Is Prime Time Ready for Sex?

Will young Jodie go through with his sex-change operation and marry a football player? Will Cousin Corinne continue bedding down the local tennis pro, despite hard-breathing competition from her mother? Will Father Flotsky modernize the Mass by substituting Oreo cookies for the traditional wafers? And will Soap, the new ABC comedy that features all these characters, be a TV sensation this September?

The show has become this year's lightning rod for controversy, real or contrived, about the upcoming prime time season. Robert Bennett, ABC affiliates vice chairman, calls it "a sophisticated adult farce." The network has been screening the show for its member stations, many of whom are extravagantly enthusiastic. It has also shown Soap to the press, and somehow a five-year plot projection, or "bible," has been leaked. Religious groups have quickly created a dispute about material that has not yet even survived the ABC censors. Says Everett C. Parker, TV watchdog for the United Church of Christ: "It's going to be the opening wedge for sexually explicit material in prime time." Adds Al Antczak of the Roman Catholic newspaper Tidings: ''The desecration of morality, and of the Catholic religion in particular, is an outrage that calls for protest in the strongest terms."

Struggling Sisters. On the basis of the only two half-hour episodes that have been produced, it is difficult to see new cause for outrage in Soap--though certainly no harder than finding evidence of sophisticated adult farce. The plot revolves around two middle-aged sisters and their families in suburban Round Hill, Conn. Mary Campbell (Cathryn Damon) struggles to stay afloat in the middle class. Her husband (Richard Mulligan) is impotent; her younger son would like to be her daughter. "He's sick!" rages the husband. "So am I," says Mary. "He looks better in that dress than I do."

Sister Jessica (Katherine Helmond) is a well-fixed chucklehead whose husband (Robert Mandan) has not looked at her since she was 30. She is now learning tennis theory in bed with the pro. Grandpa thinks he is General Patton; Daughter Corinne does not come home at night any more; the family's ghetto-cool black butler condescends, quite rightly, to the whole lot.

The comedy--and Soap has its funny moments--is about race, sex and religion. Until the ABC censors got wind of it, the show's writers had plotted Father Flotsky's seduction in church by Corinne, then an exorcism for their baby. The priapic tennis pro may still be killed--with his racket-stringing machine--after one of his love matches.

Still, there is no racial slur in the first two episodes of Soap that Archie Bunker has not uttered before. Though the sex jokes may be new to prime time, they are familiar to anyone who has watched Mary Hartman or followed what seems to be the terminal lust of the Globatron girls in All That Glitters. Seven years ago ABC rejected All in the Family, a fact that officials of network affiliates still discuss with steel in their voices. For Norman Lear, who produced all three shows, Soap is the sincerest form of flattery, a sweaty attempt to play catch-up with his old comedies.

Some affiliate stations are worried. Says Don Cunningham, program director of WOWK-TV in Huntington, W.Va.: "If you want to see Shampoo, that's your choice, but we are concerned about family viewing." In the Midwest, ABC is allowing reluctant managers to air Soap later than the network time of 8:30. (Elsewhere, it goes on at 9:30.)

So far, CBS and NBC insist that they are more bored by Soap than worried about it. Says an NBC executive: "It's kids'porno: Laverne and Shirley, Three's Company--the end of a trend." CBS President Robert Wussler is rumbling about the possibility that Soap will refuel criticism of prime time programming just when the ruckus over violence is dying down. But the Cyclops eye is not blinking. Says one CBS programmer: "If it works, the whole industry will have a Soap in five months."

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