Soap: The Complete First Season

"This is the story of two sisters." So began the most controversial primetime series of the 1977-78 season. Soap took the conventions of daytime television and turned them up to the max, as two wildly dysfunctional families, the upper crust Tates and the blue collar Campbells, struggled with marital infidelities, homosexuality, murder, blackmail, impotency, the mob, sex changes, suicide, and a ventriloquist and his mocking dummy. Standouts in the seamless ensemble cast include Katherine Helmond, uncanny in her ability to be fathomlessly ditzy one minute and sympathetic the next as wealthy Jessica Tate, who is accused of murdering a womanizing tennis pro; Billy Crystal as Jodie, primetime's first sympathetic, three-dimensional gay character; Richard Mulligan as beleaguered working stiff Burt Campbell; and Robert Guillaume in his iconic role as Benson, the Tate's anything-but-servile butler. The series' intermittent lapses into over-the-top situations or characters (including Jessica's father, an addled World War II vet) were kept in check by the empathetic performances. It's a sign of our increasingly crass times that Soap--nicely presented here on an otherwise extra-less triple-disc set--looks tame today, but one of the defining series of the '70s has not lost its addictive ability to hook audiences anew. Recommended. (K. Lee Benson)