'Soap' protest is no threat to freedom

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WASHINGTON "Soap" is a television show that ABC is pleased to call "adult," presumably because the show is obsessed with sex. Having seen two installments, I can defend ABC against the charge that "Soap" is dramatically more offensive than all other shows. It is merely another step, and certainly not a final step, in the direction of what advanced thinkers call "frankness."

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It concerns two families related by marriage. In one, the father copulates with everyone except his wife, she copulates with her tennis instructor; he copulates with her daughter. The other family includes an impotent stepfather and two sons, one a homosexual, the other a Mafia hood.

The first family has a militant black butler who insults everybody and is insulted by a deranged grandfather. In the other family, the stepfather jokes that Fruit Loops is the appropriate breakfast cereal for the homosexual son. So goes the "frankness."

Various church and other groups urge boycotting products advertised on "Soap," and scores of companies have reportedly instructed their advertising agencies not to buy time on "Soap." But an age that is as pompous as it is vulgar will rationalize almost any tastelessness as "satite." And groups opposing "Soap" are being called threats to intellectual freedom.

The Washington Post finds it "disturbing" that "Soap" is opposed by "fervent" groups with "a special focus and a particular ax to grind." Post editorialists, who presumably recoil from ax grinding, say attacks on Soap" are "a form censorship."

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Richard Pinkham, an advertising executive, warns, "If television knuckles under to these minority pressures, it will sink deeper and deeper into the quagmire of mediocrity." Right. Madison Avenue, which can't abide mediocrity, must protect "Soap" from the enemies excellence.

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No industry is more devoted than is television to detecting society's lowest common denominator and knuckling under to it. The overriding purpose of television entertainment is to attract a mass audience of potential buyers of beer and soap and, denture adhesives. So networks and advertising agencies live with their ears to the ground, a posture more profitable than dignified.

Those who choose to be slaves to Nielsen ratings should not pretend to cherish their independence. And even in an age when the First Amendment is regularly invoked for low commercial purposes, it is a bit much for networks and ad agencies to shout "censorship" when viewers make themselves heard.

That most of the groups opposing "Soap" began opposing it before the first show is immaterial. They did so on the basis of published reports that were part of the networks' preseason-publicity. That persons opposing "Soap" are a minority is not-remarkable. Intense minorities always are disproportionately influential in politics and elsewhere in society.

Ofcourse the networks find intense -

George F. Will

minorities tiresome. Those who schedule entertainment programs think in terms of Nielsen ratings and are impatient with persons who have more complicated criteria for judging the suitableness of popular entertainment.

Some persons fear that pressure from concerned minorities will make television "bland" and "timid." But television entertainment has characteristics on which blandness would be an improvement. And "Soap" is not an act of moral bravery. It is a corporation's carefully calculated ploy for expanding profits by expanding its audience; it is just the latest network tactic for titillating an increasingly desensitized public.

Some conscientious parents, advertising agencies (for example, J. Walter Thompson), and sponsors have successfully insisted on less violence on television. Like gratitous violence, the "adult" comedy of "Soap" is an affront to the sensibilities of many Americans.

That is why the most agreeable fact about the new television season is this: Many Americans who are not comatose in front of their television sets are talking back to the tube.