France Reid the matriarch of Days of our Lives passed away last week and today Ken Corday told Soap Opera Digest how the show will handle Alice Horton’s death on the show NBC daytime drama.
“The way we’re going to deal with her death on screen is we’re not going to one day walk downstairs, as it was with Mickey, and say, ‘Oh, Grandma’s dead’ and then have a day or two where everyone comes to the show and we have a funeral and you cut to Marie for one line and Doug and Julie for one line and it really becomes ‘lip service’ to such a great character. So, what we’ve decided to do is we will play her as being ill and the end is coming and one by one, characters who loved her dearly or are related to her, from the past, will come to the show and ‘visit’ with her. You can start to imagine the list. I don’t know what we’re going to do with Bill Horton, because the last person who played him was not Ed Mallory, it was Chris Stone, who is gone, too, so that will be a little tricky. We’re working that out. And unfortunately, because we’re so far ahead into writing the show, it won’t air really until the end of May sweeps. But I believe it’s far better to do it that way then to just have a day or two of she’s gone, here’s the funeral and on we go. It’s too important and there are too many individual relationships that needed to be remembered and have flashbacks as opposed to a flashback show. I think it’s an honest and sensitive way to deal with something like this. It will give the audience time to prepare, even though many of our fans know this has happened. We will put a bumper up at the end of the show on February 18 or 19 with a picture and her dates, but it’s impossible to stop the machine now, write a show or two in the next week and bring everyone in. It was just not the right thing to do.”
Personally I think they are waiting too long to honor her life on the show, but I understand why it won’t happen until May sweeps. Hopefully they will bring back cast members like Deidre Hall, Melissa Reeves, Drake Hogestyn, Matthew Ashford to name a few of the people who are not on the show now, but have worked with her in the past. I also really hope they will do her justice, which I think they will.
