Credit: Jill Johnson/JPI (2), Peacock screenshot (2)
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It’s never good news when a soap opera gets canceled. And though it’s been a good 12 years since the last soap bit the dust (RIP One Life to Live… the first time, at least), we can understand if daytime fans may still be worried about their favorite soap being the next to go.
Now, Days of Our Lives has just given us what feels a bit too close a case of art imitating life as Kate’s revealed to Abe that his beloved soap, Body & Soul, had been canceled. (Read about it in today’s recap here.) He got hooked on the sudser last summer while he was held captive, and Days of Our Lives gave us delightfully campy clips from the long-running fictional soap with familiar faces like Deidre Hall (Marlena), Jackée Harry (Paulina), Mary Beth Evans (Kayla) and Lauren Koslow (Kate) playing the glammed out characters.
With it being axed, we can understand why folks might be a bit worried about what that means for Days of Our Lives. Because now we’re looping back to when One Life to Live went off the air. Remember what happened then? Onscreen, the show dealt with it by axing its long running soap, Fraternity Row. It was a way to directly say goodbye to a beloved soap without breaking the fourth wall.
And now, it’s hard not to see the parallels, as Ed Kane Cudahy tweeted ominously, “Body & Soul canceled, just like Fraternity Row…”
So does this mean Days of Our Lives is getting the ax too? Not at all. NBC had the chance to do that back in 2022, but rather than canceling Days of Our Lives, it was just moved online to Peacock. And from all indications, it’s been met with resounding success.
And besides the fact that it’s been renewed through its 60th anniversary, we know that the show’s still shooting full speed ahead, and already has a special 15,000th episode celebration planned for the fall that’s also going to send Doug and Bill Hayes off in grand fashion. And that may be why Kate suggested that rather than produce a new soap, she and Abe just buy Body & Soul since they were planning on producing their own soap anyway.
Maybe they’ll even resurrect it online like Days of Our Lives. Because while One Life to Live and Fraternity Row may have been canceled, Days of Our Lives was given a whole new lease on life. And now, it looks like Body & Soul will soon follow suit. So rather than cause for alarm, this time, we’re going to have to say it’s cause for celebration.
Days of Our Lives is still going strong and so, too, are soaps in general. In fact, by the new year we’ll have our first new soap in over a quarter century when The Gates finally debuts!
So take a breath and enjoy the ride we seem about to go on as, if Abe and Kate manage to pull this off, we’re probably soon going to be getting behind the scenes glimpses of how you put a (fictional) soap opera together!
