future watch

DAYS’s executive producer, Ken Corday, reflects upon the show’s two-year pickup

- Stephanie Sloane

Soap Opera Digest: Congratulations on the pickup! How do you feel now that you know the show will remain on the air until September 2023?

Ken Corday: Thank you. I feel a lot of relief. The cast was thrilled. We needed this. We needed a shot in the arm and it’s nice to get a little love.

Digest: What did it mean to you to get a two-year pickup?

Corday: It feels inordinately wonderful. It’s been a while, over five years, since the network made this kind of commitment. It just goes miles to everyone on the show, and to what we’ve accomplished and what they see as our future and what we see as our future. It’s just great. For the viewers, it’s also really encouraging that they don’t have to think about what to watch next year.

Digest: Do you do things differently now that you know you have two years as opposed to one year?

Corday: We have some wiggle room now with the schedule. We can take a few more extra dark weeks through the year. Making eight shows a week is arduous and the crew is pretty much done after three or four weeks of that, and so is the cast. And we’re able to plan for the next 24 months and beyond, and that’s a huge bonus, especially budgetarily. In two years, we’ll see what happens. Right now, I’m going to focus on the foreign sales of the show, because that’s in need of a little attention and this gives me the opportunity to do that.

Digest: Very few shows on the air have the distinction of saying that they’ve been on for 57 and 58 seasons, which you will have at the end of this extension. How does that feel?