Word: soaps
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High concept goes totally over the top in ABC's Good & Evil, an outre farce from the creators of Soap. The title refers to two warring sisters. One (Margaret Whitton) is a medical researcher so good-hearted that she tests a new vaccine on herself rather than give it to lab monkeys. The other (Teri Garr), who is scheming to take over her mother's cosmetics empire, smears an experimental cream on her secretary's face to see if it makes the skin peel off. Among the other characters: a husband of one sister, who has just been thawed...
...prisoner of war and thus receives 80 Swiss francs (U.S.$50) a month from the U.S. government -- more than enough to pay for a steady supply of his favorite cookies, Oreos. He spends his time studying classified documents, talking on his government-tapped phone and watching Spanish-language soap operas. Like many a cornered scoundrel, he claims to have undergone a sudden religious conversion...
...farceurs displayed their oversize personalities on TV, then did more of the same in Hollywood. John Candy, for instance, plays the jolly lug, coping with crisis by wearing it down. In his O.K. new movie Delirious -- the season's second daytime-drama parody, after Soapdish -- he is a soap-opera writer who is knocked silly and dreams that he is a prisoner in his own show. The premise is frail, but Candy gives it his usual shrug-it-off assurance. No big deal. No problem...
...York shows provide classic entertainment. Prom Queens is a way-too-familiar pastiche of '50s high school intrigue and sci-fi frissons; it plays like Little Shop of Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden...
...soap opera, Embassy, chronicles the goings-on at the Australian embassy in a fictional nation in Southeast Asia called Ragaan, which Mahathir contends is an unflattering version of his country. Since the program began appearing on television last fall, Malaysia has protested by reducing diplomatic and social contact with Australian officials and encouraging an informal "Buy Australian Last" campaign...