Word: lather
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What is wrong with this picture? Not quite enough to work up a lather over Salley's alleged miseries. Because Salley tells her own story, it is impossible to say how seriously Cheever wants her to be taken. The only real point of suspense in the book is a foregone conclusion: when the right job comes along, Salley gets...
...their failings. Soap contemptuously presents its people as either stupid or conniving or cruel or some hybrid thereof. With so many unpleasant cartoon figures on the screen, Soap's potentially affecting sexual shenanigans devolve into mean-spirited locker-room jokes. It is not Soap's desire to lather on the sex that lands the series in hot water but its insistence on isolating sex from humanity that makes it look dirty...
...have been holding out for more money after she heard what NBC last week offered Kelly Lange, the barmy blonde weather girl at the network's Los Angeles station and an also-ran for the Today job. What actually happened, however, was that NBC officials went into a lather when they learned that Lange was being lured by the ABC body-snatchers who had stolen Walters from them. The network's brass hurriedly rushed into prolonged negotiations and promised to double Lange's salary, to $200,000, and give her a series of spots on Today...
...biggest departure from old formats and formulas, the networks are turning to expensively produced dramatic serials and adaptations of bestselling novels; the emphasis is on high drama and convoluted story lines that lather on from week to week. This strongly resembles what soap opera has been doing for decades. Some of the soaps' Homeric techniques have already sudsed off on the evening shows, partly through the smash spoof opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman...
...intricate plot is-paradoxically-simplified into near incomprehensibility. Its rich characterizations are reduced to banality. Anthony Newley, who also composed the film's stupefying score, plays Quilp, a scheming moneylender whose machinations reduce Nell (Sarah Jane Varley) and her grandfather to begging. Newley works himself into a great lather turning Quilp's villainy into a parody of evil so broad that the most innocent child could not possibly be scared by the funny man. Of course, once menace is removed, so is drama. The audience is left to find such solace as it can in studying a prettified...