Soap [TV Series] (DVD)

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It's pretty tame now, but in 1977 "Soap" was so controversial that ABC received thousands of complaints and churches organized boycotts before the first episode even aired. Given that Welcome Wagon, it's surprising the show lasted four seasons. Then again, it turned out to be tamer than most daytime soap operas would become just a few years later.

As a parody, "Soap" doesn't poke fun of every daytime dramatic convention, either. For one thing, the melodramatic music is lacking (and just as well, if you ask me). For another, the sets and the blocking resemble TV sitcoms more than afternoon soapers. It's not nearly as static, and the lighting isn't as one-source subdued. Then too, there isn't even much parody of soap opera dialogue. The lines, by virtue of their comedic timing and their lack of stand-and-deliver hyper-emotion also have more in common with sitcoms. They're less cheesy, less hokey, and more designed to keep things moving. It's the plot, really, that has a little fun at the expense of soap operas, and even then the writers seemed to find as much inspiration from the tabloids as they did from the daytime serials.

Over the course of the series, viewers encountered one of TV's first openly gay characters presented as a normal person and not a flaming caricature, but there was also plenty of good old-fashioned heterosexual infidelity, secrets aplenty, mobsters, dementia, oversexed priests, alien abductions, alien clones, demon spawn, murder, kidnapping, erectile dysfunction, escaped convicts, a split-personality ventriloquist, revolutionaries, and so much interbreeding that you'd think there'd be more obvious disorders than there are. And the secrets that are revealed each episode? If I had a dollar for every one, I'd be a rich man. Well, make that an English pound sterling. The U.S. dollar is getting uncomfortably close to Confederate money these days.

"This is the story of two sisters, Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell," the voiceover announcer intones, and each episode begins with a long story-style introduction of the rich Tates and not-so-rich Campbells. That opening, by the way, gets old real fast when you watch five or six episodes in rapid succession. So does the lengthy recap of the previous episode and the "outro" teaser, which means if you're like me you'll be pressing the "next" button to advance to the third chapter for every episode. But I digress (like this series). Jessica (Katherine Helmond) is married to Chester Tate (Robert Mandan, a veteran of "Search for Tomorrow"), who's a successful stockbroker. They have an open marriage, though neither of them knows it, at least for a while. Their children are blue-blood-at-heart Eunice (Jennifer Salt); good-girl Corinne (Diana Canova), who's having an affair with the same tennis pro as mom; and Billy (Jimmy Baio), a sex-obsessed little guy who ends up having an affair with his teacher. Then there's "The Major," Jessica and Mary's father, who takes neighbors prisoner because he thinks they're Nazis. Then there's the butler, Benson (Robert Guillaume), who would function like the maid in "The Jeffersons" and back-talk his way to a spin-off (after which he'd be replaced by Roscoe Lee Browne, another comedic veteran).

Then there's the Campbells. Mary (Cathryn Damon) is married to a second husband who can't make love to her because she can't imagine why. Turns out the guy popped her first husband, and guilt makes him go limp (Freud would love to have written for this show). Later, mental illness makes Burt (Richard Mulligan) go all soft and floppy as he starts thinking he can make himself invisible. Yeah, well, don't try walking into a women's restroom. This little blended family is composed of Mary's sons, Danny (Ted Wass), a small-time mobster who's following in his dead father's footsteps, and Jodie (Billy Crystal), who is openly gay and will get the water-cooler crowd talking in future episodes when he's seduced, fathers a child, and petitions the court for custody. The boys don't exactly get along with their stepdad. In fact, they routinely have food fights, and Burt keeps referring to Jodie as a "fruit," which of course hurts Mary's feelings.