by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 01, 2008

"Soap" was a funny half-hour comedy that aired for four seasons in the 1970s. As it's title suggested, it was a parody of soap operas, featuring lots of characters improbable entanglements. There was romance, murder, UFOs, and at one point even an exorcism. "Soap" always remained a situation comedy. It just had a lot of different situations!

"Soap" was instantly controversial. Sexy dialogue led to organized protests against the show, and it was one of the first popular shows to feature a gay character (played by a 29-year-old Billy Crystal). But by the end of the first season, there was a new controversy - who killed the character of Peter Campbell? (He was played by 1970s leading man Robert Urich.) As the show's bouncy theme music set a wry tone, audiences found themselves attracted to its unpredictable and whimsical stories - and the controversies only created an extra sense of notoriety.

Its opening credits introduced two sisters - the wealthy Jessica Tate and her blue collar sister Mary Campbell. But each family was filled with an assortment of odd characters, including a gangster, a defrocked priest, a senile former army major, and a ventriloquist. (One episode actually ended when the entire family being taken hostage by an escaped serial killer.) Each week the announcer offered a speedy recap of the previous episode. ("Danny met a girl named Polly at the cemetery who might help him get over Elaine...")

"Confused?" he'd ask at the end. "You won't be after this episode of Soap!"

In later seasons the opening showed both families posing for a photograph, only to have the roof collapse on top of them (or to have both families suddenly break into an enormous fist fight.) But beyond the unpredictable comedy were moments of real drama, like when Jessica Tate realizes her husband had been cheating on her. And an improbable story about a demon possessing Corrine Tate's baby led to an inspiring speech. When priests failed to displace the demon, eccentric Jessica Tate finally confronts the devil himself, and her message is honest and irrefutable. We're a family, and we've already been through hell together and come out the other side. There's nothing left that can tear us apart. The demon vanishes, the baby cries, and the family returns to its own plucky struggles.

Soap's creator, Susan Harris, had already written for the top-rated shows of the decade, including "All in the Family," "Maude," and even "The Partridge Family." One character on "Soap" proved so popular that he was spun off into his own series. (Benson, the surly butler who would respond to ringing doorbells by asking nonchalantly, "You want ME to get that?") But throughout its four-year run, Harris proved again and again that she was determined to push the boundaries of television. She even appeared in two episodes herself - playing a prostitute!

Ironically, the show's final episode ended with a cliffhanger in which Jessica Tate was apparently executed by a firing squad. It remains one of the great ironies of television history: after four years of following the families' wacky problems, audiences ultimately never did find out how it all came out.

They just knew that they'd had a lot of laughs along the way.

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