DAYS: POSSESSION PREVIEW!

For Head Writer Ron Carlivati, doing a possession story was always a thought in the back of his mind.

“I started thinking about it the day I got hired at DAYS OF OUR LIVES,” he muses. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Isn’t this the show where Marlena got possessed by the devil? We’re doing that.’ But when I got there, it seemed there was, let’s say, a caution or a hesitation about it, and it seemed like for me to come in and establish myself at the show, maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do right away. But it’s the kind of thing that I gravitate to and was intrigued by.”

Four years later, Carlivati was surprised when Executive Producer Ken Corday and Co-Executive Producer Albert Alarr pitched the idea to him. “I was laughing in my head thinking, ‘Is this Bizarro World where they are trying to convince me to do a possession story and not the other way around?’ ” he recalls. “So it was an exciting and fun challenge, but it was a challenge, because the one-liner, ‘Oh, the devil comes back to Salem,’ is great but then you have to sit down and say, ‘Well, what is the story? Who’s possessed? What makes it possession 2.0?’ ”