Soap will slip in as satirical 'opera'

By Sander Vanocur

WASHINGTON

Fred Silver-

man, who orchestrates programming at ABC the way Toscanini used to conduct a symphony, is considering a soap opera for ABC's prime time schedule next fall.

Appropriately enough, it is called "Soap." It is being written by Susan Harris and produced by Paul Unger Witt, who collaborated on the illfated "Fay," which NBC yanked off the air in the early weeks of the new season last year.

But Witt and Harris think they may have a winner in "Soap." In a television conversation with Witt the other day, he said:

"We took

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basic soap opera concept two families and how they relate to one another. But we are not doing a farce or a satire about soap opera. We are not so much poking fun at soap operas as having fun with the concept."

When I called Miss Harris for more details, she was sitting in her home in Sherman Oaks, California, recovering from flu and working on another pilot for CBS. ("It's about a relationship between a man and a woman written in the style of the 1930 movie comedies like 'It Happened One Night.' I usually write angry Jewish. This is adorable Protestant. Believe me, it's much harder to write adorable Protestant than angry Jewish.")

Miss Harris, like Witt, is excited about "Soap." It is about two upper middle-class families in Connecticut. Two of the characters are sisters, Jessica Tate and Mary Dallas Campbell. Mary has two sons, Jody, a homosexual who wants to have a sex change operation, and Danny, who is trying to get out of the Mafia.

The reason that Danny is in the Mafia is because Mary's first husband, Johnny Dallas, was in it. He's dead. Everyone believes he committed suicide. But Miss Harris assured me that the audience will know early on that Mary's present husband, Bert Campbell, who is in the construction business, killed him.

Jessica has four children. David, the oldest, has been missing in action in Vietnam for seven years. Jessica knows he's still alive. There are two daughters: Eunice, described by Miss Harris as "cold as she is beautiful," and Corrine, who according to Miss Harris "sleeps around more than her father." Fa-

Fred Silverman

ther is Chester Tate, a stockbroker who makes puts and calls on several mistresses.

The youngest member of the family is 16-year-old Billy the only sane person in the family. Said Miss Harris: "He's a Walter Cronkite in a Cuckoo's Nest." Rounding out the group is Benson, a hostile, old, black servant who has hated everybody in the family except Billy for several generations. Eventually, Harris will write 42 characters.

Miss Harris wants everyone to understand that "Soap" is not going to be another "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," which she considers to be satire. "Soap," she said, "is based on exaggeration. If you take the basic soap opera plots and then exaggerate them and their characters, it becomes very funny." "Soap," she says, will be a comedy.

Miss Harris would be delighted if ABC decides to run two half-hour episodes in prime time each week. Silverman has not made up his mind. If he likes the show when he sees the pilot, which will be made this January, he might decide to run a one-half hour episode each week or an hour version weekly.

If "Soap" does make it into the ABC schedule, it will be a breakthrough of sorts in prime time network television programming.

All the networks turned Norman Lear down when he brought them "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." So he sold it to individual stations. My instinct is that "Soap" will not receive the same treatment. If it does, Miss Harris will have to go back to writing "angry Jewish."