTI calls Introverted Sensing (Si). And this is exactly what producers aim at: they dangle a pleasant and likeable actor before the viewers, hook them, and reel them in. The actor who portrays the show's signature villain winds up becoming an old friend and one who is most welcome when he returns after having spent a few years away; for example, the Days audience is cheered when Joe Mascolo reprises the role of Stefano in the late 2000s. Instances such as these demonstrate that a producer can enjoy a real stroke of luck when casting, and when he hits upon an actor who is perfect for a role, he stands the chance of making his soap a national institution.

 

IV.          Soap villains and heroes

 

I should mention that a good soap will allow shades of grey in a depiction of a villain, and as the Wiki entry on soap operas observes, the sheer length of a soap season allows the actor to illuminate all sides of a character. The entry quotes from a 2012 Los Angeles Times article:

 

Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic; indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes, and conversations that a 22-episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with in half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time even with the minor characters; the apparent villains grow less apparently villainous.

 

Even so, subtlety, nuance, shading, all fail to break down the distinction, so clearly drawn in soaps, between good and evil. In other words, heroes and villains continue to exist as separate categories of character despite any fine and subtle shadings, which is to say that the soap genre follows the same rules as the melodrama. And as to what the conventions of the melodrama were, you can read about them here in an amusing account of what was perhaps the prototypical American soap opera, The Drunkard, a wildly popular temperance play that debuted in 1844. 

 

The daytime genre, then, needs heroes, and at the center of a good daytime soap stands the indomitable, two-fisted, courageous, tall and handsome male who strives to be morally upright but who, like the hero of the temperance play, frequently lapses. The personality type of this hero is usually ESTJ: think of Ridge Forrester (Bold), Holden Snyder (As the World), and John Black (Days), who are played by Ronn Moss, Jon Hensley, and Drake Hogestyn respectively. (Coincidentally, the three actors - who are tall, lanky, and gangly - share the same body type as Abraham Lincoln, and I type them and Lincoln as NTs, that is, Intuitives and Thinkers). By accident or design, these men serve as an anchor; they tether the show. The 1990 season of As the World suffers from Hensley's absence, because we need a lynchpin ESTJ hero to help guide us as we make our way through the story, which is quite complex, and without such a guide we are lost.

 

These comments imply that I have seen the seasons of As the World after 1990, and so I have; I will explain how this came about.

 

The daytime genre entered its autumn in the late 2000s. In that decade, all the daytime soaps feel and look the same. Being middle-aged, they are a little faded, and like those of autumn leaves, the colours of the sets are bronze, copper, and gold. The shows appeal to the eye, and they seem prosperous and healthy: there is plenty of money, all the actors dress well, and the production is slick. But after autumn winter must come, and so, a slew of soaps was cancelled around the end of the decade: Guiding went off-air in 2009, As the World in 2010, All My Children in 2011, and One Life in 2012. Soap viewers were left with the big four: Days, Young, Bold, and General.

 

Days lumbered on into the 2010s, and sometime in that decade, Days' quality turned south. This is why I regard the years of the 2000s as the last good years of Days, or at least the last fat years, that is, the last monied years. In 2000, we are treated to a spectacular plane crash, one that is so realistic that we almost are led to believe that a real jet airliner crashed, and in 2008, the stunt is repeated and is just as convincing. 

 

Having said that, the 2000s receive little love from Days fans, and admittedly, the show begins to tire at the start of the decade; after Mascolo's abrupt departure, which takes place in the middle of 2001, the show experiences a blow-out. But the pace quickens with the beginning of the Salem Slasher arc in 2003, when Reilly decided to shake Days up, and by 2008, Days is firing on all cylinders.

 

While watching the 2008 season, which is one of the best of the decade, I wondered idly how the other soaps were doing at that time. On a whim, I sampled the 2008 season of As the World, and was taken aback by how much it had improved since 1990: at some point in the previous 18 years As the World had turned the corner and become a good show. I decided to start over, beginning with the 2000 season, and again, I was impressed.

 

What explains the strides that As the World had made in ten years: why is the 2000 season so much better than the 1990?

 

Firstly, Holden Snyder had returned; and secondly, in 1995, As the World had found its mascot in the person of Carly Tenney, who is played by Maura West. Most would agree that she does look distinctive:

 

 

The third reason is that in the 2000s the writers of As the World demonstrated a mastery of the basics of the soap opera craft, which consists of answers to these four questions:

 

- Who is the character? We want to know how to distinguish one character from another, in appearance, behaviour, personality type, and morals.

 

- What are his relations with other characters? Every character is related to another as a brother, sister, father, mother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, cousin; and if there is no blood relation, he is related as a friend, enemy, colleague, employer, casual acquaintance. Because soaps revolve around families, blood is thicker than water, and therefore familial relationships are the most important.

 

- What is the character's predicament? A soap character frequently finds himself in hot water, and the story assigns him the job of solving a particular problem. In the 2008 season of As the World, Holden must deflect police suspicion away from his wife Lily Walsh, who may or may not have committed murder while sleepwalking. Carly is befriended by a felon, Sam Hutchins (played by Wally Kurth of General and Days fame), who is a Country and Western singer and a ventriloquist who performs with a dummy that seems to possess a life of its own. At this point, Carly is vulnerable - she is a single mother who is tasked with the responsibility of running a bar - and so oddball creep Hutchins worms his way into her life and makes romantic advances.

 

- Why should we care? The character will struggle to extricate himself from his difficulty, and even if we do not like particularly like him, good writing means that we are interested in tuning into the next episode and seeing what happens. Off-putting as he is, we want to see how far Sam Hutchins gets with Carly, and of course we want to see if Holden will protect Lily. But this desire - to see what happens next - cannot be called into being easily, and there is no formula for stimulating curiosity. Often the producers, writers, directors, and actors must keep their fingers crossed and hope that the x-factor - really, magic - will put in an appearance and attract an audience.

 

VI.          Other changes in the 2000s

 

Watching the 2000 and 1990 seasons of As the World was a strange experience, one that was jarring to me mainly because of the sudden wrenches that occur when you pass from one period to the other. Journeying from 1990 to 2000, I travelled in a time machine across the span of ten years, and in 1990 and then in 2000 I encountered As the World's Andy Dixon, played by Scott DeFreitas, who is a pretty boy actor that wears mascara and that bears a passing resemblance to Aidan Gillam, who was Petry 'Littlefinger' Baelish in Game of Thrones (2011-2019). After viewing the 1990 season, I failed to remember any of the characters with the sole exception of Andy, because soaps use this stock temperance play character - the chronic drunk who needs to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in order to be saved - again and again, and so Andy seemed familiar to me. On the list of soap opera alcoholic sybarites we find Billy Lewis (Guiding), A.J. Quartermaine (General), Lucas Roberts (Days), and Andy. These drunkards, all of whom are ESFPs, are hard to forget, and the actors who play them usually deliver memorable performances, DeFreitas being no exception: he is a warm, expressive, natural actor.

 

As equally memorable are Dr John Dixon, Andy's father, and Lucinda Walsh, Lily's mother. These are two of the elderly characters on the show, and whereas most elderly characters on soaps are given a saintly portrayal, John Dixon and Lucinda Walsh are not; they are nasty curmudgeons. But they have money and power, and that is the only reason why others have anything to do with them. That injects a rare note of realism into the proceedings.

 

The passage of time seemed not to have affected the older characters that much; they look more or less the same in 2000 as they did in 1990. But some of the younger actors have changed a great deal. Throughout the nineties, Kelley Menighan played Emily Stewart, who is a poisonous, obnoxious, and dislikeable character that is forever coming up with harebrained schemes; the equivalent of South Park's Eric Cartman, she is, like Cartman, an ENTJ. What confused me was that throughout the 2008 season, Emily was not wearing her trademark nineties pixie haircut, and it took me some time to realise that 2000s Emily and 1990s Emily were the one and the same.

 

I was even more addled by the look of Tom Eplin, who had become famous in soapland as Jake McKinnon in Another World. In the 2000 season of As the World, the Eplin character is called 'Jake' - could it be the same Jake? Yes, it was. After Another World was cancelled in 1999, a few characters crossed over to As the World, even though Another World was broadcast on NBC and As the World on CBS. I learned that Procter and Gamble - a company that sells soap, appropriately enough - owned the two shows and so had the right to transfer Another World characters to As the World. And so, the crossover happened. But the Jake of 1990 Another World and 2000 As the World may as well have been two different people; in the space of ten years, Eplin, who in 1990 played a handsome, svelte, lady-killer, had become seriously overweight and unhealthy-looking; it is no exaggeration to say that he had swelled up like a balloon. This was surprising because most soap male actors keep to the same build throughout their careers. Some of them even lose weight: see, for instance, the actor Sean Kanan, who played AJ on General, Deacon Sharpe on Bold, and Mike Barnes on Cobra Kai.

 

Once I adjusted to the new look of the actors and the show, I came to understand that the stories of As the World, like those of Days and General, rely on action and adventure. It is true that the stories of a soap will always chiefly concern romance, but the viewer needs non-romantic stories to balance a soap out. As the World in 2000 provides a few of these. We get the following: a story in which a stolen racehorse is acquired by an unwitting Holden; a story in which a dead woman returns as a ghost; and a story in which a young man is duped into committing a crime by a father and daughter pair of confidence tricksters. And the soap would not be a real soap without a doppelganger storyline. Martha Byrne, who plays the heroine Lily, also plays Lily's long-lost identical twin sister Rose D'Angelo, a crass showgirl who works in Atlantic City. Rose impersonates Lily, who is stranded on a desert island, and takes over Lily's life, usurping Lily's role as mother and luring Holden into - well, you can guess what. And so, As the World has something for everyone.

 

As the World became lighter in the 2000s, One Life darker. Many of the 1990 characters have stayed on, but the tone of One Life has changed. 1990 One Life is light and frothy, 2000 One Life is dark, gothic, and intense - perhaps overly so. In keeping with the new atmosphere, most of the One Life seems to be filmed at nighttime. One of the biggest departures can be found in the soundtrack: in 1990, the incidental music is the usual soap fare, and in 2000, it is mainly rock and blues. The soundtrack, which is one of the finest in the history of daytime, features brooding and sinuous guitarwork reminiscent of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

 

I rank One Life as one of the best soaps of 2000, and the only thing that can be said against it is that it suffers from what other soaps such as Bold suffer from, and that is a limited gene pool: nearly every man has had sexual relations with every woman. Two of the heroines - or rather anti-heroines, because they behave like villains a great deal of the time - Lindsay Rappaport and Nora Hanen, marry and allow themselves to be impregnated by the same two men, and Lindsay and her sister Dr Melanie Farrell MacIver have had affairs with the same three men. And four other female characters are involved in love triangles. One needs a bingo card to keep up with these wife-swapping shenanigans, which are (as you can tell by now) de rigueur in soaps. Because it is his duty, the soap writer will serve up the mandatory storylines about wife-swaps and love triangles, but if he is talented, he will throw in a few storylines about more interesting subjects - stolen racehorses, for instance.

 

Before I finish my report on 2000 One Life, I will point out something curious. On the run from the law, young heroine Jessica Buchanan goes on a road trip with two young heroes, Will Rappaport and Cristian Vega; both men are in love with her and share her (to what extent, is left to the imagination). The three get into all sorts of scrapes, and at one point, perform on stage with a rock band. It struck me, when making my way through this lengthy arc, that the exact same plot is used in the video for one of the smash hits of 2000, Lady (Heart Me Tonight) by the French duo Modjo, a song that has garnered nearly 300 million views on YouTube. Was the resemblance coincidental?

 

VIII.        Good soap writing versus bad

 

The reader will notice that I have not spent much time here examining All My Children. This is because All does not attract many fans, at least not of the sort that upload entire seasons to the Internet, and the result is that the complete 1990 and 2000 seasons are hard to come by. I have seen a handful of episodes from 2000, but a small sample does not do All justice.

 

So, my account of AAAGO soaps in the year 2000 excludes All, but as part of my research, I have digested a fair chunk of the others. And when summing up the year, I would like to laud all the soaps, but I cannot, because one of them is bad indeed - and that is Guiding, which is the runt of the litter.

 

Guiding went from bad to worse over the period of ten years, so much so that it is the worst soap of 2000. Why? It had everything going for it: a good cast that includes Paul Anthony Stewart from Loving, which had been cancelled in 1995; a devoted fan base; a generous patron; and producers who lavished on it care and attention. One cannot fault the clothes, the sets, the special effects. The soap lacks for nothing - except emotional investment. Over the course of many hours, I have played one episode after the other, and at the end of each one, I could not have told you what happened - what was the story, what were the emotions, what was the hook. Soap Opera Digest must have had a hard time of it when summarising for its readers what exactly happened each week. Granted, there are times when any soap story will get bogged down and spin its wheels, but in the main, writers always seek to move a story forward; every incident is carefully chosen and laid down brick by brick. In craftsmanship, soap writers follow in the same footsteps as the writers of the great operas; every step in the narrative of Wagner's Ring trilogy is a rung on a ladder that the audience climbs up. But we see none of that craft in Guiding.

 

To give an example, take one episode in which Stewart's Danny Santos accidentally shoots Jim LeMay, the husband of one of the show's heroines Beth Raines, who is a lovely blonde. Danny and his wife Michelle Bauer Santos are cowering in fear in a hotel room, expecting a South American mafia assassin to break in and murder them. For whatever reason, Jim, who is a harmless good guy and not an assassin, stands outside the door, and he pounds it and then dismantles it, tearing one plank off at a time. Understandably, Danny and Michelle, not knowing who is outside, are terrified. One character in the room is packing a pistol, and in the hubbub that ensues after Jim breaks through, the pistol flies into the air and falls into Danny's hand. Acting on reflex, Danny squeezes the trigger, a shot rings out, and Jim is struck. But never fear, it is only a flesh wound, and Jim is up and running two or three episodes later: there are no consequences in this show. One incident or story beat (as scriptwriters call it) flows into the next without leaving a mark, and the plot becomes a meaningless blur, 'Sound and Fury / Signifying Nothing'.

 

This is how Guiding treats gunplay; how does One Life treat it? By the 2000 season, Asa Buchanan, played by Philip Carey since 1980, has turned evil. The patriarch of the Buchanan family, Stetson-wearing Asa, who is modelled on Jock Ewing, oil tycoon and Ewing patriarch in Dallas, has always been bad or at least neutral; but by 2000, he has become a man possessed and one who has turned to the dark side. He has made destroying the Rappaport family his life's mission; Dr Ben Davison, a member of that family, is swept up in the tide of Asa's vengeance, and thanks to Asa, his licence to practise medicine has been revoked. Naturally, he hates Asa, and taking a handgun out of a drawer, he resolves to kill Asa with it, or at the least, use it to threaten Asa and force him to confess to his crimes. Other characters, including his brother and his girlfriend, rush to Dr Ben’s side and beg him to stand down. This story, an arc in itself, is drawn out over four or five episodes, and the drama in it is exploited to the utmost. Dr Ben is played by Mark Derwin, an actor who is as histrionic as Stephen Nichols, and Derwin milks every scene for all it is worth, extracting the most from every line, every gesture, every facial expression. Davison suffers from an excess of feeling that he is unable to control. Soap audiences love this intensity in an actor, and watching Davison's story spread out and expand, we are transfixed. These episodes teach a master class in how to write.

 

How, then, are we to improve Guiding Light? Examining the defects of the 'Danny shoots Jim' sequence, we can tentatively offer this fix. The remedy lies in giving the actors and the audience more time to digest the implications of the shooting. In my rewritten story, comatose Jim, hanging on to life by a thread, is confined to a hospital bed for five episodes, and Danny is overcome by remorse. He rends himself psychologically, and feeling suicidal, he walks to the edge of a cliff, intending to jump. Showing up at the last minute, his wife pleads with him. At this point, the show writes itself, and even though the rewritten storyline consists of nothing but clichés, by using my storyline the show would be staying true to form. The good soap writer will never pass up an opportunity to work his audience up into a lather, and likewise, soap actors, who naturally gravitate towards melodrama, will seize upon any chance to make an exhibition of themselves. The audience expects histrionics in a soap in the same way that the ancient Greeks expected them in a tragedy. This is common sense; I am offering no pearls of wisdom, and I am telling no secrets; every soap writer in the year 2000 understood these basic principles - with the exception of the writers of Guiding. 

 

I shall persist with Guiding and continue to watch it after 2000, but I am not confident that it will improve. I fully understand why it is that Guiding was the first of the AAAGO soaps of the 2000s to be cancelled - the first of the gang to die, to paraphrase the title of Morrisey's 2004 single.

 

IX.          In conclusion: Soaps, MBTI, and the Mirror type

 

Above I listed four important questions that every soap writer must answer, and the first of these was 'Who is the character?’ and ‘How is one character to be distinguished from another, in appearance, behaviour, personality type, and morals'. By personality type I mean here MBTI or Socionics personality type.

 

One of the side effects of watching so many different soaps back-to-back is that your understanding of MBTI types is improved; lessons in MBTI typing are given when you encounter an instance of one type, say, the ISFP, in the one soap and then another. When you see an ENTJ character in the setting of Bold and then Guiding, you begin to perceive the outlines of the ENTJ more sharply and clearly. And remember, the genre gives an actor a chance to strut his stuff; performing in hundreds of episodes a year, each episode running for 40 minutes, is hard work, but an advantage enjoyed by an actor in the soaps over an actor in the movies is time. The average movie runs to 120 minutes; the average soap season runs to 10,000. For a movie, an actor's work can consist of only ten- or twenty-minutes worth of screentime (see for example Michael Keaton's ten minutes in Beetlejuice (1988)), and for a soap season, hundreds. The soap actor is allotted enough time to deliver a rich, textured, many-sided portrayal. The character is gradually built up. In much the same way, the comic book character first appears as a vague and unreal image in the mind's eye of the writer who describes him in a script, and the penciller, the inker, and the colourist bring the character to life, fleshing him out, giving him sharp lines and contours.

 

After digesting a great many movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, plays, we come to understand the truth that the characters that last the longest are the ones whose MBTI personality type is the most well-defined. And using this as a starting point, we see that a real mastery and subtlety is shown when a soap writer illuminates what it is that one type shares with its brother type. By brother type, I mean for example the ESFJ's brother type, which is ISFJ; the ENTJ's brother type, which is INTJ; and so forth. You see the pattern: take the 'I' (Introversion) out of the four MBTI letters and replace it with an 'E' (Extraversion), and you arrive at what Socionics calls a type’s Mirror. The ENTP is the Mirror of the INTP, the ENFP is the Mirror of the INFP, the ISTJ is the Mirror of the ESTJ... The relation matters because a display of shared personality traits becomes important. When surveying popular culture, we see that a great many villains in movies, TV shows, comic books are NTJs, that is, ENTJs and INTJs; and we see that the NTJ plays the role of master villain more than any other. In the NTJs, we find two types that are different and alike, and in a soap, it behoves the writers, directors, producers, actors to illustrate the differences and commonalities.

 

One example of the Mirror relation is to be found in eighties-era Days, which features two NTJ supervillains: Stefano DiMera (ENTJ) and André DiMera (INTJ). We are presented with two types, both of which are NTJ, both of which crop up in many soaps, and both of which exhibit a strain of ruthlessness, cruelty, and obsessiveness. But this is a portrayal of the NTJ villain that comes about only if the writers and actors know what they are doing. Luckily for us, for many years, the writers and actors on Days did know what they were doing, which is why they made Stefano and André so typically NTJ.

One of the great villains of All My Children, Billy Clyde Tuggle (played by Matthew Cowles), is a stock type: he is a pimp, a nightclub owner, a cheap and sleazy scoundrel, a hoodlum, and a type that is the very opposite of the NTJ villain, who is grandiose, megalomaniacal, epic.What makes Tuggle unique is that he delivers great lines - his dialogue is florid, bombastic, over the top - and in doing so he steals every scene. 

Even now I feel the urge to rewatch Tuggle’s scenes and once again hear him pronounce words that are little-heard in soaps - words such as 'fussbudgetry'. The trick of the writers lies in the juxtaposing of Tuggle's high-blown and flowery rhetoric against his vicious nature; when you put the two together, you get a colourful monster. Considering his personality traits, I type him as an Extravert (E), a Sensor (S), a Thinker (T), and summing him up, I say he is an ESTP.

 

The 'brother' or Mirror type of the ESTP is of course the ISTP. Do STPs share certain characteristics? The most famous ISTP leading character in soaps is Days' Steve 'Patch' Johnson, and after viewing Tuggle and then Nichols, we see what it is that the two hold in common. In their interactions with other types, it is as though the two wear a series of masks, and one mask is one of affability and jocularity. But we know what is behind it: we sense an underlying sarcasm, and malice, and aggression. And other qualities manifest themselves. Both men possess a theatrical streak - Johnson is an aspiring blues performer - and both are exhibitionists who often play the fool. Actors and born deceivers, they share a 'sketchiness', 'skeeviness'. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once wrote of Bill Murray in one role that he 'oozes untrustworthiness from every pore'; the same can be said of Tuggle and Johnson. When we first meet them, they are villains and nasty ones at that, both showing an aptitude for terrorising women. That makes them sound scary, and that is the goal: Tuggle and Johnson would be delighted to hear that they make others afraid: they aim to intimidate and frighten. To the STP villain, life is one long power-play.

 

It would be fruitful to examine the traits of other paired types, especially the ESFJ and ISFJ pair and the ISTJ and ESTJ pair, the four types – ISFJ, ESFJ, and ISTJ, ESTJ - being what Keirsey calls the 'Guardians', a group that crops up in soaps again and again. Analysing soap characters using MBTI allows you to unlock the secrets of the soap and indeed all drama, but to analyse effectively, you must spread your wings, and that means taking in the AAAGO soaps as well as the big four. 

 

MBTI: Days of Our Lives rogues gallery

 

I.  The Days rogues gallery

 

A distinct genre unto themselves, soaps borrow from other genres: the spy genre, the action-adventure, the science fiction, and so on. In the main, soaps aim to provide conflict and excitement, and that does mean on occasion fisticuffs, gun battles, car chases, and explosions, and it also means a stark contrast between hero and villain, good and evil. This moral absolutism, as I call it, evokes the comic book and one genre of comic books, the superhero; the affinity between soaps and comic books is one of the main reasons why I like soaps, silly and ridiculous as they may be.

 

But I must separate the two. The chief difference between the superhero comic book and the daytime TV soap is that soaps are written for women of all ages, and comic books (at least up until the 2000s) for children, particularly boys. This is why most men who are normally fans of American popular culture shrink from embracing the daytime soap. I am here to tell them that soaps do not differ overly much from preferred genres such as the superhero comic book; soaps are meant for females but can be enjoyed by males.

 

Like any DC or Marvel series, Days has a rogues gallery. Like most soaps, it makes a clean divide between heroes and villains, and in doing this, it is as cartoonish, viewing the worlds in terms of black and white, as a DC or Marvel comic book.

 

On an intuitive level, we all understood the gulf between good and evil characters, but explaining it takes work. When I am settling down to write on this subject, I am confronted by a question which is this: in soapland, what makes a hero, and makes a villain?

 

II.  Defining villainy and evil

 

In Days, a rough working definition of a villain is: a Days villain breaks the law consistently and he does so for selfish purposes, whereas while a Days hero does break the law now and then, but he does so always in the interests of a justice higher than the law. Most of the Days lawbreakers belong in the former group, and Salem is filled with career criminals, many of them thieves, blackmailers, drug dealers, pimps, rapists, murderers, and all of them qualifying as villains.

 

On occasion, a morally grey or neutral character will engage in criminal conduct, and in Days this is nearly always because the character has come under the influence of a more dominant personality who is a villain. Gray characters include Lucas Horton (influenced by Kate Roberts); Mimi Lockhart (influenced by Jan Spears); Lexi Carver (influenced by Stefano DiMera); and Nick Fallon (influenced by Willow Stark). They may be either swayed, coerced, bullied, blackmailed, into going along with the villain's plan. They usually think that by co-operating they are taking the easy way out, but they soon regret their decision, and they usually end up in court and then jail.

 

In Days, the worst crime a villain can commit is murder or rape, and either of these crimes distinguish the evil villain from the merely bad; in Days, a murderer or rapist is always a monster. This is not to say that a good character never kills. Heroes do take lives on Days, but extenuating circumstances always exist. For example, a heroine may commit manslaughter (see Isabella Toscano) or justifiable homicide (see Adrienne Johnson), and the good people of Salem forgive them for it, recognising that the character's actions were out of character. And sometimes heroes, especially action heroes, are given a licence to kill. In one episode in the late eighties, Shane Donovan and Steve Johnson gun down, quite casually, an armed hostage taker at Salem University hospital; in other episode from the same era, Roman Brady orders a police sniper to kill a gang member who is holding Steve at gunpoint. In both instances, a villain was killed, and the audience's sense of justice is not offended, and indeed, in the audience's view, the villain got what he deserved. This is especially true in the former case: a two-bit hood had been stalking heroine Eve Donovan (Shane's daughter) for six months and trying to extract the location of buried treasure from her; at the time of his death, the audience had grown heartily sick of the man and was glad to see him go.

 

An act of evil makes a character a monster, and the monster who the audience finds particularly repulsive is the one who takes life with his own two hands; Victor Kiriakis and Stefano DiMera, both master villains, rarely if ever get their hands dirty and neither man usually carry out an act of murder themselves - they let their minions do the killing for them. (One exception I can think of is when Stefano, in a fit of anger, kills Curtis Reed, a thug who had held Stefano hostage and humiliated him, taking advantage of an illness that had made Stefano confined to a wheelchair).

 

The villain who kills with his own hands is seen by the residents of Salem as particularly dangerous, and this leads to another standard Days theme: the villain as menace terrorising the good folk of Salem. The Menace is regarded with fear and contempt, and in the eyes of others possesses a power that is almost supernatural, and the heroes spend a great deal of time trying to divine his intentions, anticipating his next move. At the beginning of the 1986 season, three villains - Victor Kiriakis, his employee Steve 'Patch' Johnson (working most of the time independently of Victor), and the Salem Hospital rapist serve as the Menace. By the middle of the year, the lineup of Menaces has changed slightly: Kiriakis and his employee Orpheus (who like Steve Johnson is a wayward henchman of Kiriakis’) are terrorising Salem, and Steve, now a more neutral character, is their victim.

 

Every season after the eighties relies heavily on the plot device of the Menace; to take one season at random - the 2003 season (a mostly forgettable one) - two master villains Tony DiMera and Larry Welch, and one minor villain, drug dealer and murderer Vin Ramsell, do duty as the Menace in the first half of year, and the Salem Slasher in the second.

 

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the most frequently used Menace is of course Stefano DiMera, and because the DiMeras are such powerful pieces on the chessboard, they must be used judiciously. A writer deploying a DiMera follow certain rules, and the first of these is: only one DiMera master villain at a time. In the 2006 and 2007 seasons, EJ Wells (who is revealed to be EJ DiMera, Stefano's son) is the Menace causing havoc. By mid-2007, we learn that EJ was only holding the fort and was awaiting Stefano's return, and after Stefano does return, Stefano takes up the mantle of Menace once again; EJ is downgraded to flunky and then Stefano's conscience. For the rest of the decade, EJ fulfils the same function as Tony DiMera did in the 1980s: he is the good DiMera, forever remonstrating with his father Stefano and trying to persuade Stefano to refrain from carrying out evil acts.

 

III. Can a villain become a hero?

 

Villains can turn into heroes and romantic leads; this happens all the time in soaps. But converting a villain into a hero proceeds according to a set of rules. The first rule is that change must happen naturally and organically, that it cannot be forced, and the same applies to forgiveness and acceptance. Further, the reformed villain must do good deeds and do them selflessly, without thought of reward, i.e., without one eye on the approbation of the other characters; it helps if the good deeds receive no recognition from the other characters and that it is only we in the audience who see them. And lastly, the villain must undergo some form of punishment.

 

Accompanying the change from villain to hero is a change in the villain's view of himself. One defining characteristic of a villain is a lack of self-awareness. A wealthy and powerful man, and a man of culture and refinement, Stefano ought to see himself as belonging to the upper class, the elite, the aristocracy of Salem, but throughout his time in Salem he sees himself, as most criminals in real life do, as a poor picked-upon fellow who has been wronged. Stefano claims that he has been targeted by what he calls the 'Brady justice system' and that he has been unfairly persecuted by those in authority in Salem. This is rich, given that all the misery he has visited on Salem and the Brady family. If he is to reform, then, the villain must right his warped world view; the first step on the road to redeeming the villain is the villain's reassessing himself; he must begin to hold a low opinion of himself as opposed to a high.

 

To see how soap writers manage to bring a bad, even evil, character over to the side of good, we can think of two classic cases: the brothers Johnson - Steve 'Patch' Johnson and Jack Deveraux. The writers faced a great challenge in the task of redeeming Jack Deveraux; for whereas Steve is bad, Jack is evil. A snide, well-heeled yuppie, the mincing, effeminate Jack appears to be somewhat unusual and disturbing; perhaps this effect is enhanced by his habit of wearing mascara (never trust a man who wearing mascara). He commits rape, which is worse than murder on soaps, and after it, the industry journal Soap Opera Digest put him on the cover with the caption 'The Most Hated Man on TV!'. He is shunned by Salem, but nevertheless he becomes engaged to a member of the Horton family, heroine Melissa Horton, who is blind to his faults. Her family reluctantly attends the wedding. It is here that she comes to her senses, finally recognising Jack for what he is, and jilts him at the altar; her father Mickey chortles in delight. After this social humiliation, he continues to be a villain, but his acts of villainy are to be characterised more as acts of mischief more than anything else (Jack is an ENTJ like Loki, the god of mischief). And then, to our surprise, he does something an evil character rarely does: he develops self-awareness. He begins to view himself with contempt. Around this time, he meets the ingenue Jennifer Horton (Melissa's cousin) who takes a job as a reporter at the newspaper Jack owns. The pair's relationship is a strange one, close but adversarial. Jennifer hectors and berates him, and by this method, encourages him to better himself. Slowly, he is gradually transformed into a comic buffoon, and then a romantic lead, and then a hero. And then, much like Steve, he is punished. Lawrence Alamain, an INTJ, visits the same misery on Jack and Jennifer that Jack, an ENTJ, visited on Steve and Kayla. Thus, we are given another example of symmetry in soaps. Clearly, the writers wanted to punish Jack and not let him get off easily. Overall, their treatment of Jack and his redemption worked, and worked spectacularly; Jack went from being the most hated man on TV to being one of the most loved. He moved from being a villain into a hero, one half of a supercouple, and a fan favourite, and all this was done easily and seamlessly. For this we have to than the writers and the actor portraying Jack, Matthew Ashford.

 

The rule then is do not tell us that an evil character now regrets being evil, show it; do not tell us that he is now a character who does good deeds, show it. 

 

The below selection ranges from 1985 to 2008, a twenty-five-year period that encapsulates the best of Days. To help ground the reader in the history of Days, I have presented the villains in order of their appearance.

 

IV.   The Eighties

André DiMera - INTJ (first appears 1983)

 

A loyal 'soldier' or minion of the master villain Stefano, the character of André functions in two modes. When Stefano is around, André serves as a 'soldier' and does Stefano's bidding. He kills for Stefano but sometimes ends up going out of control, and he either kills too many people or kills the wrong sort of people (one of his victims is Stefano's daughter Renee DuMonde). After one of André's excesses, Stefano typically tries to reel André in. He will contemplate punishing André and then decide against it: André has a monopoly on Stefano's affections, and Stefano regards him as his finest and most loyal soldier.

 

When Stefano is not around, and Stefano is missing from the canvas for substantial amounts of time, André will substitute for him. He plays the master villain, taking up the mantle of Days' Palpatine (another INTJ villain) throughout the years 2002 to 2005, a period in which Stefano was absent.

 

What is confusing is that André is the evil twin of Stefano's son Tony, the good Dimera who is forever hectoring Stefano and demanding that Stefano renounce his evil ways. André, who is the exact duplicate of Tony, steals the identify of Tony in 1983. As the years roll by, André seems to be convinced that he is Tony, but André's true personality breaks through, and we see the subtle transforming of connoisseur and bon vivant and playboy Tony into the dark and brooding schemer André. Longtime fans of Days know the subtle visual tics that distinguish Tony from André, and we these in what is one of the great Days storylines, Aremid. In Aremid, André / Tony, who is terminally ill, commits suicide and frames John Black for murder. It is the perfect scheme, and in this instance, André lives up to the INTJ's reputation as a master planner.

 

Some of the most representative André scenes can be found in the 1984 season. After his latest scheme - which involves impersonating Tony and living Tony's life - goes awry and his imposture is revealed, he flees to London and becomes a Shakespearean actor in a run-down theatre. Wearing a series of costumes and masks backstage, he deteriorates mentally; he descends into the brooding, paranoia, and obsessiveness that the INTJ villain is famous for. In these scenes, he reminds me, oddly enough, of Bruce Wayne, another INTJ.

 

Victor Kiriakis - ENTJ (first appears 1985)

 

A ruthless Greek shipping magnate modelled after Aristotle Onassis, the character of Victor first appears in 1985 months after the exit of Stefano from the series; the writers felt Stefano's absence keenly and evidently thought that another ENTJ mastermind was needed. Although not as flamboyant as Stefano, the smartly dressed and high-living Victor shares his sense of style, and like Stefano, he embarks on a series of far-fetched escapades that are marked by international mystery and intrigue. The DaysWiki entry summarises the first phase of Victor's career thus: 'Victor's organization engaged in many schemes and plots all over the world during the late 80s and early 90s, including selling military secrets to the Soviets, hiding stolen Treasury bonds in Stockholm, Sweden, and stealing a computer disk from the U.S. government that turned out to be made of an indestructible material with various potential military applications'.

 

Women, children, and family play an outsized role in Victor's life. In 1986, it is revealed (and this was something suspected by us all along) that Victor is the real father of Days' leading man Bo Brady; it is explained that in his youth, Victor had an affair with Caroline Brady, the wife of Shawn Brady, who is an Irish American fisherman and the patriarch of the Brady family. Victor is also, for a time, considered to be the father of Andrew Donovan, the son of Caroline's daughter Kimberly, who was married to secret agent Shane Donovan; Kimberly consented to sex with Victor to distract him from Shane's burglary of Victor's mansion. As the series proceeds, we encounter more of Victor's progeny. In the late eighties, Victor is revealed to be the father of Isabella Toscano; Victor had a youthful affair with Isabella's mother, who was married to an ENTJ billionaire, the madman Ernesto Toscano. (We see a pattern here: Victor tends to cuckold other men). In the early nineties, Victor marries Kate Roberts and fathers a son, Philip. They get divorced, Kate tries to kill him, and he marries model and former pornographic actress Nicole Walker, and Nicole tries to kill him as well. It is in this period that Victor earns a reputation as a misogynist. He sours on women, and sadly reflects that the only woman he ever truly loved and respected was Caroline. But we cannot blame his wives for the breakdown of his marriages, because we quickly recognise that marriage to Victor is a miserable affair. Like the 'rich old man' in the Eagles song Lying Eyes (1975), Victor is 'a man with hands as cold as ice'.

 

Victor takes after Stefano in his frequent displays of coldness, vindictiveness, and cruelty. I attribute this trait to Stefano and Victor's sharing the same personality type; the inferior function of the ENTJ is Introverted Feeling Fi, which can manifest itself, as Jung observed, in great explosions, or rather in this case implosions, of vengefulness and malice. This is commensurate with the ENTJ villain's desire for control. Like any Extraverted Judging type, Victor habitually lectures people and instruct them in how to live their lives.

 

Something that I do enjoy in Victor, at least in his first twenty years on the show, is his courtesy. Even when he is expressing anger or disappointment or annoyance, this well-spoken man struggles against his inclinations to vent - we can see these bubble below the surface as his brow furrows - and he strives to express his feelings in the most polite and courteous way.

 

By the late eighties, Victor retires from the job of Menace and master-villain. He does remain a villain but refrains from terrorising the Salemites and embroiling himself in international intrigue. By the 2000s, he achieves a sort of self-awareness and comes to the realisation that life as a villain has made him lonely, isolated, and miserable. Such insight never comes to Stefano, who is the same boat as Victor; in the case of Stefano, there is no growth, no self-awareness.

 

The secondary function of the ENTJ, Introverted Intuition Ni, can mean two things: firstly, a desire for continuity, for what lasts over the course of time, and secondly a desire for progress. We see Ni manifesting itself in two typically Victor character traits.

 

For most of Victor's time on the screen, Victor is obsessed by the need to find an heir to his empire. In his search, his attention is drawn to sons or substitutes for a son, and Victor attempts to mold them into copies of himself. In this pursuit, the young men he latches onto are his son Bo, his stepson Lucas, his son Philip, his grandson Brady, and his nephew Xander.

 

The other typically ENTJ Ni quality is this. Victor, in the first year of his arrival in Salem, champions progress. His company buys up all the businesses on the Salem riverfront, except for that of his old friend Shawn's; Shawn holds out. In a stormy meeting down at the docks, Victor implores Shawn to give in. Victor doesn't understand why it is that Shawn is resisting progress, growth, jobs, and all the good things that can come to Salem under Victor's wise leadership. Being a stubborn old Irish American mule, Shawn argues with Victor, digs in, and puts up a front; perhaps in his subconscious he suspects that Victor is the true father of Bo. The episode illustrates what Socionics calls the Conflict relation between two types: Victor is an ENTJ, and the Conflicting is Shawn's - Shawn is an ISFJ.

 

Orpheus - ISTP (first appears 1986)

 

Victor learns that a fortune in US government bonds is buried somewhere in 'Old Town', a district of Stockholm. The location of the bonds will be revealed if three tattoo designs are superimposed on a map of the Old Town district of Stockholm; the tattoos are of daggers whose blades point to the location of the bonds. The wearers of the tattoos are hero Bo Brady, his former friend Steve Johnson, and Britta Englund, a Soviet spy who has had affairs with both men. Why the three wear these tattoos is never fully explained, and neither is the part that Soviet spy agencies and the ISA (International Security Alliance), a shadowy secret service that possesses vast power, plays in the affair.

 

We learn that Salem superhero Roman Brady is involved. In 1979, Roman and an ISA agent who later becomes known as Orpheus are engaged in a gun battle with Russian spies in Stockholm's Old Town; Orpheus' wife is killed in the crossfire, making Orpheus a widower with two children. Driven mad by grief, he convinces himself that Roman is to blame and he vows vengeance. Seven years later, he comes into the employ of Victor, who is seeking out the bonds. The body count racks up as Britta and anyone else who knows of what happened that night seven years ago in Old Town are systematically murdered. Desperate to find the bonds, the ISA begs Roman to return to Stockholm and uncover the bonds before Kiriakis gets his hands on them, but Roman refuses; in a Machiavellian move, the ISA then kidnaps Roman's wife Marlena to Stockholm and holds her hostage there as an inducement; Roman is tricked into thinking that Orpheus and Victor are responsible for the kidnapping. Once Roman arrives in Stockholm to find Marlena and rescue her, Orpheus begins his long-drawn-out scheme of revenge.

 

Orpheus is not interested in Victor's schemes in the slightest, and after he finds the bonds, he steals them for himself and lies to Victor about their whereabouts. His motivation is that he wants the cat and mouse game with Roman to continue. Eventually Roman tracks Orpheus down to his tropical island lair, a fight ensues, and Orpheus dies in a gun battle (or so we think) and Marlena dies in plane crash (or so we think).

 

Orpheus returns to the show thirty years later, and it is never explained as to how he survived being shot: this has become something of a recurring theme with Days - a character will die and then be brought back to life without explanation. Other continuity problems cropped in the wake of Orpheus' return. Days fans know that Roman was played by actor Wayne Northrop, whose portrayal of the character ended when Roman died in 1984; he returned in the following year, this time being played by Drake Hogestyn, and plastic surgery was given as the reason for the difference in appearances between Hogestyn and Northrop. But, in 1991, the Northrop Roman returned, and the Hogestyn Roman was revealed to be an imposter called John Black. And then in 2016, Orpheus returns, and all his animus towards Roman Brady - so important to the Orpheus's motivation - is redirected towards John Black; he pays little attention to the real Roman Brady.

 

To conclude, two traits make Orpheus a typical ISTP. The first of these is his svelte appearance, in the 1980s at least, when he wears hauteur-couture eighties gear (including a marvellous Michael Jackson style jacket with shoulder pads and zip up pockets (in which he hides the Stockholm bonds)). The consensus among female viewers is that the character is extremely attractive, and it is this quality that explains why it is that Calliope Jones, who is working at a waitress, leers at him and behaves in a licentious and flirtatious manner after he approaches her to ask for a table at her restaurant. Amusingly enough, the normally unflappable Orpheus is deeply discomforted by Calliope, and this touches upon another distinctive ISTP trait: Extraverted Intuition (Ne) makes up the vulnerable function of the ISTP and it is main function of Calliope's type, the ENFP. Ne rattles the ISTP, as does the ENFP; the relation between the two types is one of Conflict.

 

Andrew 'Drew' Donovan III - ENTP (first appears 1988)

 

Like André, Drew is an evil twin and like André, Drew is fond of elaborate disguises that change his appearance completely. In this he is a typical ENTP villain: NT villains are often shape-shifters.

 

When we first meet him, Drew, like André, impersonates his twin brother. Drew attempts to take over his brother Shane's life in all aspects, which includes of course an attempt to enjoy intimate relations with his brother's wife Kimberley Brady. Like André, Drew resents and envies his good twin. His career follows the trajectory of André's: at some point Drew falls into evil ways, becomes an employee of Stefano DiMera, and carries out several murders and kidnappings on Stefano's orders. But whereas André is an introvert, Drew is an extravert. He performs his deeds with a theatrical flair. In one story, he impersonates a stage magician, dons makeup and a costume, and has a captive Steve lowered headfirst into a water tank on a stage; the theatre audience thinks Steve's immersion and drowning is part of the act. The ENTP's dominant function Ne gives Drew great powers of invention.

 

The secondary function of the ENTP, Introverted Thinking (Ti), comes into play when Drew returns to the show in 2017. He had left in 1989 after giving up being a villain; in his last appearance, he had let his brother and Kimberley escape Stefano's secret island (where Shane and Kimberley have been held captive) and he achieves a reconciliation of sorts with Shane; as often happens when a villain changes his ways, Drew is punished - he is shot, and for a while we think that he is dead. He survives, however, and decides to leave Salem. In 2017, he turns up in Salem - in a wooden crate. Usually as dapper as his brother, he now looks dishevelled - and maniacal. We learn he is now a brilliant computer programmer and hacker, a variant on the ENTP as mad scientist stock type. Ti + Ne gives a character a knack for creativity and scientific discovery. By the time of his next appearance (in the 2021 mini-series Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem), he has been transformed into fully-fledged mad scientist:

 

He poses as his twin brother, Shane, conspires with Dimitri von Leuschner to steal Alamainian gemstones which Drew uses to connect with satellite lasers in space. He intended to use them to destroy various locations worldwide, including Salem. However, he was found out and stopped by John, Marlena, Shane, and Billie Reed before being sent to prison.

 

Saul Taylor - ESFJ (first appearance 1989)

 

Certain stories and seasons of a soap build up a reputation among fans. The decade of the eighties is held to be one of the best, if not the best, for Days, but the consensus is that the quality tailed off after the two excellent seasons of 1986 and 1987; the seasons of 1988 and 1989 are not highly regarded. In response to this, all I can say is ignore the critics: widely disparaged storylines such as the Marlena demonic possession story of 1995, the Salem Stalker / Melaswen arc of the early 2000s, and the Santo and Colleen romance of the late 2000s, are great fun. In the seasons of those years, the producers, writers, directors, and actors did their jobs with the usual professionalism and skill that we have come to expect. And that is true of the all the stories of the late eighties period.

 

Having said this, I found the certain of the storylines of the 1989 season more bizarre and confusing than usual; one of these is the Saul Taylor storyline, which made little to no sense.

 

The overweight and middle-aged evangelist Saul Taylor comes to Salem and holds a revival meeting near the docks. After an accident, his sheltered and virginal daughter Faith is taken to hospital; there she meets Dr Marcus Hunter. Saul takes a dislike to Marcus and warns his daughter to stay away from him. Whether this antipathy stems from a father's natural protectiveness or from a racial animosity (Marcus is African American) is not known; the answer, we begin to suspect, is both.

 

At this point in the season, Marcus is undergoing a trauma; he keeps having flashbacks to his childhood, when his two parents (both civil rights activists) died in an explosion in a church; gradually we learn that Saul Taylor and his associate Alfred Jericho planted a bomb. DaysWiki describes it thus:

 

Years ago, Saul was responsible for numerous black church burnings in the south with a man named Jericho. One of those churches was blown up, and though Saul thought it was empty it really was full which Jericho knew. Among those inside the church were the parents of Marcus Hunter, whose father was a civil rights activist who was Jericho's target. Jericho tried to kill the young Marcus Hunter, who fled from the church.

 

Here is more background on Alfred Jericho:

 

Jericho was a crooked ISA agent who was involved with the Reverend Saul Taylor. The two of them had burned many black churches in the south and fenced stolen goods through Saul's traveling revival camp.

 

It is here that the story goes off the rails. Why would an ISA agent blow up churches and fence stolen goods? The incongruity is compounded after Jericho establishes himself in Salem; we see that he is a criminal mastermind, a master villain, and an ENTJ villain in the tradition of Stefano DiMera, Victor Kiriakis, and Ernesto Toscano. He is important enough to attract the attention of the ISA, which sends one of its best men (Shane Donovan) after him. He lives in a Stefano-like secret base inside a mountain; the walls of it are lined with giant computers. But even though he is a supervillain, he stills retains his alliance with the preacher Saul. They are engaged in some secret scheme that I never understood the particulars of, but it did involve more than fencing stolen goods.

 

After Jericho takes Shane prisoner, Steve is sent by the ISA to infiltrate Jericho's operation and become a member of Saul's church. Given plastic surgery and a glass eye to make him 'look pretty again', he poses as a drunk homeless man and makes his way into one of Saul's revival meetings. There he pretends to have a religious conversion; he gives testimony and confesses his sins to the assembly: 'I drank! I lay with whores!'. (This is probably Steve's funniest scene). Saul trusts and approves of Steve, who is sent to a religious camp on the outskirts of Salem; there in a secret room Shane has been tortured and imprisoned.

 

As could be expected, the story ends with a bang. Saul is shot and wounded, Jericho's mountain base blows up, and Jericho and Shane fight on top of a cliff. Both men fall to their apparent deaths. Steve's glass eye is put out and his eye socket crushed, and he goes back to wearing a patch. Saul gives a deathbed confession to his daughter. And so, the strange and confusing Saul Taylor and Alfred Jericho arc ends. In retrospect, it seems that the writers and writers wanted a certain aesthetic effect: they wanted to portray the Deep South in the 1960s, the Civil Rights struggle, and so on, and accompanying the footage of life in the South they had made, they wanted gospel songs. The need for effect took priority over writing a story that made sense.

 

When Saul first appears, I typed him as an Extravert and a Feeler - most likely an Extraverted Feeling (Fe) dominant. Seeing as he was a preacher, this raised the possibility that he was an ENFJ villain like Glorious Godfrey in Jack Kirby's Fourth World. But down to earth and small-minded Saul gets his information through his senses, not his intuition; he is not a mystic or a seer. And his family matters most of all to him - another trait of the ESFJ (Extraverted Feeling / Introverted Sensing) type.

 

IV.  The Nineties

 

Vivian Alamain - ESFP (first appears 1992)

The fan favourite Vivian arrives in Salem in 1992, showing up at the mansion of her villainous nephew Lawrence 'Larry' Alamain. The pair come from a Ruritania country, and both are fabulously wealthy and of royal heritage. The two should be considered as a pair: they are what Socionics calls Duals.

 

Because of this relationship, we need to look at Lawrence in some detail. Lawrence is well-dressed, well-mannered, well-groomed; he is a man who speaks with an American accent that is aristocratic as can be, and a man who is cultured and genteel; he is also snide, prissy, effeminate, self-centred, and a villainous schemer. He is, in short, a typical INTJ villain, and this time a typical INTJ villain as prince or playboy. Lawrence is a Bruce Wayne but a Bruce Wayne who has turned to the dark side; I am cynical enough to say that if Bruce Wayne did exist in real life, he would probably be Lawrence Alamain.

 

Lawrence is not irredeemable: as his time on the show progresses, he is drawn in shades of grey. In the 1992 season, when his ex-wife Carly Manning becomes ill and she and her stepson Shawn Douglas Brady come into his care, he treats the boy Shawn with great kindness; Lawrence is a gentle, albeit preoccupied, father figure. In these sequences we see one of the typical tricks that writers use to humanise a villain: they show him going out of his way to be nice to small children.

 

Vivian plays the part of Harley Quinn (another ESFP) to Lawrence's Bruce Wayne. A forceful woman and a woman who calls attention to herself wherever she goes, she is a bon vivant who loves life, and she lives up to the ESFP's nickname - the Performer. Unlike her nephew Lawrence, she is improvident and has no business sense. Early on, she confesses that she squandered her fortune by giving most of it away to a gigolo in Europe. Nonetheless, she keeps up appearances by living off credit and by doing so she maintains a luxurious lifestyle; and part of that lifestyle is keeping her dour Eastern European butler, Ivan Marais, in tow; the loyal and laconic manservant is inseparable from her and accompanies her throughout all her subsequent appearances.

 

To ameliorate her financial woes, Vivian sets her sights on Victor Kiriakis and becomes a rival to Kate Roberts (see below) for his affections. Vivian goes on to commit terrible crimes to achieve her objectives, but excuses are made for her - she was under the influence of drugs at the time. Improbably enough, she goes on to have more than one child (using stolen embryos): the middle-aged Vivian is as fertile as an ewe.

 

To sum up, she is your typical larger than life soap villainess, and like most extraverted villain types (see Stefano DiMera) she possesses a great charm and warmth; we like her, and we like seeing her on our screens, even though we feel we shouldn't. She becomes a fan favourite, which is why the writers kept bringing the character back.

 

Kate Roberts - ESTJ (first appears 1996)

 

The character of Kate, as played by Lauren Koslow (who previously had been an actress on a rival soap, Bold and the Beautiful), has seen a long run; she has appeared over the course of nearly three decades.

 

Interestingly, Kate Roberts as villain was created out of two characters. The first of these is a nurse called Kate Roberts who debuted on Days in the late seventies; the second, a nurse who debuted in the mid-eighties. The latter, a character called Kate Honeycutt, worked for Stefano DiMera and then Victor Kiriakis; Victor employed her to minister to a captive John Black (who in the first few months of his time on the show was a bed-ridden amnesiac swathed in bandages and who went by the name of The Pawn). In the early nineties, the writers of Days dusted off the 1970s good-girl Kate and made her into a love interest for Victor. She made herself useful to the show by expanding the cast; after her debut her children Lucas, Austin, and Billie were introduced (a soap can always benefit by introducing young blood). After the departure of Deborah Adair who had played her, Kate was recast; she was henceforth played by Koslow. And as often happens with a recast, the character's personality type changed. Elements of Nurse Honeycutt were introduced, and Kate became scheming, manipulative, ruthless, and evil.

 

Kate Roberts' medical background was excised, and Kate was made a businesswoman who pulled herself up by the bootstraps, a social climber who went from being a struggling single mother (and prostitute) to head of a corporation. A stylishly dressed woman who has the best fashion sense of all the women characters on the show, her life revolves around the men she manages to attract, and her children. Like many a soap parent, she is constantly interfering in her children's lives, especially their romantic lives, and in this capacity, she makes an enemy of Sami Brady, who is romantically entangled with two of her sons and who is the mother of her grandchild Will. A villain in her own right, Sami drugs Austin so she can have sex with him and claims to have been pregnant so she can trap him into marriage; she is pregnant, but by Austin's brother Lucas. Their son, Will, makes Sami a permanent fixture in Lucas' and Kate's lives, and such is her irritation, Kate cannot stoop low enough to get rid of Sami. In 1998, Kate and Lucas - whose relationship with Sami has soured by this point - frame Sami for murder, and Sami gets sent to death row.

 

Putting it mildly, Sami and Kate do mean things to one another. One of the most amusing of Kate's schemes has Lucas impersonating a blonde, long-haired surfer who looks Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar; Lucas sneaks into a restaurant in Italy and drugs Sami's meal; Sami hallucinates, and she nearly becomes mad after Lucas visits her in her bedroom and torments her with a life-sized Will mannequin that talks in Will's voice. 'Don't go mommy, don't go; why are you hurting me?'. But after she after she wanders to the seashore and nearly falls off a cliff, Lucas becomes remorseful. He is not evil like his mother and not a villain; he is merely a neutral character and a weak-minded one, so he is easily influenced.

 

Shortly after this story, Kate, who is married to Victor again, tries to kill Victor - twice - and he retaliates by throwing her out on the street. Homeless and sleeping in her car, she lands a job as a waitress at a café. There Sami finds her serving meals, and Sami of course gloats over Kate's predicament and rubs it in her face. The argument between the two continues into the restroom, and there Kate, who has made ill by her ordeal, collapses, and starts bleeding between her legs. Revealing herself once more to be a total sociopath, Sami snickers, and she gingerly steps over the growing pool of blood on the bathroom floor. This is strong stuff, and I don't think anything quite like it had been seen on a daytime soap before.

 

As could be expected, Kate hauls herself up by the bootstraps again after this low, and she achieves escape velocity from poverty. This is in keeping with her personality type, which is the ESTJ. That type belongs to a group of four that Socionics calls the 'Delta Quadra'. One of the distinguishing marks of a type that belongs to that Quadra is a desire for self-betterment, self-actualisation, moral uplift, the bringing-forth of one's inmost possibilities to completion. Whenever her children are caught up in a romantic entanglement that she feels is unworthy of them, she exhorts them, and the theme that lurks underneath all her lecturing is, 'You can do better'. In a twisted way, Kate embodies the qualities of the Delta Quadra. A character can preach moral uplift and at the same time be evil.

 

Like any ESTJ, Kate can be summed up by three functions, and these are Extraverted Thinking (Te), Introverted Sensing (Si), and Extraverted Sensing (Se). The dominant function of the ESTJ, Te, is logic, business logic; it guides all of Kate's most important decisions; the type’s secondary function, Si, drives her to create a safe, comfortable, familiar, reassuring domestic environment for herself and her family. Extraverted Sensing, which is what Socionics calls the ESTJ's Demonstrative Function, means that she is prepared to defend that safe and cosy environment with force - brutal force if need be.

 

Bart Biederbecke - ISFJ (first appears 1997)

 

Some characters must perform the function of background characters, drudges, servitors, henchman; not every character can be a bright and shining star. Keirsey calls these workmanlike, yeoman characters 'Guardians', and Bart Biederbecke is one such Guardian. Normally, Guardian characters stand on the side of good; Bart breaks the mold insofar as he stands on the side of evil.

 

Bart begins his life as a henchman and hitman of Stefano and he wears, like many a gun-wielding character of the nineties, a navy suit and a navy trench coat; he dresses like a spy or secret agent from the X-Files. As time goes on, we see more and more of the inner Bart, and he is revealed to be a sentimental character, and a character with barely suppressed creative longings; at one point, he records, in one of the DiMera hideaways, an imitation Frank Sinatra tune, and for the recording session, he wears his tie loose, Sinatra-style.

 

We can trace all these elements back to functions of the ISFJ that are strong. The first of these is Fe, Extraverted Feeling, a function that manifests itself in Bart's gross sentimentality. On finding that André, the son of his employer Stefano, is alive, Bart weeps tears of gratitude and hugs him; André, horrified, responds by yelling 'Don't touch me!'. This is a piece of cleverness on the part of the Days writers: like many a soap villain, André is an INTJ, and that type finds itself vulnerable to overt displays of Fe; Fe forms what Socionics calls the Vulnerable Function in the INTJ; simply put, Fe makes the INTJ uncomfortable, overwhelmed, oppressed.

 

At the conclusion of the notorious Melaswen story arc, one which saw around a dozen regular characters killed off and then brought back to life on a secret island (in a village that is a perfect imitation of Salem, right down to the last detail), Bart is holding the good guys hostage at gunpoint; the heroes attempt to reason with Bart and get him to join their side; after all, they argue, André's mental state is deteriorating rapidly, he is becoming more and more crazy; and furthermore, the entire island is about to be engulfed by an erupting volcano. So why not switch sides? Bart refuses, and in a strangled voice cries out: 'The DiMeras took me in!'. That is typical Bart and typical ISFJ. ISFJ loyalty supersedes self-preservation.

 

Dr Wilhelm Rolf - ISTJ (first appears 1997)

 

Like Bart, Rolf is an Introverted Sensing (Si) dominant, and it is the lot of the Si-dominant character to be nondescript background figure, which is what Rolf is; and like Bart, Rolf is a loyal, long-standing and long-suffering henchman of Stefano DiMera who is bullied and abused. Rolf does not deserve our sympathy, however; he is perhaps the most cold-hearted villain on the show, one who kills without thinking and without remorse.

 

Rolf spends most of his time in Stefano's employ inventing; he constantly comes up with miracle potions and cures, the most famous of which is his 'reviving serum', which can bring a man back from the dead. The inventive streak has led others to call Rolf a mad scientist, and from the perspective of MBTI, the most interesting thing about this appellation is: should it lend weight to the categorising of Rolf as an INTP?

 

We find a lot of Introverted Intuition (Ne) in Rolf. This is the function of creativity, and the exploration of possibilities and potentialities. Mad scientist types, such as the INTP and ENTP, possess Ne in spades. But Ne can be detected in a few Si-dominant characters, like Bart for instance. An Si-dominant will have Ne bubbling underneath the surface, liable to erupt at any time; Ne is the type's inferior function, or what Socionics calls the Suggestive Function. If a type is put under stress or placed in an extreme state of loosening of inhibitions, the inferior function will burst forth. And that is what we see in Bart, who has barely suppressed desires to be a creative type, an artist, a performer. We also see it in other Si-dominant types - Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager.

 

In Rolf, Introverted Thinking (Ti) recurs again and again. That function is the dominant one of the INTP, and perhaps the prevalence of Ti in Rolf could support the argument that Rolf is an INTP. But Ti does form an important part of the makeup of the ISTJ as well, Ti being what Socionics calls the ISTJ’s Demonstrative Function.

 

The ISTJ's Ti helps the ISTJ's first two functions, Si and Extraverted Thinking (Te) do their work. One MBTI nickname for the ISTJ is the Duty-Fulfiller; the fundamentally passive ISTJ, an Si-dominant, uses his secondary function Te, which is business logic, in his capacity as a cog in a wheel, in either a business, an army, or in Rolf's case, an organised crime syndicate. But his approach to business uses a lot of Ti; the Ti function is analysing, and it closely attends to underlying first principles, mechanics.

 

This explains why it is that cold and cerebral character who is a scientist can often appear to be an INTP, the consummate scientist and rationalist; after all, there are two functions that the ISTJ returns to again and again, and these are Ne and Ti, form the first two functions of the INTP.

 

V. The 2000s

 

Hattie Adams - ENFP (first appears 2000)

 

Hattie, one of several evil twins in Days, and Dr Marlena Evans' doppelganger, is played by Andrea Hall, the real-life twin sister of Deirdre Hall, who plays Dr Marlena.

 

A waitress who works at a greasy truck stop café, the malcontent Hattie develops a dislike for Dr Marlena after she replaces Hattie's favourite celebrity psychiatrist on a radio show. An extravert - unlike Marlena - she attracts the attention of a few prominent Salemites, including Marlena's ex-husband Roman Brady, who she falls in love with, and the supervillain Stefano DiMera, who frequents the café and calls it his 'Own little piece of Americana'. Stefano conceives a scheme to turn Hattie into Marlena's perfect double, and being Stefano, he intends no good. He sends Dr Rolf to persuade her to take plastic surgery and tutor her in how to reproduce Marlena's mannerisms. Rolf, a secret romantic, falls for Hattie, and we see a re-run of the plot of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912), the Audrey Hepburn movie My Fair Lady (1964), and the Richard Gere and Julia Roberts movie Pretty Woman (1990).

 

Stefano plans on abducting Marlena and making her disappear, in order to punish for refusing his advances; Hattie will take Marlena's place, the perfect resemblance ensuring that no-one will notice that Marlena is gone. Before Stefano can carry out this intriguing scheme, he is forced to leave Salem abruptly. He would not return for five years. Hattie would put in a brief appearance for the notorious Salem Slasher / Melaswen storyline of 2003 to 2004.

 

A Feeler like Marlena, Hattie displays a great deal of Marlena's Introverted Feeling Fi; at the same time, she is an Extravert whereas Marlena is an Introvert. This led me at first to type Hattie as being an ESFP, but I think Hattie dwells much in a dream world to be a Sensor, which is what an ESFP is. Besides which, Hattie's rather weird turns of phrases show a lot of Extraverted Intuition (Ne). This makes her sound like the John Candy character in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). Here's what Taylor has to say on the Candy character, whose name is Del Griffith (I cannot link to Taylor’s site Zombies Ruin Everything site here, because the site is down).

 

Del’s Ne seems to come in the form of not only being able to find a solution in the dimmest of situations (and ones that get the better of Neil throughout the film), but in his constant analogous sayings and anecdotes.

 

"St. Louis and Chi-town are booked tighter than Tom Thumb’s ass"

 

"We’d have more luck playing pick-up sticks with our butt cheeks than we will getting out of here before daybreak."

 

"If they told you wolverines make good house-pets, would you believe them?"

 

Hattie, like Del, gets the best lines, and I believe that Hattie's creators took inspiration from Del, among other sources.

 

EJ DiMera (INFJ) - (first appears 2006)

 

I think of all my typings, this would be most controversial. Intuitive-Feeling (NF) types rarely turn up as the villain, especially INFJ types; as a rule, NFs are soon as too sensitive, too nice, and too ethical.

 

In 1996, Stefano fathers by artificial insemination a son on hillbilly moron Susan Banks; Stefano, preying on Susan's gullibility, convinces her that he is Elvis Presley and even wears an Elvis costume when he is with her. The baby, Elvis John DiMera, is born in 1997, and Susan escapes with him to England, fleeing Stefano's clutches. Sometime later, Stefano does catch up with the boy and raises him to be his evil protégé. EJ returns to Salem in 2006, not as a ten-year-old, but as a man in his thirties: the writers have taken the liberty of artificially aging him, that is, subjecting him to the 'SORAS' (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome) treatment.

 

EJ takes the name 'EJ Wells' and moves into the apartment next door to Sami Brady's. He keeps his lineage secret; the world knows him only as a race car driver and businessman. A handsome snake, his British accent, his charm, his fine clothes, his culture, his good looks, and his habit of walking around half-nude in a towel and flaunting his waxed, oiled-up torso - all serve to attract Sami's attention. His sympathising with her, his listening to her, and his lack of moralising and condescending to her, makes him different from all her other suitors; unlike these men, he accepts her unconditionally. The truth is that EJ, an INFJ, is the Dual of Sami's type, an ESTP. Sami has found the love of her life but does not get to enjoy EJ's good side for long; the writers of the show have decreed, as usual, that Sami must be punished for her long list of crimes, Sami being as much a villain as EJ.

 

At the first, I typed the slippery, insubstantial, vague, and otherworldly EJ as an Intuitive, and Intuitive dominant; his leading function was Intuition, N. In some ways, he reminded me of Lord Baelish from Game of Thrones, who Taylor types as an ENTP. Was EJ an ENTP? To be one, he would need to be a Thinker, and he lacks the ruthlessness that comes with a villain who is a Thinker. EJ expresses himself more in terms of emotions, feelings, ethics, values, than cold rationality; this is made clear when we see him on the screen with his brother André, an INTJ. Both are Intuitive dominants, but one is a Feeler, the other a Thinker. This is not to say that EJ does not do villainous deeds, but at this point, we are willing to accept - or half-accept - his contention that these are not in keeping with his true character. He is a 'good' DiMera, or so he argues.

 

One MBTI nickname for the INFJ is 'The Counselor', and that is precisely what EJ does with Samantha: he counsels. And he does not criticise Sami's lack of morals and her inability to empathise with others, which is for the good, for as Gulenko writes of the ESTP, 'Lecturing and annoying hectoring over this element can lead to a sharp deterioration of [the ESTP's] mood'. Gulenko writes:

 

The [INFJ] unconsciously produces large psychological distances on this element, he as if slips away from his conversation partner, closes himself off behind a meaningless smile. Events that are relayed by his conversation partner do not affect him deeply. It is exactly these kind of elusively polite relations that seem inviting to the [ESTP], creating for him [the ESTP] the stability of the external psychological situation.

 

EJ's thin-lipped smirk is the default facial expression for the character, and Gulenko is right to describe it as a 'meaningless smile'.

 

Ava Vitali (ESTP) - (first appears 2008)

 

Iconic Days hero Steve 'Patch' Johnson returns to the show after a 16-year absence in 2006; he was presumed dead, murdered, in 1990, but in a typically soapy retcon, it transpires that his death was faked and his memories erased. Steve takes up the identity of 'Nick Stockton', male nurse and delivery driver for the mafia. Sometime during his missing years, which are somewhat like Ben Reilly's missing years in the notorious Spiderman Clone Saga of the 1990s, Steve had an affair with the daughter of his employer, mob boss Martino Vitali. The pair are engaged, but on their wedding day, Steve is abducted by Vitali's goons and sent away. Thereafter Ava falls into a depression. She is prescribed drugs by a quack doctor and locked away by her father in a luxurious bedroom in the Vitali compound, which we assume is somewhere in New York State. The influence of The Sopranos can be detected in the 2008 season, and this is natural enough, because The Sopranos, which had come an end the year before, had been a highly popular show. It concerned the decline of an Italian American organised crime family, and the mafiosos in The Sopranos, like those in 2008 Days, live with the ghosts of the past; by the time we see them, both crime families, the Sopranos and the Vitalis, are clearly on the way out.

 

Isolated in her New York compound and drugged up to the eyeballs, Ava becomes increasingly unhinged. Obsessed by the past and her affair with Steve Johnson, she plans to win him back with the aid of her father's goons; even though she is progressively losing touch with reality and is neglected by the father whom she hardly sees, she still has a hold on the gun-wielding mafiosos in her circle; these men will obey her orders without question. 

 

She and her retinue follow Steve, who is in the company of the Brady family, to Ireland. After Steve's party board a passenger plane back to Salem, the plane is sabotaged by Ava's goons and its pilots are drugged. Ava wanted to ground the plane and leave the Salemites stuck in Ireland, but her scheme backfires. The jet does succeed in taking off but develops engine trouble over the Atlantic, and it goes down in a sequence so thrilling that we in the audience hardly notice that the same plot device was used before, in 2000. Days possessed so much realism in this period that one could be forgiven, when looking at the wreckage of the jet when it crashes, that a real jet was destroyed.

 

These exciting events only form the beginning of the Ava arc. The denouement, or climax, occurs when Salem's heroes Steve, Kayla, Bo, and Hope, are held hostage by Ava in her family compound. Inevitably - and we see this coming from a mile off - Ava blackmails Steve into sex; her ultimatum is that if he lets her have her way with him, the lives of his wife Kayla and his friends Bo and Hope will be spared. Fortunately, Bo, who is tied up, escapes his captors in what is an implausible escape ('And with one bound, Jack was free'), and he rescues Steve, who is mercifully spared the choice between sex with Ava or Kayla's life.

 

After the rescue, the Salem police descend on the compound and arrests are made; Ava is taken to a hospital, and she detoxes. After the drugs have been flushed out of her system, becomes halfway normal. She leaves the show and comes back in 2015.

 

For the Ava arc, the writers of Days were inspired by a Steve story from 1989; in it, Steve and Kayla, happily married, saw their lives upside down after a woman from Steve's mysterious reappeared; her name was Marina Toscano, and she was played by Hunter Tylo, who would in a few years become famous on rival soap Bold and the Beautiful. Marina claimed to be Steve's former wife, and in this she was correct, and the unfortunate consequence was that supercouple Steve and Kayla's marriage was null and void, and Steve was revealed to be a bigamist. But Marina assures him, this can be undone; in return for a divorce, Marina demands that Steve help her locate a map that will lead to buried treasure...

 

The two women, Marina and Ava, are con women and grifters, and share the same personality type, which is ESTP. The dominant function of the type, Extraverted Sensing, can be defined as pure force, volition, concentration of energies into a focal point like a laser; the secondary function, Introverted Thinking Ti, is understanding of the structures of things - and personalities - and for the predatory and crooked ESTP character, that means an understanding of others' weaknesses and how to take advantage of these. It should be noted that in such ESTP characters, the moral sense is atrophied, and this is largely due to the function of Introverted Feeling Fi. This function, a moral function, makes up the Vulnerable Function of the ESTP type; the ESTP lacks a strong Fi, feels embarrassed by it, and prefers not to think about it.

 

Considering the three functions the strong Se and Ti and the weak Fi, we arrive at a sketch, an outline, of the ESTP type, and we recognise the sketch in its essentials in plenty of Days villains over the decades; there have been many hoodlums, con-men, pimp, bullies, extortionists, blackmailer ESTP characters - too many to count.

 

Another strong function in the ESTP is what Socionics calls the type's Demonstrative Function: this is Extraverted Thinking Te. Simply explained, Te, which is business logic, help the ESTP's two main functions, Se and Ti, do their work. Se equals force, volition, will; Ti equals an understanding of systems, and a certain obstinacy. The ESTP wants to understand existing social hierarchies and carve out a place for himself in them; and he uses force, bullying, effrontery, to get his way. In this struggle, he draws upon the organisational power of Te; furthermore, he 'hustles', like a good Te-dominant businessman.

 

When we translate the above into popular culture and apply it to a female character such as Ava, we arrive at the stock character of the 'Girl Boss' who, when a villain, manages a criminal gang by dint of her charisma and organisational acumen. Think of Catwoman, and transpose her to Days, and we get Ava.

 

VI. The End

 

After looking at all the major villains from a twenty-five period, I have found twelve characters who are representative of twelve out of the sixteen personality types. The reader will notice the types missing from the above list: INTP, ENFJ, ISFP, and INFP. Coincidentally, each of the four missing types belongs to a different Socionics Quadra.

 

If you read my two articles on Days together, you will not need to watch twenty-five seasons worth; I have done all the work for you. Having said that, I hope that now my readers will want to explore further, because the series was a classic for a reason. It provided hundreds of hours of entertainment, and writing on Days’ past has made nostalgic and want to watch some of it again.