Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...coal stove for my Saturday night bath and to have to use the back-porch toilet until I was grown. Yet I feel lucky when I see many of today's youngsters leave their modern, publicly financed housing projects not realizing what respect, love, compassion or soap and water are all about...
...Soap aspires to be a network Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and one only wishes that it were. Susan Harris, Soap's creator, producer and writer, centers the action on two related Connecticut families, the rich Tates and working-class Campbells, whose flaky members collectively include philandering and impotent husbands, bored and batty housewives, nymphomaniac children, a senile grandfather-and so on. Most of these types have counterparts in Mary Hartman's Fernwood, Ohio, but Soap's characters are flimsy replicas of the originals...
...show's talented cast. For all the trouble this writer has taken to reproduce Mary Hartman's formula, she has left out its essential ingredient-compassion. Mary Hartman presented its admittedly loony characters with such affection that audiences cared about them and even identified with 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...
...Soap had other comic concerns besides sex, its nastiness wouldn't be so pervasive. Unfortunately, Harris has none of Norman Lear's redeeming flair for witty social satire-unless one counts the tired reverse-racist jokes she lavishes on the character of a sassy black butler (Robert Guillaume). The flatness of the conventional comic scenes can be painful; when two characters engage in a lengthy and unfunny food fight, a third appears to suggest lamely that "this is like having breakfast with the Marx brothers." Good jokes never announce themselves...
...Even so, Soap is not without its virtues. Jimmy Baio, as an oversexed 14-year-old, and Billy Crystal, as an out-of-the-closet (but preoperative) transsexual, are sharp young comedians. The series' hellzapoppin plot, whose chaos recalls the '30s farces of Kaufman and Hart, exerts a strong narrative pull. With care, these elements could yet form the basis for entertainment that is both notorious and decent. Soap will surely make enough money to buy itself a heart...