DAYS Dreams On
Talk about synergy between NBC daytime and nighttime! On Sunday, Feb. 22 four stars of DAYS OF OUR LIVES guest on AMERICAN DREAMS, NBC’s love letter to the ’60s. DREAMS’ creator and executive producer Jonathan Prince, who has no problem calling DREAMS a soap (hello HBO!), was tickled pink to explain how this special crossover came to be. “AMERICAN DREAMS is finally joining the real ranks of soap operas,” Prince beams.In keeping with DREAMS’ obsession with authentic period detail– music, cars, clothing and the then new technology — the television sets on the floor of Pryor TV and Radio show whatever was on television at that time in history. The episode in question “Old Enough to Fight” was set in November 1965. A member of the production staff showed Prince the opening titles of the first episode of DAYS. “Oh my God, that’s ridiculously cool,” Prince remembers. “So I looked at it and I thought, what do we do with this? What do we do? And they (writers, producers) all said,’Well, why don’t we try and get some of them to be on our show.’ And I thought ‘We’ve got to get someone who was on that episode in our episode, playing somebody different.’ Me not knowing DAYS OF OUR LIVES, I said, “Who’s the oldest woman who’s the oldest man?’ ” So Prince asked DAYS John Aniston and Frances Reid (ex-Victor and Alice) to play characters — he’s applying for a job, she’s browsing — seen in the store, both looking at the monitor that’s airing an early episode of DAYS, which happens to feature, yes, you guessed it, Reid.
Prince was on a roll. “Of course, that mushroomed, because I thought to myself, ‘We can even do better because there’s a younger generation of DAYS viewers who also watch our show. I said, ‘Give me the names of some of the younger hipper girls who are the show.'” So, Alison Sweeney and Farah Fath (Sami and Mimi) were cast as Miss USA and a Playboy Bunny. “That’s part of the storyline where Jennifer Love Hewitt as Nancy Sinatra goes to visit the boys in Vietnam in a USO show,” Prince previews. “And as always in USO shows they bring a Miss USA and a Playboy Bunny. So they play those girls from the period and they have these scenes where they’re signing autographs and flirting with the boys. They’re really cute. And I just thought it would be a great way for us to say to the daytime fans of our show, ‘Hey look,’ you know, with a wink and a nod, ‘We know that we’re a really classy night-time soap opera and we owe so much of our storytelling to the daytime.’ And here we are 40 years after DAYS OF OUR LIVES premieres, watching the premiere of DAYS OF OUR LIVES. So that’s where it all came from. I just feel like we’ve gotten the best of all possible worlds on this one.””Old Enough to Fight” airs Sunday, Feb. 22 on NBC.
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