Vital Viewing (Confused? You Won't Be After This Week's Episode Edition)

 

Actress Katherine Helmond was born on this day in 1929. She's best known for...well, that's an interesting question. According to the various headlines announcing her death in 2019, she seems to have been best known for playing Mona Robinson, the free-spirited, vampish mother of Judith Lights' Angela Bower on the situation comedy Who's the Boss? And make no mistake, she was good in that, but her original claim to fame was in an earlier, and in my opinion much funnier, sitcom than Who's the Boss, and that would be...  

...Soap. In it, Helmond played Jessica Tate, and Cathryn Damon played her sister Mary Campbell. Jessica, husband Chester, and their two grown daughters, one teenage son, the children's deluded grandfather, and the household's insolent butler lived in the rich part of town. Mary, husband Burt, Mary's two grown sons from another marriage, Burt's one grown son from another marriage, and the latter's ventriloquist's dummy, were all working-class. But don't get the idea things were as socioeconomic as all that. The class differences hardly made a difference on that show. The first big hit from writer-producer Susan Harris (who went on to create The Golden Girls), Soap took its' sitcom characters, and instead of the usual surprise birthday parties, reluctant visits to the dentist, and amateur talent shows put on to raise money for a new seniors center, plopped them into melodramatic situations. Being sitcom characters, they lacked the basic melodramatic social skills to deal with these situations on anything other than the level of a sharply-written burlesque sketch, and that's what made this series so damn funny. The melodrama got pretty wild as time went on it, with storylines about demonic possession and alien abduction (which reminds me, they also lacked Mulder and Scully's basic social skills), but in Soap's first season the plots dealt mainly with the kind of things you would have seen on afternoon soap operas (hence, the show's name), and, in the 1970s at least, that meant affairs of the heart, cheatin' hearts, and broken hearts. Katherine Helmond attempts to sort out all those various hearts in relation to her character in the following interview:

Here's a scene from early in Soap's first season. Along with Helmond herself, there's Robert Mandan (Chester Tate), Jimmy Baio (Billy Tate), Diane Canova (Corrine Tate), Arthur Peterson Jr. (the Major; Jessica and Mary's father), and Robert Guillaume (Benson):

If the above clip is all you've ever seen of Soap, you could easily get the impression that it's just an ordinary sitcom. Or out of the ordinary only because it's funnier than most sitcoms. But the above scene actually comes in the aftermath of a shocking revelation. So, going backwards in time by an episode or two, let's see what happens when Peter is introduced to the rest of Corrine's extended family.  In addition to the actors I've already mentioned, there's Robert Urich (Peter), Richard Mulligan (Burt Campbell, Peter's father), Ted Wass (Danny Dallas, Burt's stepson), Billy Crystal (Jodie Dallas, Burt's other stepson), and Cathryn Damon (whose name I did already mention, but now you get to see her.):

 

What this? It looks as though Peter had ongoing affairs with both the daughter and the mother! Ewwwwwww! Where are their morals? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Soap takes place in Connecticut, which is, you know, one of those blue states. I can't watch any more. I need a soap opera parody that takes place in Middle-America, in a red state, like Ohio, where I live, where there are still such things as values:  

There. That's better.