Back to the Beginning With Sixty Years of Salem: Days of our Lives Two Scoops For the Week of November 10th

If you want to take a trip down memory lane of your life and Salem's lives, then you need to have watched Days of Our Lives this past week. If you didn't, the episodes are right there on Peacock on demand to view whenever you choose. If you have spent most of your life living in Salem, one hour a day for decades, or are a new viewer first trying out one of television's most enduring series, then Peacock is the place to be. And here's why.

All the Days of our Lives

The year was 1981. This writer was nine years old and home from school, and apparently, people were getting strangled all over Salem. This was some good television when you were supposed to be in your fifth-grade classroom. Thankfully, Mom's addiction to Another World made us the first house on the street with a VCR, so we just added Days of our Lives to the lineup for the kid now well enough to go to school, and a soap addict was born.

We'd come home every day from school, do our homework, and get the VCR ready for Salem and Bay City. While Alma Rudder (played by Elizabeth Franz, who died this past week) and Cecile tortured Blaine Ewing over in Bay City, Marlena needed a protector over in Salem, so we met Salem PD detective Roman Brady (played then by the late Wayne Northrop), and the Brady family was born.

By 1983, an 11-year-old future soap industry writer named Hope couldn't believe her beloved soap had a high school student also named Hope, who fell head over heels for a motorcycle-riding, bearded young hero named Bo. And that was it. We never wanted to leave the town of Salem and wanted to know about everything that came before 1981. So, what could we do except read about it in magazines and, miracle of miracles, books.

A series of soap opera novelizations was published in the early and mid-1980s, telling us the story of Marie Horton falling for her brother, Maggie Horton falling for a handsome stranger at her farmhouse, and Julie Olson falling for a former con named Doug Williams. For decades, all we could do was imagine these stories in our heads, but this past week, it all came to life on our laptop screen (of course, that is where members of the soap press watch their soaps in 2025).

Thanks to the Dr. Tom Horton Free Clinic and the magic of flashbacks some of us had never seen, we got to watch Tom Horton tell Laura Horton that he wouldn't keep the truth of Laura's pregnancy from Mickey. We got to watch an amnesiac Tommy Horton give his mother flowers. And we got to see Julie's first bonding moments with baby Hope. That was especially moving, as Julie and Hope's sister and mother-daughter relationship was still center stage as late as this past spring.

All of these incredible early stories finally came to life as the soap we began watching at just nine years old turned 60 years old on November 8, 2025, and Salem celebrated all week. As this is a soap opera and the story must go on, we even had...soap opera stories, so let's dig in.

Jennifer, check yourself

One of those 1980s characters that we've been following since her teenage years and our teenage years intersected is now a writer...and a grandmother. While we have the writer thing in common, we haven't yet entered grandparenthood, but we'd like to think that when that happens, we won't try to take our grandkids from their only parent.

We get it. Jennifer does not have to like Cat after she impersonated her late daughter, Abigail. Nobody is telling her to, but Chad is allowed to like her or even love her, if that is how he feels. And even with his feelings for Cat, he was willing to give her up for his son's sake. But a misunderstood moment between Cat and Chad led to Thomas running out into oncoming traffic, so now Jennifer is sure that Chad is an unfit father who puts his own needs ahead of his kids.

Oh, Jennifer, get over yourself. Really. Chad has never done one thing to harm his kids, has never been negligent, and explained the misunderstanding. What more do you want? All this story serves to do is paint Jennifer Rose as a stuck-up shrew who seems to be thinking more about her own feelings than someone else's, and it is not a good look.

Sami's pointless engagement?

Sami came. Sami left. And Sami is engaged. Ok, and? Are we going to see this man? Watch their romance play out? Be invited to the wedding? It doesn't look like it because Sami is not a regular character on the show and hasn't been for more than a decade. She flits in and out of Salem once or twice a year, and sometimes, not even that.

And is there only one Vitali family in the entire world? How did EJ immediately know that Dante Vitali was a member of Ava Vitali's crime family when he was not from the criming side? Something better come of this story that finds Sami engaged to one of Ava's relatives. However, Ava is now in Genoa City in a romance with her Salem son. (Yes, Tamara Braun's love interest on The Young and the Restless is Lucas Adams, who played Tripp. What a trip!)

Lab partners

What the heck is really going on in that clinic, namely, the secret high-security state-of-the-art lab behind the clinic? There are too many moving parts to actually figure it out, but hopefully, it comes together soon. Is perfecting Versavix the real plan or just a cover to get Mark Greene involved? Perhaps Rolf will be taking the Versavix to new levels, so he can resurrect more dead people...

We do know that someone who looks like Tony kidnapped Kristen from Statesville, but where does he have her? Is that the lab, too, or just some warehouse somewhere? And is that Tony or Andre? We want to know, but we guess we have to sit patiently to find out. Maybe our patience will even pay off this week. We have also been predicting that Tony is really Andre for months and think we are onto something...

Real life to reel

While Jennifer might be driving us insane, Sami might be engaged for no reason, and the mess in the lab might have left us befuddled, but that didn't mean the gala wasn't wonderful.

Sure, it was low budget because it took place in the town square, but this is Days of our Lives, so what does one expect? It was still a lovely event that didn't just pay tribute to Tom Horton, but also to John Black. And what an incredible tribute it was, remembering Drake Hogestyn at the same time. Having John leave an endowment to the hospital for pancreatic cancer research was a wonderful touch. Hogestyn died from pancreatic cancer last fall, while John's first wife, Isabella, succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the early 1990s.

DAYS outdid itself all around with a wondrous week of memories, warm moments, and soap opera. And that's just the way it should be. Here's to making it to 70 in 2035.

Catch all-new episodes of Days of our Lives weekdays on Peacock