Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem: Why did Kristian Alfonso return?

Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem is officially coming to Peacock later this month, and nostalgia here is really the name of the game. The whole idea beyond this five-episode series, just like with season 1, is to put a lot of your old favorites in a new spot and see exactly what happens.

One of the big surprises entering this season, at least for us, is the return of Kristian Alfonso as Hope Williams Brady. Back when she originally left the original show, we assumed that she was 100% done with the franchise for good. However, that isn’t the case and as she tells Soap Opera Digest, one of the motivators behind her return here was that it’s something different.

“I don’t think of this as going back to Days of Our Lives … [Beyond Salem] is, I feel, a branch of it … I have seen online where viewers have stated that I said, ‘Never’ regarding [returning someday] — I never said never. I said that I will not be popping in and out like other actors have done in the past. I didn’t say I’m never, ever coming back. I was not absolute.”

Of course, this quote does leave the door open that she could be back either on the flagship show or Beyond Salem in the future, but we don’t want to look ahead here and make any sort of large-scale assumptions. For now, the most important thing is simply that we get to see this character get a major life update on the spin-off, and we tend to imagine that a lot of the fun here is that it’s largely a standalone story. Daytime dramas have that ability to draw storylines out forever, mostly because the medium is so ongoing. There’s less of an immediate end for a defined beginning or an end. This is a slightly different form of storytelling, and we tend to imagine it is fun for the writers — also, of course it is an incentive for network viewers to get Peacock.

Related – See a trailer now for Beyond Salem

What are you most excited to see on Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem season 2?

Share right now in the comments! Also, come back here for other updates that you 100% will not want to miss. (Photo: Peacock.)