Word: soaps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oldtimers like Mary Stuart of Search for Tomorrow earn $100,000 a year. The average actor takes home $35,000?about what many Broadway stars get. "I got to talking to Julie Harris a few years ago," says Michael M. Ryan, a veteran soap actor who is now John Randolph in Another World, "and that was what she earned that year. I was horrified." Now Ryan believes that the soaps subsidize Broadway: "If it weren't for them, there would be no actors left in New York." In Los Angeles, where General Hospital, Days of Our Lives and The Young...
Fans find out what is happening to their favorites through a dozen-odd soap magazines. Daytime TV is the largest and purest: it has a 380,000 circulation and discusses only soaps. Mostly the stories are breathless accounts of stars' offscreen habits and romances. Item: Carolee Campbell is leaving her role in The Doctors to pursue her interest in the martial arts. Last year the mags had some real meat to chew. Another World Actor George Reinholt, the soaps' bad boy, had so many off-camera tantrums that enraged Head Writer Harding Lemay wrote him out of the show...
...cracking jokes is kidding yourself, and this is bound to bring Mary Hartman! a different audience from the people who enjoy taking the real soaps seriously. In fact, all soaps are a solitary trip on which the individual viewer's imagination is given free rein. No two fans ever understand a soap situation quite the same...
This nebulous quality ultimately makes the characters baffling. Women are at once narcissistic and manipulative as well as sturdy, realistic survivors. Men are both fatherly providers and wicked seducers. Critic Leslie Fiedler, who is faithful to All My Children, theorizes that soaps are antimale. "First, they show how men exploit women, and second, in a crisis the men are impotent." This may help explain the soaps' unique aspect. Nowhere else in life or drama are both men and women seen to be equally interested in emotional relationships. Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who frequently watches the soaps with the blue-collar...
...British serial Upstairs, Downstairs (which will start its third season on public television this week) does not do that. Like the soaps, it is a dense family drama, but there the resemblance ends. Upstairs, Downstairs reflects a society in which masters and servants are bound to each other by shared and common memories. There is an intimacy, both abrasive and comforting, that precludes abandonment, despair and uncontrollable passions. Soap operas, on the other hand, are folk tales that tug at the soul of a nation of strangers for whom television itself is a bond. Tolstoy thought that unhappy families were...