I get a version of the same question from friends who don't watch soaps: "How can you watch that every single day?" They mean it kindly, usually, but underneath it is an assumption — that daily serialized television is somehow lesser. That it can't be as good as the prestige stuff. That watching a show five days a week for decades is something you do out of habit rather than genuine love.

They're wrong. And Days of Our Lives is the proof.

Here's what prestige TV can't do: sit with a moment for a week.

When a streaming show gives a character bad news — a diagnosis, a betrayal, a death — you get one scene. Maybe two. The show has eight episodes and forty minutes each, and it needs to move. You feel the weight of the moment, and then it's gone, replaced by the next plot point.

When Days gives Chanel a mammogram result that's highly suggestive of malignancy, you get to live inside that fear with her. You see her get the inconclusive result on one day. You see her come back for follow-up imaging the next. You see Sarah's face when Kayla asks for her gut feeling. You see Chanel sit in the chapel and think about leaving. And when the results finally come, you've been carrying the same dread she has for days.

That's not padding. That's the format doing something no other format can do. Daily storytelling lets you inhabit a character's emotional reality in something close to real time. You're not watching a story unfold — you're living alongside it.

The best thing about a soap opera that knows what it's doing is the slow burn. And I don't mean slow in the "nothing is happening" sense. I mean slow in the "every single week is adding one more ingredient to something that's going to explode."

Days just spent two years building Sophia Choi from Holly's scheming best friend into a character capable of constructing a death trap. Two years. In that time, the audience watched her lose her boyfriend, get pregnant, get abandoned by the people who were supposed to adopt her baby, have a breakdown, spend months in a psychiatric hospital, come home to a town that hated her, and get recruited by a woman who saw her pain and decided to weaponize it.

None of that happened fast. None of it felt rushed. And because of that, when Sophia finally crossed the line, the audience was genuinely torn. You understood how she got there. You felt sorry for her even as you wanted her stopped. Try doing that in a ten-episode limited series. You can't. You don't have the runway.

The same patience shows up in how the show handles Kristen DiMera. She's been a schemer and a manipulator for years — always dangerous, rarely lethal. The show spent months quietly escalating her: each scheme a little more calculated, each act of violence a little more deliberate, each line crossed a little harder to come back from. When she finally committed premeditated murder, it didn't come out of nowhere. It felt like the inevitable end point of a journey the audience had been watching without fully realizing it.

That's what patience buys you. The big moments land harder because they were earned over time.

One of the most underrated things about a show that's been running for sixty years is that characters carry their history with them. When Stephanie tells her therapist that she keeps choosing men who make her feel controlled, and connects it to Owen Kent — something that happened years ago — it doesn't feel like a retcon. It feels like a person who's been alive in our living rooms long enough to develop real patterns.

When Brady and Shawn stand in a hospital room and talk about living up to John and Bo, it lands because the audience knew John and Bo. We watched those relationships. We're carrying the same grief the characters are.

When Kristen kills Sophia and the audience thinks of Haley Chen — another young woman Kristen caused the death of — that's not a callback the writers had to explain. It's a memory the audience already has. The show trusts us to bring our own history to the screen, and it rewards us for it.

No other format has this. No streaming show, no limited series, no movie can draw on sixty years of shared memory between the characters and the audience. It's the soap opera's secret weapon, and Days uses it constantly.

Prestige TV gives you one protagonist. Maybe two. Everyone else orbits them. A soap opera gives you a town. On any given day, you might spend time with a DiMera power struggle, a teenage love triangle, a medical crisis, a police investigation, and a comedy plot — all in the same episode, all given room to breathe, all featuring characters the audience has known for years.

That breadth means there's always something on screen for you, even on days when your favorite storyline isn't front and center. It means the show can surprise you — a character you weren't paying attention to suddenly gets the best scene of the week. It means the world feels alive in a way that single-protagonist shows never quite manage.

Days is particularly good at this right now. The Sophia/Kristen arc is the big story, but it's surrounded by Chanel's cancer scare, the Alex/Stephanie/Joy triangle, Chad's identity questions, the Stefano will reading, Gabi's secret engagement — all running simultaneously, all getting real attention, all interconnected in ways that make Salem feel like an actual place where people's lives overlap.

I started The Salem Dispatch because I wanted a place where watching Days of Our Lives was taken seriously. Not ironically, not as a guilty pleasure, not as something to be embarrassed about. The show is doing real work right now — character development, long-term planning, emotional storytelling that earns its biggest moments through patience and craft.

It deserves an audience that pays attention. That's what I try to be every day in this newsletter — a fan who watches closely, connects the threads, and writes about what's working (and what isn't) with the same care the show puts into telling these stories.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you're in the right place.