Days of Our Lives Wants New Viewers — and These General Hospital and Young & Restless Faves Are the Key

It’s 2024, the entertainment industry has come full circle, and finally soaps are having a resurgence. CBS has renewed The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful is steady as she goes, ABC has expressed its commitment to General Hospital, and Peacock… Hmm. What is the streamer doing to shore up and bring new eyeballs to Days of Our Lives, which has been picked up through September 2025?

If the powers that be are short on ideas, we have a doozy of one. What’s the best way to introduce an audience to a show? It’s by introducing new characters who then get to know the existing ones along with the beginner viewers. It’s sorta like the way that CBS jump-started Dallas spinoff Knots Landing back in the day, by relocating Valene and Gary Ewing to California and gradually allowing them to suss out who was who among their new neighbors.

Seeing Stars

In the case of Days of Our Lives, we’d stack the deck in the soap’s favor by casting popular daytime alumni Nathan Dean (ex-Ethan, General Hospital) and Hunter King (ex-Summer, Young & Restless) as the new couple in Salem, Harley and Britt Davies. Newlyweds, they’ve just moved from Chicago for Harley’s job as a photographer at The Spectator. While Britt looks for a new gig herself, the duo befriends their new neighbors, Johnny and Chanel.

Everything is going swimmingly at first, though the Davieses are taken aback when the news breaks that somehow Sloan wound up with Nicole’s baby. Harley and Britt, she confides in Chanel, only got married because she got pregnant and panicked at the prospect of becoming a single mom. “I mean, we probably would have eventually, anyway,” she adds. “But then I miscarried, and by that time, we were already halfway to Salem.”

More: Backstage treachery that got Days star fired

Hello, Conflict!

As days go by, Harley and Britt absorb shock after shock: Kate used to be a prostitute? Xander once had a habit of kidnapping people? Stefan came back from the dead? Marlena was possessed — wait, and so was Johnny?!? Eventually, Paulina hires Britt to do PR for Sweet Bits — a birthday present for Chanel.

But just then is when Chanel mentions that she’s bi, which gets an unexpected reaction from Harley and Britt, who it turns out are ultra-conservative. Chanel tries to make light of it, noting that she might still be with Johnny’s sister if she hadn’t cheated with the guy with whom they’d had a threesome. All of this makes Harley and Britt’s heads spin.

Discussions Worth Having

As Chanel and Britt work together, the former challenges the latter on her stance against the LGBTQ+ community. “I’m not against anyone,” Britt argues. “It’s just that it… it’s against God.”

“Uh, doesn’t God say something about not having sex before marriage, too?” Chanel asks. “We get to pick and choose what rules we apply now?”

Meanwhile, Harley struggles, too, to deal with the fact that boss Leo isn’t just gay but openly so. “It wouldn’t be so bad,” Harley tells Chad, “if it wasn’t so in your face.”

“What’s so in-in-your-face about it?” Chad asks.

“Well, it’s… it’s the way he talks… and dresses… and he’s always mentioning his ex-boyfriend and… “

“You mean he’s being himself,” Chad says. “The same as you or I do.”

More: ‘Human garbage’ targets Days fave

The Turning Point

Despite their difficulties, Harley and Britt and Johnny and Chanel continue to try to navigate their friendship. But when Chanel accidentally lets slip that Britt wouldn’t have said “I do” if she hadn’t been expecting, Harley is thrown for such a loop that he winds up in Theresa’s bed.

When Britt finds out, she walks. Ironically, it is then Johnny and Chanel who find a way to get the couple communicating again. They do leave each other. But their timeline was sped up a lot by her pregnancy. Maybe, they decide, they need to take a break from one another, step back and figure out what they really want.

Trying to do just that, Harley ties one on at Small Bar. When Leo comes across him, he tries to convince the shutterbug to call it a night. Instead, Harley slurs that if good isn’t always good and bad isn’t necessarily bad, he doesn’t know what’s what, and maybe that’s why he keeps thinking about Johnny.

Come again? Yeah, Harley says, he’s starting to think that he hasn’t been so anti-gay because of anything he’s been told God has to say about it but because he was afraid that maybe a part of him was gay or bi or… “I don’t even know what I am,” he laments. “But I know what you are.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?” Leo asks.

“Cute.” With that, Harley kisses him, making his and Britt’s lives in Salem exponentially trickier.