Setting Pretty

DAYS’s Production Designer, Tom Early, Dishes About The New Sets In Salem

- Stephanie Sloane

Soap Opera Digest: With Salem jumping a year ahead there are some new sets. Town Square got a complete overhaul.

Tom Early: It did, but that kind of happened on camera. We had it where it was being redone literally on camera so we had “Wet Paint” signs, which was great for our department because typically when a set premieres, it has to be absolutely perfect and finished. The challenge with Town Square is that it’s very difficult to do in one big day. I had weeks and months to kind of tweak it. We’re still tweaking it to get it just perfect.

Digest: Doug’s Place went away and Julie’s Place replaced it. How did you approach that?

Early: Well, with Doug’s, it was taking up a lot of real estate on stage. The producers wanted to have more room to have more sets. That was the beginning of the thought process with Doug’s Could we have a smaller restaurant that still has an exterior and can fulfill what Doug’s Place was doing, but opens up a whole other space to put other sets in? We pitched the idea of doing a kind of hip restaurant like you see in Los Angeles, which is sort of healthy food and everything is sort of natural, modern architecture and we’re gonna call it farm-to-table. And this is long before the time jump or any of that when we were pitching it. We just knew that in the future, we were going to do the restaurant. So, when the time jump idea came along, it just sort of fell in step with that, so they decided to call it Julie’s Place and fit it in with the story.

Digest: What are some special elements of that set?