"This is the story of two sisters, Jessica Tate, and Mary Campbell." - Announcer Rod Roddy
Soap: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Peyton Place, that 1950s hotbed of illicit passions and smoldering secrets, has nothing on the Connecticut hometown of sisters Jessica Tate (Katherine Helmond) and Mary Campbell (Cathryn Damon). Soap follows the drama-filled lives of dimwitted Jessica, down-to-earth Mary, and their wacky families. Of course in Soap, the "drama" includes such tragedies as a grown man who talks to dolls and family meals that devolve into food fights.
Jessica and her family live in a palatial home in the nice part of town. Her businessman husband, Chester (Robert Mandan), provides his family with lots of material goods - including loads of groovy '70s wallpaper - but he is having affairs with his secretary, a woman named Pigeon, and half of the town. Young son Billy (Jimmy Baio) is a teenaged horndog who can't drive but likes to park. Eldest daughter Eunice (Jennifer Salt) is having an affair with a married Congressman. Middle child Corrine (Diana Canova) is in love with a priest while simultaneously carrying on with her hunky tennis instructor, Peter (S.W.A.T.'s Robert Urich). Things become even more complicated when Jessica starts receiving special "tennis lessons" from Peter herself.
Rounding out the Tate household are Jessica's father, The Major (Arthur Peterson), an addled World War II vet who believes he's still fighting the Germans (who conveniently live next door), and Benson (Robert Guillaume), the Tates' sarcastic, back-talking butler.
Mary's family is blue collar, but it still has its share of unusual problems. Her second husband, Burt (Richard Mulligan), is impotent and believes that he can magically turn himself invisible. Unknown to Mary, his problems are caused by the guilt he feels about killing her first husband. Mary's youngest son from her first marriage, Jodie Dallas (Billy Crystal), is not only gay, but he toys with having a sex change operation in order to regain the love of his pro football playing boyfriend. Beefy eldest son Danny (Ted Wass) works for the mob, a line of work that he discovers is very hard to quit. The family grows when Burt discovers two of his long-lost children from his first marriage - tennis pro Peter and Chuck (Jay Johnson), an oddball who believes that his ventriloquist's dummy, Bob, is a living creature.
As the season unfolds and secrets come to the surface, one of the family members is murdered. Everyone has two or three motives for the killing (even Bob the dummy), and the ensuing investigation leads to even more twists and turns in the saga of the Campbells and the Tates. Since the stories are ongoing, at the beginning of each episode an announcer (The Price is Right's Rod Roddy) recaps the intricately stupid plot from the week before and at the end of the show provides a teaser of what is to come in the following week.
Soap premiered on ABC in September of 1977. With its controversial plotlines about the clergy, homosexuality, and loose living, the series was the subject of boycotts and protests even before it aired. Many affiliates refused to air it. The protests backfired somewhat, helping to raise ratings, and the show finished thirteenth for the season.
Does the show hold up today? Not really - it has lost its ability to provoke. A priest attracted to a female parishioner? A politician fooling around with a constituent? Real life has proven to be far more shocking. Much of the show's humor is unfortunately based on such then-outrageous behavior that seems tame now. (It is also strange that such a fuss was made about a show that was intended to be a silly, exaggerated romp. Soap was verboten in my household when I was growing up, but I was allowed to watch Maude, a show that dealt with alcoholism, abortion, and other hot button issues in a much more serious and graphic manner.)
Still, if the show is not the barrel of laughs that it could be, it does provide much to admire. Writer/creator Susan Harris (who would go on to create The Golden Girls) does a terrific job in her creation of Jodie Dallas, one of the first out gay characters on American television. At first it seems as if the character exists only so that the audience can laugh at the ridiculous "Froot Loop" who wants to get a sex change operation and dress up in his mother's clothes. Only later, when Jodie is dumped by his boyfriend while in the hospital for pre-op does it become apparent what Harris is up to. Harold Gould, playing the heterosexual patient in the next bed, tenderly consoles Jodie with stories of his lost love, and how he was able to move on. This scene is intensely moving, and Harris' decision to play into stereotypes in order to later pull the rug out from under viewers actually makes the character more real - and is an effective way to disarm hostile audiences.
The series is also greatly aided by its strong cast. Mandan, Mulligan, Wass, Damon, and the others all give terrific performances. Helmond grates at first in what seems to be a one note performance. By the end of the season, however, she has hit her stride and frequently is the funniest thing about the show, adding a subtle hint of insanity to her character's vacuousness.
Robert Guillaume also receives many laughs as Benson. It would be interesting to study the history of sardonic butlers and maids on television. It seems that in the 1970s, it was okay for sitcoms to feature African American domestics, but only as long as they were insolent and resented their jobs. This hardly seems like a great stride. The character of Benson proved to be such a hit that he was spun off into his own self-named sitcom in September of 1979. Inga Swenson, who played housekeeper Gretchen Kraus in Benson, is seen as an identical (but unrelated) character in the first season of Soap.
The twenty-five episodes that make up season one are divided onto three discs. The menus are simply designed and easy to navigate. On the main menu, viewers can choose to play all episodes, or to access the individual episodes menu. The episodes are unnamed, so the menu identifies them by number and with a screen shot from the episode.
Following the lead of its The Best of Designing Women collection, Columbia/Tri-Star has added chapter stops to the interior of Soap's episodes. There are no scene selection menus or chapter names, but nevertheless, stops have been added and are accessible using the remote control. Generally, the stops follow the opening credits, the first commercial, and precede the closing credits. The company should be commended for listening to consumer reaction on this issue, and hopefully these two releases are a sign that this decision is here to stay.
