Word: soaps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spin-off about two female beer factory workers who also live in '50s Milwaukee. After that comes Three's Company, No. 3 in the Nielsens, another sitcom about two women roommates-only this time the women share their flat with a single man. The night concludes with Soap, one of this season's few new hits, and Family, an hour-long dramatic series that is a particular favorite with TV critics. Most of the time these ABC series leave the other networks reeling. They capture up to half the TV audience, or 45 million to 50 million...
...young seem to have a monopoly on wisdom. The teen-agers of Happy Days and Soap, as well as the young adults of Laverne & Shirley and Three's Company, are forever outwitting their elders, whether parents or employers or landlords. This fantasy is not without its comic rewards. In the '50s, Father Knows Best concluded with an Eisenhower-like Robert Young counseling his children about the wages of maturity. Now the same sermons are delivered with far more panache at the end of Happy Days by Fonzie, the dropout greaser. Only on Family are parents still role models...
...fill their houses to over-flowing, for they had filled the whole year with Christmas and found they had no more days to expand to--began to drink a lot, too. They sat, dry of new ideas, among mounds of cuisinards, trash mashers, yogurt-makers, decorator cologne sets, soap-on-a-rope, leisure suits, pulsating shower heads, vibrabeds, three-dimensional chess sets, digital watches, coffee-table pictorial history books, pet rocks, ant farms, pastel toothpicks, statuettes inscribed "world's greatest mom" and world's greatest dad," incense holders, lava lamps, shampoos smelling like exotic fruit, toy rifles with plastic arsenals...
...history, I, Claudius is pure Robert Graves-though his vision is perhaps no more inaccurate than any other history's. As high-gloss soap opera, however, the series is little short of wonderful...
Fast, too, leaves no base uncovered as he once again demonstrates his knack for soap history. The old Marxist reveals a genuine enthusiasm for the rugged values of laissez-faire enterprise in his energetic descriptions of Lavette's schemes and deals. Lest one think that this hero escaped from an Ayn Rand novel, appropriate lip service is paid to such issues as war profiteering and the passive wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophy...