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Far more modest than the magazines is the Daytime Serial Newsletter ($8 per year; 20,000 subscribers), put out monthly by Bryna Laub, a California housewife. With eight television sets in her house, she tapes each show for later transcription. The idea for Newsletter was her husband's: after Bryna had spent hours on the phone updating her working women friends on their favorite serials, he cried in frustration, "Why tell them for free?
Charge them and you can make a fortune!"
Will the irreverent Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! inspire the same kind of fevered loyalty? The first episodes feature exhibitionism, mass murder and impotence. Louise Lasser plays pliable Mary as if in a permanent coma. A fast and funny show, Mary Hartman! underscores the euphemistic nature of the soaps: terrible things may happen, but it is the emotional reaction to them that is emphasized.
But cracking jokes is kidding yourself, and this is bound to bring Mary Hartman! a different audience from the people who enjoy taking the real soaps seriously. In fact, all soaps are a solitary trip on which the individual viewer's imagination is given free rein. No two fans ever understand a soap situation quite the same way.
This nebulous quality ultimately makes the characters baffling. Women are at once narcissistic and manipulative as well as sturdy, realistic survivors. Men are both fatherly providers and wicked seducers. Critic Leslie Fiedler, who is faithful to All My Children, theorizes that soaps are antimale. "First, they show how men exploit women, and second, in a crisis the men are impotent." This may help explain the soaps' unique aspect. Nowhere else in life or drama are both men and women seen to be equally interested in emotional relationships. Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who frequently watches the soaps with the blue-collar and poor families who are the subjects of his studies, thinks they have a philosophic impact. He recalls a working-class woman "who sits down to watch a soap, then turns it off and asks herself what is really the existential question: What is life all about?"
The British serial Upstairs, Downstairs (which will start its third season on public television this week) does not do that. Like the soaps, it is a dense family drama, but there the resemblance ends. Upstairs, Downstairs reflects a society in which masters and servants are bound to each other by shared and common memories. There is an intimacy, both abrasive and comforting, that precludes abandonment, despair and uncontrollable passions. Soap operas, on the other hand, are folk tales that tug at the soul of a nation of strangers for whom television itself is a bond. Tolstoy thought that unhappy families were unhappy in different ways. But a Madison Avenue philosopher, selling sex and suffering in the afternoon, remarks: "Show me an unhappy home and I'll show you a home that doesn't like television."