Riddle of the month: What's unbelievably popular, largely misunderstood, followed religiously by millions and full of offbeat ideas about sex?
No, it's not the Pope. It's the soap. Once looked upon as mere filler--video Hamburger Helper--soap operas now boast that they're TV's most popular genre. Soaps make millions, shoot in locations from Natchez to Nassau and have fans so loyal they make collies look like traitors.
Why the turnabout? The soaps have rushed from kitchen to bedroom. Sex sells soap, and these days the only turndowns in daytime drama are of bed sheets. Now the brightest day-time stars are the ladies who survive the heroines' fixes and play the villainous vixens. The best of those bubble right here in our pictures.
They're young and restless, and all Ryan ever hoped for. Some are nurses with just one life to live, but they're generally hospitable to the doctors. You'll never see them all together, even by twirling your antenna, except in this, Playboy's special episode of As the Rabbit Head Turns.
Most people have no idea how big the soap bubble really is. Fifteen million fans check into General Hospital every day. There are magazines devoted to excavating the plots of all the soaps, and bars in big cities used to screen video tapes of General Hospital after dark until network lawyers objected. If you're a devotee, you're excused for missing a show only if your daughter has just borne a child by either a Trappist monk or a Doberman pinscher, or if you find that your husband is (A) a transvestite, (B) a mass murderer, (C) actually your sister or (D) all of the above and a Trappist monk or a Doberman pinscher to boot. Even Harvard recently hosted a soap-opera weekend.
Still, some soap scrutinizers think there's too much love in the afternoon. Studies published by the University of Pennsylvania show the soaps have more sex than any other kind of network TV and that it's not all squeaky clean: Only six percent of it is between people married to each other; 49 percent is between unwed lovers. Sex between total strangers happens almost five times as much as marital sex.
That seems to bother some of the researchers. Maybe nobody told them sex on TV sells, more sex sells more. If the women on these eight pages typify what the soaps are selling, then we're buying.
