On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE SOAP SICKNESS BY MARVIN KITMAN The television wedding of the century did not join Prince Charles and Lady Di, or even Mork and Mindy. It linked Luke and Laura (Anthony Geary and...
...Still, I hope Liz never reads The New Leader . There is no telling what she might do to a TV critic who displeases her...
...My pet rocks are livelier...
...I know...
...The show today is a cross between James Bond and Gilligan's Island...
...I knew the key to the action would take place on Day Two when the minister got to the part about" speak now or forever hold your peace...
...Why, I can remember when people were ashamed of being caught dialing a soap opera...
...Imagine, the first lady of screen and stage deigning to appear on a lowly soap opera...
...That was it...
...Any one he wants...
...ABC didn't need Liz for the ratings...
...The care there is excellent, what with the doctors and nurses outnumbering the patients eight to one...
...Some colleges have even stopped scheduling classes opposite the show because the competition is too stiff...
...That's how I came to be there when the marriage of the century paused in the countdown at 4:00 p.m...
...In fact, she blew the soap's other overactors out of the water with her portrayal of Helene Cassadine, the mystery bad woman who suddenly returned to Port Charles...
...T Then , if I may turn to the jugular vein for a moment, there is the problem of kids who spend their youth in thrall to soaps like General Hospital...
...Befuddled memory banks will hum, "That's what happened two seasons ago when Martha's boyfriend turned out to be a latent heterosexual in As the Worm Turns...
...He was the rapist of the year in 1980, she the rapee...
...No, it doesn't have one...
...Mean Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers also watches soaps...
...Forget whether David Stockman had his tongue in his cheek or his foot in his mouth when he admitted that his boss couldn't balance a checkbook...
...She needs General Hospital the way she needs another chin...
...Believe me, it's frightening...
...General Hospital is very boring on a technical level, too...
...on Day One, just as Luke and Laura started their vows...
...Nothing can surprise them-incest, infidelity, rape, abortion, alcoholism, they've seen it all...
...I am expecting an emotional explosion when the present college generation, so happily sedated by GH and similar garbage, finally comes of age...
...Liz is not alone in her passion for this sort of programing...
...There wasn't a dry eye in the house...
...The magazines seem to think that is very cute, so adult and mature of them...
...am the right woman for Luke Spencer...
...And there was Helene Cassadine, Miss Piggy herself, standing at the back of the gazebo giving Luke the big eye...
...Luke and Laura-theirs is the great American love story of the decade...
...Rob-en McNeil of The McNeit/Lehrer Reports told me he tunes in General Hospital-although he insisted he only looks at the news bulletins at the bottom of the screen...
...That'sthe whole story...
...Besides, I'm a method TV critic-I really get into my work...
...If the Russians attacked the United Stales between 3:00 p.m and 4:00 p.m...
...Tough noogies...
...Of course, life is lot more slippery than a soap...
...She'sa big fish, "a whale of an actress," as Joan Rivers always puts it so sweetly on the Tonight Show...
...Nobody could figure out why Taylor took the role...
...1 wouldn't be surprised to hear that John Kenneth Galbraith takes them in at Harvard along with I.F...
...What a grating voice...
...The nuptials of Lucas Lorenzo Spencer and Mrs...
...At least the actors occasionally get up and move around, something that most of the actors on other soaps don't do...
...Having met unconventionally, the couple spent a bizzare long hot summer at Beechman's Corners, not far from the show's setting, Port Charles...
...Thomas Hoving-Mister Metropolitan Museum himself, who does avant-garde cultural reporting for 20/20 and has watched a lot of soaps in the line of duty-currectly noted the other night in his foamiest prose that the entire country has gone bubbles over soaps...
...Of course, Liz can get away with anything...
...Liz certainly rose to the occasion...
...The suspense was too much as I waited for the next episode...
...Surprises, surprises...
...It would be a miracle if some impetuous fool didn't run down the aisle screaming, "No, no...
...What a dress...
...It was something dirty, a vice you kept under wraps...
...After the build-up, all Helene Cassadine did was put a curse on the newlyweds...
...Brain surgeons' wives, librarians, teachers, women with PhDs, they all love the genre...
...Laura Webber Baldwin were what really mattered to the American people this month...
...Forget the AWACS controversy and the recurring crises in the Middle East...
...There will be an outburst of immorality that will make the Moral Majority wish they had not been born again: This TV generation will be staggering home from Hadassah meetings at 3:00 a.m., hanging out in bars, motels and discos, you name it-all the sleazy goings-on they have been steeped in for years on television...
...Fans keep telling me it has to be looked at in a humorous light...
...Houses went untidied the afternoon of November 9, children had to fetch their own after-school snacks, dinners were delayed for husbands arriving from work...
...Universities ought to pay rebates to parents whose kids blow their afternoons this way: The inability to come up with an alternative more attractive than GH is an institutional failure...
...To begin with, the acting is flat, insipid and plastic...
...Lately, though, my toleration has been wearing thin...
...Another shortcoming is the stories, which are absurd to the point of being nonsensical...
...What make-up...
...Just imagine how this will affect their handling of life's ordeals as they begin to crop up in their own lives...
...But as everyone knows, Luke and Laura married each other on the second day with enough time left over for 147 commercials...
...Since they remain glued to the tube in college, instead of being engaged in idealistically creating a better society, these TV babies have nothing to look forward to when they come marching home, except more of the same...
...His subsequent rehabilitation had to be oneof the triumphs of social services in our time...
...Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not sending my kid to Harvard or Brandeis to sit around the lounge and major in junk...
...But it's her favorite show, believe it or not...
...So what if the space shuttle can do 84 orbits in not quite three days-that proves nothing...
...We live in a sick land...
...For months, their social significance and impact on Western civilization has been the subject of discussions in homes and magazines, with GH making the September 28 cover of Newsweek...
...Wedding interrupts, as it is known in scholarly language...
...She exaggerated her every movement for the lip readers in the daytime audience...
...By the time they are 13, kids have seen virtually every human predicament explored at great length...
...It's lucky she didn't topple from the weight of those vulgar rocks on her head and chest...
...Take General Hospital, the most popular soap...
...As Tony Randall pithily inquired in a recent episode of Love, Sidney, "How can you hate something that brings misery to millions of people...
...What a double chin...
...True girth...
...Phony rapists, international jewel thieves, hit men, murderous mental patients-they add up to cardboard characters in unreal situations...
...You may have guessed that I'm not really a soap opera person...
...Yet I have never really hated them either...
...That's been the attraction of General Hospital-you can never guess what kind of incredibly bizarre, kinky thing will happen...
...It's an amazing change in American society...
...Although I almost never waste my time with General Hospital, I just happened to be ironing my shirts on the two days of the momentous ceremony...
...on a weekday, nobody would notice...
...If somebody called, you ran to turn the sound off, or you said you were watching reruns of Wall Street Week in Review or Cosmos...
...Which one...
...The sequence is always a standard one-shot followed by a three-shot, and then another one-shot and a three-shot...
...It linked Luke and Laura (Anthony Geary and Genie Francis), those two fun-loving kids from ABC's General Hospital(Monday-Friday, 3:00-4:00p.m...
...It's all a miscarriage of justice...
...You don't care, you say, you're not concerned...
...Stone, or that Judge Sandra O'Connor sneaks peeks at them in the Supreme Court's TV chamber...
...College students-the nation's future leaders-are devoted viewers, especially of General Hospital...
...Now people talk about their favorites openly, rehashing the details as if they were poring over the Congressional Record...
...By this season they were being hailed as the Clark Gable and Carole Lombard of television land...
...But it was in the bad taste she has become famous for...
...The current acceptance of soaps, their cultural validation, if you will, worries me...
...Saying " I do" took two days because in a soap opera everything requires more time...
...Everybody is coming out of the closet about soaps...
...The wedding began November 16 an continued the next day...
...Missing from all the weighty analyses however, is any mention of what inane drivel we have become addicted to...
...Heck, they were right up there with George and Gracie, Ozzie and Harriet, Superman and Lois Lane...
...I say, stop kidding yourself-even a laugh track couldn't laugh at such stupidity...
...What diamonds she had on...
...Those who have never seen it themselves cannot fathom how silly it is...
...Moreover, you're supposed to learn from experience, not watching the experience happen to someone else...
...As for Liz puffing up her image, she has been bigger than ever as a result of her success in The Little Foxes...
...And what a hammy performance...
...There was always the chance, too, that Luke or even Laura might suffer amnesia-or decide to renegotiate their contracts with ABC right at the altar...
...It's bad enough that American children get hooked on these melodramas on their mothers' knees...
...It's the lull before the lull...
...I was tempted to check into General Hospital myself and have my nerves X-rayed...
...More than an ambitious actor wants to play Uncle Vanya or Clark Kent, she wanted to play anybody on General...
...Second, she simply wanted to be on GH, as the cognoscenti call it...
...Was she hypnotizing him...
...GH, or General (without the italics) as the really "in" soapniks refer to it, is already the hottest thing in America since white bread...
...Audience imagination comes to the rescue here, for housewives and others think of the actors as real people...
...The festivities actually got under way the week before, with the arrival of Liz Taylor in Port Charles-the cultural event of the century...
...First of all, Liz loves weddings, having had so many herself...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 22
