Soap – The Complete Series (Sony DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C Episodes: B+
All In The Family opened up so much great TV and
Norman Lear did some innovative shows afterwards. One standby to take on is the daytime soap
opera, as no show goes on and on like a successful serial drama. He came up with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (reviewed elsewhere on this site) and
though it was a great show, there were other possibilities and the team of
Susan Harris, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas found it with Soap, a brilliant TV comedy show that
arrived in 1977, ran four seasons, changed TV forever and for three of those
seasons was a show so on the cutting edge that it could go a few rounds with
Saturday Night Live and remains an all-time TV classic.
I watched
it from the first episode, expecting something interesting and for the first
three seasons, never missed a debut broadcast of any of the shows. That’s how great I thought the show was. Seeing this again over thirty years later, I
realize how great the show was, how it is one of the most well-cast TV shows in
history, is still ahead of its time and in its first season, is the single
greatest season of TV comedy in American television history.
Besides
the great writing by Harris and others, plus the amazing cast, director Jay
Sandrich (whose work began on The Andy
Griffith Show and started directing great episodes of That Girl and Get Smart,
he continues to be one of the most prolific TV comedy directors of all time) made
this the first show he took on on a regular basis and it is a marvel.
The story
and series begins with two families of different social economic classes (the
rich Tates and poor Campbells) tied together by two sisters who love each
other. Mary Campbell (Cathryn Damon) has
her construction worker husband (Richard Mulligan), gay son (Billy Crystal in a role that put him
on the map in the long run), puppeteer son with a split personality he
manifests through a puppet (Jay Johnson) and straight son (Ted Wass) who is
involved with mobsters and (at first) thinks he is Italian when he is not.
Her
sister Jessica Tate (Katherine Helmond) is also married to a businessman
(Robert Mandan) Chester who is on the take with his company’s money and
sleeping around all over the place, father (Arthur Peterson) who thinks WWII is
still going on, daughter (Jennifer
Salt) who is a reporter sleeping around, another daughter (Diana Canova) who is
in love with a priest and a son (Jimmy Baio) who is just trying to have a
normal girl-chasing teen life. They
luckily have a butler named Benson (Robert Guillaume) who can’t stand half of
them, but loves Jessica like a sister and enough to tolerate the ones he does
not like.
Though
the first three seasons are great, nothing in TV history is as intense in a
narrative level like the first season of Soap. So many ideas, characters, bold storylines
and comedy that it is a whirlwind, a force of nature and arguably the peak of
the U.S. TV sitcom; a fact that will not be changed by High Definition TV or
any cable TV show. The words “brilliant”
and “genius” get kicked around all the time, but for most of the time, the
series lived up to that kind of hype and it helped put the ABC TV network on
top in a way it never has been since.
Taking
some cues from short-lived shows like Hot
L Baltimore and breaking through more of the then-limitations of the Big
Three Networks, the show went all-out and never stopped being great. However, by the end of season three, one too
many contrivances (not enough new characters being introduced), problems with
developing some new ones and the loss of Benson (towards the end of the third
season) to a hugely successful spin-off eroded the core audience sadly. However, while it was on top, Soap was unstoppably funny and its
arrival on DVD was a key release when the separate season arrived. As a Complete
Series set, it is a must-own set.
Other
great actors across the series included Nita Talbot, Robert Urich, Sal Viscuso,
John Byner, Rebecca Balding, Dinah Manoff, Gordon Jump, Eugene Roche, Marla
Pennington, Gregory Sierra, Barbara Rhodes, Bob Seagren, Caroline McWilliams,
Peggy Pope, Lynne Moody, Joe Montegna, Howard Hessman, Charles Lane, Harold
Gould, Edward Winter, Jack Gilford, Doris Roberts, Sorrell Booke, Ron Rifkin,
Robert Englund, Kene Holiday, Lee Bergere and Inga Swenson are among those ho
brilliantly increased the lunacy and made this show immortal. Telling about too much of the show would ruin
it, but the achievement that is Soap is inarguable and essential viewing all
the way to the end.
The 1.33
X 1 image across the four seasons are pretty good considering their age and
that these professional NTSC analog tapings are old 2” reel-to-reel
productions, with good color and only some softness typical of the format. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is slightly
compressed throughout, but still sounds good overall, while the narrative
bookends by Rod Roddy and music score by George Alice Tipton (who created the
classic theme song) come through well. Extras
include some superfluous previews that are dated, featurette The
Creators Come Clean (21 minutes) on DVD 3 of Season Two, the pilot repeated on that same DVD, but that is
all. Sadly, many of the main actors have
passed away since the release of these DVDs and are not available to do any
extras, though others certainly are and there are archival clips out there for
a show this big. He show is and
continues to be underrated. Hope this
set changes that.
There is
some controversy about the packaging, having the DVDs of all the seasons on one
spindle, and a thin plastic one at that.
The plus is that it is a space saver and if you treat the discs like
they are double-sided, it should be fine.
However, the plastic is a little thinner than I would have liked and why
not a booklet-style case?
For more
on its even longer-running spin-off, try this link for the first season of Benson:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/5740/Benson+–+The+Complete+First+Sea
- Nicholas Sheffo
