Soap (TV series)
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Publicity photo from Season 1 of Soap |
Soap was a successful
American sitcom that ran on
ABC from
1977 to
1981.
The show was a weekly, half-hour
primetime comedy whose satirical bent was, in its day, practically without precedent for an American network programme, especially one whose format was similar to that of a daytime
soap opera. It aired for 85 episodes, several of which were one hour long. (These hour-long episodes were later split up for syndication, yielding 93 episodes.) The show was created, written, and produced by
Susan Harris, and owing to its relatively sophisticated brand of humour, it found an appreciative audience in Great Britain.
All episodes from all four broadcast seasons are currently available on
DVD.
The show was controversial for its time, dealing openly with the topics of
homosexuality,
marital infidelity,
impotence,
interracial marriage, and
gay parenting.
Soap was among the earliest American primetime
series to include a regular
gay character (Jodie Dallas).
Soap is commonly cited as the
first series to do this, but it was preceded by at least two other such shows:
1972's
The Corner Bar and
1976's
The Nancy Walker Show.
Much of
Soap's controversy preceded its September 1977 premiere. In June of that year, a review of the show's pilot by
Harry F. Waters appeared in
Newsweek, where he asserted that
"SOAP" promises to be the most controversial network series of the coming season, a show so saturated with sex that it could replace violence as the
PTA's Video Enemy No. 1."
The review went on to pan the show, while also mischaracterizing some its basic plot elements and offering exaggerated reports of its sexual content.
A number of organizations then mobilized against
Soap, including the Christian Life Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention, the
International Union of Gay Athletes, and the
National Gay Task Force. Also mobilized were the
National Council of Churches, the
United Church of Christ, the
United Methodist Church, and the
National Council of Catholic Bishops, although they asked the members of their 138,000 collective churches to watch the show first, and then inform ABC of their feelings about it. Nonetheless, the network reportedly received 32,000 letters of complaint before the show's premiere, and eight out of 195 ABC affiliates refused to air the show.
On Tuesday, 13 September 1977,
Soap premiered to an audience of 19 million homes (39% of the national audience). Executives at ABC described initial public reaction as "mild," even though
Vlasic Foods pulled their sponsorship of the program shortly after the episode aired.
Harry F. Waters' 1977 review proved prescient during the following year, when the National
PTA declared
Soap one of "ten worst" shows in television.
Soap was a parody of daytime soap operas presented in a half-hour primetime sitcom. Like soap operas, the show's story was presented in a
serial fashion and included melodramatic plot elements such as
amnesia,
alien abduction,
demonic possession,
murder, and
kidnapping.
The cast included former soap opera actors.
Robert Mandan (as Chester Tate) previously appeared on
Search for Tomorrow and
Donnelly Rhodes (as Dutch) played the first husband of Katherine Chancellor on
The Young and the Restless.
Soap was set in the fictional town of Dunns River,
Connecticut, and each episode began with a shot of two women chatting over lunch. The announcer,
Rod Roddy, would intone, "This is the story of two sisters: Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell".
The Tate family was very wealthy. In the very first opening sequence, the announcer said that the Tates lived in a
neighborhood known as "rich". The Tates employed a sarcastic butler, Benson DuBois, played by
Robert Guillaume, who was perhaps the only "normal" character on the series. In 1979, Guillaume's character was spun off into his own series,
Benson. A long running gag was whenever the door bell rang. Benson would look up lugubriously, as everyone stared expectantly at him, and would say "You want me to get that...?"
Jessica and her husband, Chester, were hardly models of fidelity, as their various love affairs resulted in several family mishaps, including the murder of Peter Campbell (
Robert Urich), the first son of Mary's second husband, in the early days of the show. Even though everyone told Jessica about Chester's affairs, she did not believe them until she saw his philandering with her own two eyes: one afternoon, while out to lunch with her sister Mary, she spotted Chester necking with his secretary. Heartbroken, she sobbed in her sister's arms. While
Soap was a sitcom at its core, the show at times had many dramatic scenes that were performed like a real soap opera, and that particular scene is very sensitively handled and very moving.
Mary's family, the Campbells, were more middle-class. The Campbells had the problem that Mary's son Danny Dallas was a junior gangster in training. Danny was told to kill his stepfather Burt when it was revealed that Danny's father did not commit suicide, but instead was killed by Burt out of self-defense. In the fourth season, it was revealed that Chester was in fact Danny's true father, the product of an affair between him and Mary before he married Jessica.
The first season ended with Jessica convicted of murder for killing Peter Campbell. The announcer concluded the season by announcing that Jessica was innocent, and that one of five characters had killed Peter. The interest over this cliffhanger (which was resolved when it was revealed Chester had killed Peter) precursed interest over the "Who shot J.R.?" cliffhanger on
Dallas.
Other plot lines included Jessica's daughter Corinne courting Father Tim Flotsky, with the two eventually marrying and having a child who was later revealed to be possessed by the
Devil; Jessica's other daughter Eunice having an affair with a married
Congressman before falling in love with a convicted murderer; Mary's stepson Chuck, a
ventriloquist whose alter ego is his dummy Bob; Jessica's love affairs with Peter Campbell, a private investigator, her psychiatrist, and a
Latin American revolutionary known as "El Puerco"; Billy Tate being held hostage by a cult called the "Sunnies" (a parody of
Sun Myung Moon's
Unification Movement, called the "
Moonies" by its critics), after which he had an affair with his school teacher; Danny and his romantic trials with the daughter of a
mobster, an
African-American woman, a
prostitute, and Chester's second wife, Annie; and Mary's husband Burt being committed to a
mental institution, being abducted by
aliens while being replaced with an oversexed alien look-a-like on Earth, and being blackmailed by the Mob after becoming
Sheriff of their small town.
At the beginning of the show, off camera announcer
Rod Roddy would give a brief description of the convoluted storyline and then he would conclude it with the line, "Confused? You won't be, after
this episode of...Soap". At the end of the show, he would ask a series of life-or-death questions in a deliberately dead pan way - "Will Jessica discover Chester's affair...?" This would be concluded with - "These questions - and many others - will be answered in the next episode of
Soap."
The series ended abruptly on April 20, 1981; the final episode contained several
cliffhangers that were never resolved. These involved a
suicidal Chester preparing to kill Danny and his second wife after catching them in bed, Burt preparing to walk into an
ambush set up by his political enemies, and Jessica about to be executed by a
communist firing squad.
Had the show continued into a fifth season, it would have been revealed that Jessica had survived because her family came to save her, and replaced the bullets in the firing squad guns with blanks. Jessica later appeared on
Benson in 1983 to reveal that she was not dead, but in a coma.
*
The Tates:**
Katherine Helmond - Jessica Tate
**
Robert Mandan - Chester Tate
**
Jimmy Baio - Billy Tate
**
Diana Canova - Corinne Tate Flotsky
**
Sal Viscuso - Father Timothy Flotsky
**
Jennifer Salt - Eunice Tate-Leitner
**
Donnelly Rhodes - Dutch Leitner
**
Arthur Peterson, Jr. - The Major
**
Nancy Dolman - Annie Selig Tate
**
Robert Guillaume - Benson DuBois
**
Roscoe Lee Browne - Saunders
*The Campbells:
**
Cathryn Damon - Mary Campbell
**
Richard Mulligan - Burt Campbell and X-23 (Alien Burt)
**
Jay Johnson - Chuck and Bob Campbell
**
Robert Urich - Peter Campbell
**
Ted Wass - Danny Dallas
**
Billy Crystal - Jodie Dallas
**
Dinah Manoff - Elaine Lefkowitz-Dallas
**
Jenna Kay Starr - Wendy Dallas
*
Rod Roddy - Announcer
*
Rebecca Balding - Carol David
*
John Byner - Detective Donahue
*
Bob Seagren - Dennis Phillips
*
Eugene Roche - E. Ronald Mallu, Esq.
*
Richard Libertini - The Godfather
*
Gordon Jump - Chief of Police Tinkler
*
Edward Winter - Congressman Walter McCallum
*
Charles Lane - Judge Anthony Petrillo
*
Kathryn Reynolds - Claire
*
Caroline McWilliams - Sally
*
Lynne Moody - Polly Dawson
*
Marla Pennington - Leslie Walker
*
Candice Azzara - Millie
*
Jesse Welles - Gwen
*
Sorrell Booke - Charles Lefkowitz (Elaine's father)
*
Allan Miller - Dr. Alan Posner
*
Gregory Sierra - Revolutionary Leader Carlos Marcello David Escobar Rodriguez "El Puerco" Valdez. "El Puerco" is stated in the show to mean "The Pig".
*
Howard Hesseman - Mr. Franklin, the prosecuting attorney at Jessica's trial, and his twin brother, also Mr. Franklin, a defense attorney who refused Jessica's case.
*
Randee Heller - Alice
*
Peggy Pope - Mrs. Lurleen David
*
Joe Mantegna - Juan One
*
Soap- An ABC-TV series - a fansite
*
Encyclopedia of Television
