Buy It Now: Soap: The Complete Series

Created by Susan Harris

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By Piers Marchant

In the mid-to-late '70s, TV, like film, literature and music, was in a bit of a cultural upheaval. The counter-culture types who had so dominated the college campuses in the '60s had grown up on the old stuff and wanted to see something different, something that offered a post-modern wink to those in the know. "Soap," which aired from '77-'81 was essentially ABC's answer to the independently syndicated "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," itself a strange, almost Lynchian parody of the daily soaps that stay-at-homes and trapped housewives had been watching for years. Susan Harris, who wrote a great deal of the episodes herself, created a wickedly subversive comedy based on the most blatant and hackneyed of soap opera set ups: Two sisters, one rich and clueless (played by Katherine Helmond), the other less moneyed but no less clueless (Cathryn Damon), try to survive each other's vast and insane families, whom mostly despised one-another. The resulting show, rich with an almost unlimited stream of terminally screwed-up characters -- from deranged, cheating husbands to would-be Mafioso sons -- ran at breakneck speed, cutting from one crazily inspired set up to another, and often never resolving a damn thing in the process. Smartly, Harris would give just enough of an answer to one plot machination that she could launch into the next one almost seamlessly. The Campbells and the Tates, with their never-ending stream of side characters, perfectly played off of the over-the-top melodrama they were spearing. What the show became known for, however, was the brazenness and bravery of its humor: It tackled race, adultery, impotence, homosexuality, not to mention alien abductions and the ever-present ventriloquist dummy altercations. Screwball and ridiculous, the show's first two seasons proved its most effective before the last two seasons began to lose their juice. Fittingly, the show was suddenly canceled before the writers had begun to solve any of the labyrinthine problems with which they had saddled their protagonists. Just as well, really.

The complete series comprises all four seasons -- 90 episodes -- but offers no other extras.

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