Word: soaping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many Americans the phrase great soap opera--like a great Douglas Sirk movie--will always remain an oxymoron. Pity the unenlightened: melodramas, like cheap beers, are not created equally--there are Rolling Rocks in the sea of Schmidt's Lights. For many of its 26 years on air, All My Children has been one of TV's best soap operas, not only because it limns believably impassioned lovers and cruel, cruel villains and tantalizingly suspenseful story lines, but also because the writers and actors have always recognized the inherent absurdity of the genre in which they work. Susan Lucci...
...gave birth to the soap-as-satire, but no other serial has advanced the idea as marvelously as Melrose Place during its glory days--glory days that the current season, due to conclude in two weeks, has proved are long gone. The show will return in September, but its decline has been so steep--should it even bother...
Melrose, centered around the booth-tanned inhabitants of a Los Angeles apartment complex, debuted in 1992 as an unconvincing thirtysomething for Gen Xers. When it returned the following season it was something else altogether, a dumb-brilliant parody of the soap universe, a show in which women dressed for work as though life were a continual audition for the Howard Stern Show. Heather Locklear was now entrenched as a nasty, libidinal Leona Helmsley-ish landlady in the making, while Sydney the hooker-stripper was chasing her sister Jane's amoral husband Michael...
...spite of all the whirling lunacy they concocted, Melrose writers still kept a hand in the world of plausible fantasy--the bend-don't-break rule that is the essence of soap-opera craft. The writers also understood that soaps must always have, at their core, at least one pair of earnest lovers whose thwarted longing fuels the drama. Melrose has Billy and Alison, lovers too personalityless to be destined for any other. Last year we cared whether they would beat gargantuan odds--Alison's alcoholism, her affair with an N.F.L. sex addict--and find their way back into each...
...irrepressible, achieved reincarnation, not as one person this time, but as an entire decade--the '60s. This expansive metaphysics would have allowed him to show off all his facets: as holy man and party boy, as faith healer, sexual omnivore, purveyor of mystic salvations and bogus profundities, enemy of soap, hairy narcissist...