Soap: as good as I remembered
Um, that's Soap the TV show, not soap the substance (warning -- don't go to that wikipedia page unless you're okay with possibly seeing spoilers for the show).
Soap ran from 1977 to 1981 and was supposedly a spoof of daytime soap operas. However, there must have been some subversive types on the writing staff, because they kept sneaking in these poignant and/or pointed moments, most often having to do with how the other characters related to either Benson, the black servant of the rich family, played by Robert Guillame, or Jody, the gay son of the middle-class family, played by Billy Crystal.
The storylines surrounding Jody are particularly captivating. True, the writers confound homosexuality with cross-dressing and being transgendered, and there's certainly plenty of humour built around all of that. But -- Jody is never the butt of the joke. It's everyone around him, in various stages of denial, confusion, and disgust, that are the ones being made fun of.
And then...and then they sneak in these beautiful scenes, played almost totally straight, like the one where Jody says to his disapproving stepfather, "Look at me. I'm a person, just like you. Look at me." Or the one I just watched in Episode 108, where Jody talks his brother Danny out of his steadfast denial. Danny: "You're probably not gay". Jody: "I am! And it shouldn't make any difference -- and if it does and you don't love me now because of it, then you've never loved me at all!".
You can watch it here, if you're okay with watching an ad (if you don't want to watch the whole episode, skip to minute 9; skipping will cause another ad to play).
Soap ran from 1977 to 1981 and was supposedly a spoof of daytime soap operas. However, there must have been some subversive types on the writing staff, because they kept sneaking in these poignant and/or pointed moments, most often having to do with how the other characters related to either Benson, the black servant of the rich family, played by Robert Guillame, or Jody, the gay son of the middle-class family, played by Billy Crystal.
The storylines surrounding Jody are particularly captivating. True, the writers confound homosexuality with cross-dressing and being transgendered, and there's certainly plenty of humour built around all of that. But -- Jody is never the butt of the joke. It's everyone around him, in various stages of denial, confusion, and disgust, that are the ones being made fun of.
And then...and then they sneak in these beautiful scenes, played almost totally straight, like the one where Jody says to his disapproving stepfather, "Look at me. I'm a person, just like you. Look at me." Or the one I just watched in Episode 108, where Jody talks his brother Danny out of his steadfast denial. Danny: "You're probably not gay". Jody: "I am! And it shouldn't make any difference -- and if it does and you don't love me now because of it, then you've never loved me at all!".
You can watch it here, if you're okay with watching an ad (if you don't want to watch the whole episode, skip to minute 9; skipping will cause another ad to play).