ABC's 'Soap' is controversial

before sexy show even airs

By Les Brown

New York Times

NEW YORK The new television 'season is more than two months away, and already it has a notorious program.

A new ABC comedy serial called "Soap, scheduled to debut in midSeptember, has the watchdogs of television morality in a lather merely from verbal descriptions of its content.

Meanwhile, a number of the network's affiliates have expressed the fear that "Soap" may get them in hot. water with segments of their communities, and have not yet decided whether they will carry it.

But virtually everyone in the television and advertising industries predicts the show will be a hit.

The subject of "Soap" and the predicate as well is sex. The title is trade shorthand for "soap opera." ABC represents the series as a comedy version, but not a spoof of the domestic melodramas long familiar to television's daytime viewers.

A publication of the archdiocese of Loa Angeles attacked the series as indecent, and called for a boycott of the advertisers who would have spot announcements in the show. ABC says that no one from the archdiocese has seen the program.

Other religious organizations are also concerned about "Soap." The Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker, director of the office of communication of the United Church of Christ and a leading figure in the movement to reform broadcasting, said he had received letters from member churches around the country asking him "to do something about this."

"I won't denounce a show I haven't seen, Parker said, adding that he had asked ABC for a screening but had been denied one.

"But my concern." he continued." "is that even if 'Soap is done in good taste. it's going to be the opening wedge for sexually explicit material in prime time and then will come the deluge."

Robert Hussler, the president of CBS-TV, said the series would never have been accepted by his network because it failed to meet the CBS standards and practices criteria. Other executives at CBS and NBC worry that "Soap" may stir new criticisms of television at a time when attention has just begun to subside over prime-time violence.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, which regularly bids for the rights to American shows that promise to be hits, screened "Soap" and declined it without comment.

"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," Norman Lear's syndicated sex-saturated parody of soap operas, preceded "Soap" on the air by almost

Television

and radio

two years but was not half as controversial as the new show. This is because "Mary Hartman" was scheduled by most stations at 11 p.m., an hour when young children are presumed to be asleep.

"Soap," however, is to be a 9:30 entry on Tuesday nights (8:30 in the Middle West), and will be preceded in the schedule by three of ABC's most popular shows with the teen-age audience, "Happy Days," "Laverne and Shirley" and "Three's Company." The sexiness of "Soap" will be largely verbal. There is no nudity in it.

Some ABC affiliates, especially those in communities with large populations of Southern Baptists in the so-called Bible Belt, have serious reservations about carrying "Soap" next fall.

To head off such rejections, ABC has indicated that it may permit stations in the Central time zone to play the show at a later hour.

Two half-hour pilot shows, setting the characters and plotlines, have been screened for ABC stations and some members of the press. Based on those two episodes. "Soap" goes sort of as follows:

Two middle-aged sisters have married quite differently, one to a wealthy lecher, the other to a bluecollar worker, her second husband, who is sexually impotent. The wealthy sister and her young daughter are separately having affairs with the same tennis pro.

The wealthy husband is being blackmailed by his secretary, his mistress of a dozen years, who has kept records on his numerous other assignments.

The couple also have a puritanical daughter, described in the show as “a latent nun," and a son in puberty who is obsessed with pornography. There is also a hostile black servant who swaps racial slurs with the daft, militaristic grandfather of the family.

The poorer sister has two sons, one a member of the Mafia, the other a homosexual desirous of a sex-change operation who likes to model his mother's gowns. ("Oh, you wear it belted," she declared admiringly.)

"We considered the first two episodes one long dirty joke," remarked Lewis Klein, executive vice president of Gateway Communications, which owns WOWK, the ABC affiliate in Huntington, W. Va.

"ABC has assured us that those episodes are not typical of the series and that the rest of it may be more palatable, so we're holding off any decision until we see how it will be changed," Klein said.

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But from what we've seen of the series so far," he continued, "our attitude is, we don't need it. We feel 'it's bad for television, bad for the industry, and at a time when ABC is becoming more believable and gaining more respect."

According to Robert M. Bennett, vice chairman of the ABC affiliates board, no more than 15 stations feel they may have trouble with "Soap," and most of them, he said, can solve the problem by playing it later in the evening.

Bennett, who is general manager of WCVB-TV in Boston, said of the program, "I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw."

Fred Silverman, the ABC program chief, defends "Soap" as an "innovative form of character comedy," and contends that the themes of adultry, impotency and transvestitism are nothing new in prime-time television.

"The innovation here is not the content but the form, a comedy with a continuing storyline," Silverman said.

"It is an intelligent show written and produced by intelligent people, and in time it will be perceived as a moral show," he continued.

"Soap" is to be a production of a new independent company whose principals are Susan Harris, a leading Hollywood writer of television comedies; Paul Junger Witt, whose producing credits include "Brian's Song," and Tony Thomas, son of the comedian Danny Thomas.

Silverman said that ABC officials deliberated for weeks, anticipating the repercussions, before deciding to accept the series. The network determined that it was "healthier to offer a bold and venturesome kind of show, he said, "than five more imitations of 'Happy Days' or 'The Brady Bunch.'"

"When the television networks stop trying to do things that stretch the boundaries of the medium, we're all in trouble," Silverman commented.

Cathryn Damon stars as Mary Campbell, mother of the unusual Campbell household in ABC's "Soap."

Katherine Helmond also is in "Soap" as Jessica Tate, the jaded matriarch of the wealthy Tate family.