Season of the Nightsoaps

By RICHARD CORLISS

Beyond Dallas: sexy new series populate prime time

Lots goes on here in the town of Night-soap, most every night of the week. Mondays Blake Carrington comes to visit, with his young wife, his tramp daughter, his homosexual son and a billion dollars' worth of Colorado oil contracts; Blake is trying to build a Dynasty. Tuesdays we see the Weldons,from up on Flamingo Road; they got more problems, and hormones, than an alligator has teeth. Thursdays we play bridge with the young marrieds from Knots Landing; most of the time, though, they want to play other indoor games. Fridays we reserve for our oldest friends, the Swings --but maybe you 've already met them. For the past few Saturdays we 've seen the best and worst families of Midland Heights.

They have moved away now, saying the neighborhood got too crowded. No matter, though; next week new folks, name of Trask, are moving in, just for a spell. They dress and talk funny, and when I asked old Adam Trask where he came from, he declared, "East of Eden." But I think they should fit into Nightsoap just fine.

Ever since the Ewings of Dallas helped vault CBS back to the top of the ratings, the networks have raced into prime-time domestic cliffhangers. There are now four such series on weeknights: Dynasty, Mondays, ABC; Flamingo Road, Tuesdays, NBC; Knots Landing, Thursdays, CBS; and Dallas, Fridays, CBS. As if four hours of hot passions and cold revenge, old money and dirty money, macho patriarchs and mysterious paternities, good people worrying about, doing right and bad people having fun doing wrong were not enough, ABC has reserved three nights (Sunday, Monday and Wednesday) next week for an adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, East of Eden. While this eight-hour TV movie has clear cultural pretensions, it is really 99-and-44/100% pure soap.

Dallas, which premiered in April 1978, established the pattern: a big, powerful family whose obsession with sex and money makes them miserable and the TV audience insatiable; guilt-edged lust that skulks through the generations, seeking spectacular revenge; feuds and affairs that seep over the interwoven plots like warm Brie over a Triscuit. These mechanisms had propelled daytime drama--the radio and TV soaps--for nearly half a century before the Dallas pioneers, Lorimar Productions, streamlined them for prime time. Dallas proved that mobile America would sit still each week for a continuing story of byzantine complexity. Since the current TV season began in November.

Dallas has been the highest-rated series every week it has aired.

Could imitations be far behind? In the case of Dynasty, imitation is the sincerest form of flatulence. As Oil Mogul Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) struggles to secure control of his empire and the fidelity of his working-class bride (Linda Evans), heavy breathing can be heard --the anxious effort of writers and actors to hit a Texas-size gusher. So far, though, Dynasty is all dry wells.

Since Dallas, Lorimar has launched three more sexy serials, and two of them are paying off. Knots Landing, which spun the Ewings' gray-sheep brother Gary off into the moral thickets of California suburbia, has frequently won its time slot since it debuted in December 1979. A newer entry. Flamingo Road, is putting lurid new life into NBC's chronically tired blood. Lorimar's Secrets of Midland Heights, an updated Peyton Place with the handsomest cast on TV, seemed to be finding its narrative stride before CBS canceled it last month for low ratings.

The plot of Flamingo Road, as with most nighttime soaps, is simplicity itself. Lane Ballou (Cristina Raines), a good girl from the bad side of nowhere, comes to Truro, a small Florida town. There she attracts the attentions of both Sam Curtis (John Beck), a tomcatting entrepreneur, and Fielding Carlyle (Mark Harmon), a political comer who weds Constance Wei-don (Morgan Fairchild), the snooty illegitimate daughter of Whorehouse Madam Lute-Mae Sanders (Stella Stevens) and Millowner Claude Weldon (Kevin Mc Carthy), who is married to the patrician Eudora Weldon (Barbara Rush), whose affair with the town's newspaper editor, Elmo Tyson (Mason Adams), may have produced teen-age Skipper Weldon (Woody Brown), who aims to elope with Waitress Annabelle Troy (Dianne Kay), who dies in a fire at Claude's mill that was planned by Truro's venal sheriff, Titus Semple (Howard Duff), who is ...

Annabelle's father! That was the plot of the first episode. Since then the show has begun to get complicated.

Flamingo Road has a lot going for it: an infernal quadrangle straight out of Gone With the Wind (Lane, Sam, Fielding and Constance playing the roles of Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley and Melanie) with motives and M.O.s provocatively askew; randy women jackknifing their long bare legs around any man who will come near a canopied bed; meta-trash dialogue like "You're trouble, girl, nothin' but trouble." At the moment, a crushing share of the dramatic burden falls on the strong, hairy shoulders of Mark Harmon. His character, who is both rising-star politician and star-crossed lover, as yet shows no consuming letch for power. He is too much Bobby Ewing, not enough J.R. But an axiom of prime-time soaps is that as the show gets on and the evil folks take over, the action becomes more baroquely complex. Flamingo Road has begun sufficiently well for it eventually to turn deliciously bad.

For East of Eden, there can be no such hope. Twelve years after his death, Steinbeck's reputation grazes in the pasture of celebrated oblivion inhabited by many literary Nobel laureates. But his recasting of the Cain and Abel story in turn-of-the-century California deserves better than the ABC version, and indeed it got it in a 1955 film that starred Raymond Massey as steel-spined Adam Trask and James Dean as Cal, his loving renegade of a son.

ABC's East of Eden is situated somewhat west of Dallas and north of Flamingo Road. Richard Shapiro's adaptation is terribly tasteful and tastefully terrible; it reiterates themes ad nauseam, while denying the characters any emotional room in which to maneuver. Director Harvey Hart has allowed his cast to display some of the most ludicrously solemn overacting since Exorcist II: The Heretic.

The series has its share of crafty scene stealers (Warren Gates, Lloyd Bridges, Soon-Teck Oh) and shameless scenery chewers, including Timothy Carey, Nicholas Pryor and Jane Seymour as Adam's soulless wife Cathy. There is one wonderful actress: Karen Allen as Cal's girl Abra.

Though as written the role is little more than a smiling Abra cadaver, Allen brings strength and warmth to her task; also, she is as cute as a button on a calico dress.

A pity Allen must share many of her scenes with Timothy Bottoms, as Adam, and his brother Sam Bottoms, playing Adam's son Cal. The casting of brothers in father and son roles must have seemed like a coup to the producers. But Timothy, who virtually patented adolescent winsomeness in The Last Picture Show, has yet to mature as an actor. As the stern father, he is all jutting chin and squints and false heartiness; he frets and preens like the jeune premier in a Feydeau farce. To say that Sam Bottoms is not James Dean is to say that a Big Mac is no Chateaubriand. There are no secrets, no demons in Sam's face; there is no beauty.

Because the lead actors refuse to spark against each other, East of Eden fails as human drama and even as entertaining melodrama. With any stars, the show was unlikely to have ranked with the best prime-time soaps. With callow Tim and sallow Sam, East of Eden is doomed to scrape Bottoms. --By Richard Corliss

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