Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This sort of vapid speech demands to be performed as parody. Yet Guckenheimer has not delineated the humorous moments from the serious ones. The characters flounder in search of a voice; some scenes lack dramatic viewpoint to the verge of soap-opera tedium...
...when the social worker discusses the case he seems to be injecting extra verbiage into his speech. "Extenuating social conditions" comes out of his mouth like a cue card line in a mediocre soap opera. And that's part of Wiseman's style. The bias is there, the observers are aware that by their act of watching they are affecting what happens on camera and the distortions this causes aren't edited out; they too are a subject for investigation...
...continuing Washington stalemate over energy policy resembles nothing quite so much as a soap opera: at the end of each episode, events swirl toward a grand denouement only to emerge in the next episode as tangled as ever, with nothing really resolved. Last week, after battling through their third showdown in two months over petroleum prices, the White House and Congress found themselves still caught in a deadlock that raises serious questions about how far and how fast oil prices will be allowed to rise, how the U.S. will reduce its dependence on foreign oil, if it does...
...result is a situation comedy only a little more exciting than the Doris Day Show. In fact, the last two episodes have ended with I Love Lucy's favorite device of a wife benignly but purposefully misleading her husband. Even the soap operas to which Beacon Hill has been compared face up to hate and abortion and murder and all the other joys of everyday life...
...mistress in Boston. After World War I, during which she led a major effort to house and feed French and Belgian refugees, she divided her time between an estate north of Paris and a villa on the Riviera. Much of her later work was little better than contemporary soap opera, written by formula to keep her expensive life-style going. But the best of it, like The Age of Innocence, returned to the once despised world of her childhood, which she dissected with loving care. Such is the in exorable irony of nostalgia...