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The result will also incorporate the bizarre. In fact, one of the characters will not really be a human being at all, but a doll who comes to life as a sounding board for the local witch, Tabitha Lenox (Juliet Mills). She will occasionally ride around town with "Timmy" (Ally McBeal's Josh Evans) on the handlebars of her bicycle. "I needed someone for this crazy person to talk to," Reilly explains, "and all of a sudden I got this idea. I said, 'No, no. You're being silly. Time to go and have dinner.' But I kept on coming back to it. And I'd start telling the other writers I was working with, and we'd all break into laughter." Reilly will have another character, Grace Bennett (Dana Sparks), levitate through her French doors.
Were it not for these instances in which a call to Agent Mulder might seem in order, Passions would appear indistinguishable from almost any other soap opera. Marxism may not find much expression in contemporary American pop culture, but it certainly still thrives on daytime serials, where conflict often revolves around a town's monied Protestant dynasty and its less privileged newcomers. Here, we have the Cranes vs. the Lopez-Fitzgeralds. In typically unseemly soap opera fashion, it is Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald (Lindsay Korman), Hispanic and the daughter of a maid, who is the gold digger who goes after Harmony's wealthiest young scion. The African-American family in this essentially racially balanced cast ("I want to entertain everyone," says Reilly. "I want people to look at the show and identify with it") receives somewhat more enlightened treatment. They are a happy and prosperous lot; we know this because in the first episode they play tennis.
None of this is to say that Passions is devoid of promise. Indeed, there are flashes of a certain kind of genius in the first episode alone, which has a self-exiled Sheridan Crane (McKenzie Westmore) in France visiting Sacre Coeur every day to mourn the loss of her best friend. That best friend was Princess Diana, who we now learn was on her way to visit Sheridan when she met her ill fate in that Parisian tunnel. The show doesn't make clear why this information never surfaced on Hard Copy.
Reilly grew up visiting an Irish grandfather who kept him riveted with suspenseful tales. But Reilly's gift, colleagues say, has as much to do with his skill as a technician as it does with his being a good raconteur. "Jimmy has perfected the art of not being predictable," says Lisa Hesser, the show's executive producer. "Most soap opera viewers know they have to watch on Fridays and Mondays, but Jim can have a blockbuster event on a Tuesday." If that event should involve a reincarnated Dodi, well then, all the better.
--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York