Time To Change
Soap Opera Digest: First things first: How did your hiring come about?
Hogan Sheffer: Boy, it was just out of the absolute blue. I was having dinner with my agent in New York and he said, “Well, I’ve got a rumor for ya. Ken Corday [DAYS’s executive producer] is gonna make a move.” And I said, “It’s never gonna happen in a million years. That guy’s [James E. Reilly] got a lock.” I mean, I never even thought about DAYS because I just didn’t think it was ever available. And it happened like the next day. Within three weeks, it was all a done deal and I had to move across the country. It was just really, really wild. Digest: Was it an automatic “Yes”?
Sheffer: Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is — I think — the best franchise of daytime. It has the most loyal viewership and I think the viewership will come back if the stories get good. I can’t say that for any other soap right now. It’s very hard to bring an audience back and coming from AS THE WORLD TURNS, it was really difficult. You know, with [ATWT] you got a lot of, “Is that show still on the air?” When you mention DAYS, all you get is, “Put Bo and Hope together, make Sami bad again….” My neighbors watch the show, relatives who were afraid to tell me before because I worked for another soap are now saying, “I’ve watched it all along.” Ken Corday is the best man to work for and I’m just lucky, very lucky.Digest: How familiar were you with the show?
Sheffer: Well, because I worked for another soap, I would occasionally check in, but I didn’t really watch the show. I liked the show. I liked the look and the feel of it, and it was more youthful and vibrant. What they did was send me like 20 DVDs and I very quickly familiarized myself, read the whole history and pretty quickly got up to speed.
Digest: So where did you start?
Sheffer: The first thing we did was look at the characters who we’re going to tell story with. I think we’ve got a nice mix of veterans. For me, grounding Marlena is really important. She is the show’s icon, she should be the show’s matriarch, and that’s what we’re going to work toward. She’s had so many bizarre events and we want to ground her as a mother and as a doctor and as a family person, and make her real again because so much revolves around her. She’s going to be very important to us. I’m thrilled that Patch is back. I wrote for Mary Beth Evans [Kayla; ex-Sierra, ATWT], of course, and have had a secret crush on her, which really wasn’t much of a secret. I used to pass her in the hall and say, “I’ve got such a crush on you.” But they’re just great because on a show, when you start to make changes, you need those veteran characters that the core audience can still relate to and you can still do the old romantic stuff and flashbacks. I think Steve and Kayla will give us that, and obviously Marlena and her various associates, John and Belle and the great Sami, but there’s so many great characters on this show and it’s just now a matter of redefining who they are. Digest: Like?
Sheffer: Philip, for instance, is a war veteran with a fake leg. I didn’t know this until my co-head, Meg Kelly, called me and said, “What are we gonna do about Philip and his fake leg?” I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” She goes, “He’s got a prosthetic leg.” I said, “I’m watching the same show, I didn’t hear anything.” With our core audience and the values associated with going to war and losing a limb, it’s huge and I think we need to treat that kind of character iconography a little more seriously. Philip should be working his way toward being Victor. To me, Philip should be a little distant and hard to reach, and he should wear his experiences on his sleeve, and the present incarnation of him doesn’t. I think they’ve lost track of that a little bit over the last few years. It’s about setting up the younger generation to accept power now from the older generation, but it’s gonna take redefining who they are. 
Digest: DAYS is the supercouple show. Will you keep it in that vein?
Sheffer: First of all, I don’t write aliens and demonic possession. We’re going back to emotional soap with a lot of story. I tell story very fast, but more important, the emotional core of the story is really important and that goes along with the couples. Love, love, love Bo and Hope, Sami and Lucas, and Abe and Lexie. We’re going to be revisiting all these couples again. There’s been so much back and forth and after a while it loses meaning because there’s no emotional weight attached to it. You don’t have that deep longing that you need, that ache for somebody and that’s what we want to get back to with the supercouples, and hopefully create a few more. There’s the actor on the show who plays Max [Darin Brooks] — the guy’s a stud. I only know that ’cause he walked in the writers’ room and the women who were in the room [makes a sighing noise] and I’m very alert to that. I said, “So he’s good-looking, is he?” And they said, “Yeah, he’s really good-looking.” I said, “Why is he dating his nieces?” And they said, “Well, there are no Hortons, everybody’s a Brady.” I said, “Well, you know, that’s like really unhealthy.” I know he was adopted, but still. If I had an adopted brother and he was dating my child, I’d ice-pick him to death. So Max is a guy who’s destined for supercoupledom.
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