Developed by Ted Corday, Irna Phillips, and Alan Chase, the daytime drama Days of Our Lives premiered on NBC in 1965. With Phillips' creation for Procter & Gamble, As the World Turns serving as a model, Days proceeded to put increasingly outrageous twists on established formulae for the next three decades. By the mid-1990s, its flights into the postmodern and the macabre had themselves become models for a struggling genre.

"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives," proclaims the show's opening narration, voiced by former film actor MacDonald Carey over the appropriate image. Carey portrayed patriarch Tom Horton, all-purpose physician in Days' midwestern hamlet of Salem, from the program's inception until the passing of both actor and character in 1994. Accompanied by dutiful wife Alice (Frances Reid), the elder Hortons are two of a handful of veterans who evolved...