Daytime Confidential

Mouths around the soap world collectively dropped this weekend as the unthinkable happened. The recently-renewed Days of Our Lives, fired its biggest supercouple Deidre Hall (Dr. Marlena Evans) and Drake Hogestyn (John Black). In this special episode of the DC podcast Luke, Mike and Jamey invite veteran soap journalist Nelson Branco (TV Guide Canada's The Suds Report) and former Days writer Tom Casiello to weigh in from the perspective of industry insiders.Reactions to the shocking news are gauged from the panel, including: Branco, who reveals Days of Our Lives was the first soap he ever watched and how he first fell in love with the ravishing Hall even before discovering Andrea Evans and One Life to Live; and Casiello, who during his last few months on the soap before the Writers' Strike, was part of a team under Hogan Sheffer that was forced to script out the soap's "Big Four" (Hall, Hogestyn, Kristian Alfonso and Peter Reckell) due to their reported astronomical salaries and ultimately made th