Here’s a good rule to follow when you don’t like what’s happening on your beloved TV show:

When you like a show, you’re effectively on a bus with everyone else who likes it, and you’ve got to let the driver do the driving. You can comment on the view, you can point out the pothole he’s about to hit, you can ask him to turn up the air conditioning, and if you want, you can always get off at the next stop and hope you can get a better ride. But if you get up there with everybody else on the bus and start trying to grab the wheel, you will find yourself tumbling down the side of a ravine, and at the bottom of that ravine, there will be nothing to watch except Deal Or No Deal.

If you saw the Super Bowl yesterday, you probably saw this Google commercial. I can’t seem to get through it without my eyes welling up. Then again, I’m a total sap.

Sigh. The matriarch of Salem has passed away.

Frances Reid, who played Alice Horton on Days of our Lives ever since the show’s premiere in 1965, died on Wednesday at the age of 95. She hadn’t appeared on the show in more than two years, but she was still officially a cast member until her dying day. (I believe she had a lifetime contract.)

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I grew up on Days of our Lives. My mom has watched it on and off from the beginning; I used to look at it occasionally while she watched, and then when I was 12 years old I got more interested and decided to tape it every day and watch it after school. I became obsessed: I’d draw a family tree of the show, memorize the order of the cast list in the closing credits, and for a while I wrote down each episode’s developments on a separate index card. When I was 14, I even got to visit the set and watch a rehearsal. A few weeks later we got a script of that episode in the mail, signed by much of the cast. I still have it.

I’ve watched the show on and off over the years. A few weeks ago I tuned in for a few days, because I’d heard that they were killing off Mickey Horton, one of Tom and Alice Horton’s five children. (John Clarke, who played Mickey for most of the show’s run, retired a few years ago.) I’m sure there will be a tribute episode for Alice soon, so I’ll have to watch that, too.

All of the original cast members are now gone. Macdonald Carey (Tom Horton, Alice’s husband) died in 1994, and now Frances Reid is gone, too, and Mickey Horton is also gone.

It’s a sad day in Salem.