...however, according to my inquiries at the home of the learned Turner Classic Movies message board members, this is the only soft core porn nighttime soap opera running on Showtime in this time frame 1982-1983, which was suddenly canceled.
If I am remembering the same show, there was a rich family that employed half the town with their electronics plant twenty years before all of those jobs got exported to China. There was a plot line about a serial rapist running around loose before there were methods for the analysis of DNA evidence (honest, officer I was in Topeka at the time), and what I remember most about it were two young lovers who you are rooting for right up to the time that it is discovered that they are (BLECH!) half siblings! You see the mother of one of the young lovers had been the lover, years ago, of the father of the other young lover, and he, not her husband, was the father of her child. Thus it turns out they were trying to keep the youngsters apart for a reason - incest! What I remember as particularly strange retrospectively is that people who barely knew each other would begin to undress spontaneously spouting lines like - "with today's technologies there is no reason for people not to explore the limits of their sexuality!". Ahem, oh yes there is, you just don't know about it yet - AIDS and herpes to be exact. One disease - AIDS - so deadly, horrific, and unstoppable in the first ten years that it appeared in the U.S. that people were automatically counseled when diagnosed for fear that they would commit suicide.
Another scene that sticks out in my memory is a guy - not the serial rapist - raping one of the characters (acquaintance rape) and then her telling the rapist afterwards that she was pregnant. She said something like "Aren't you ashamed! You raped a pregnant woman!" Rapist puts on cowboy hat and looks at ground in a "aw shucks" kind of way as though it is more shameful to rape a woman who is pregnant than one who is not? Not getting the logic now, not getting the logic 33 years ago.
Anyways, it disappeared as suddenly as it appeared with really none of the story lines resolved. Like Showtime's "Hard Knocks", a summer replacement show in 1987 that starred Bill Maher, I think this one has fallen off of the edge of the earth, never to return.
If I am remembering the same show, there was a rich family that employed half the town with their electronics plant twenty years before all of those jobs got exported to China. There was a plot line about a serial rapist running around loose before there were methods for the analysis of DNA evidence (honest, officer I was in Topeka at the time), and what I remember most about it were two young lovers who you are rooting for right up to the time that it is discovered that they are (BLECH!) half siblings! You see the mother of one of the young lovers had been the lover, years ago, of the father of the other young lover, and he, not her husband, was the father of her child. Thus it turns out they were trying to keep the youngsters apart for a reason - incest! What I remember as particularly strange retrospectively is that people who barely knew each other would begin to undress spontaneously spouting lines like - "with today's technologies there is no reason for people not to explore the limits of their sexuality!". Ahem, oh yes there is, you just don't know about it yet - AIDS and herpes to be exact. One disease - AIDS - so deadly, horrific, and unstoppable in the first ten years that it appeared in the U.S. that people were automatically counseled when diagnosed for fear that they would commit suicide.
Another scene that sticks out in my memory is a guy - not the serial rapist - raping one of the characters (acquaintance rape) and then her telling the rapist afterwards that she was pregnant. She said something like "Aren't you ashamed! You raped a pregnant woman!" Rapist puts on cowboy hat and looks at ground in a "aw shucks" kind of way as though it is more shameful to rape a woman who is pregnant than one who is not? Not getting the logic now, not getting the logic 33 years ago.
Anyways, it disappeared as suddenly as it appeared with really none of the story lines resolved. Like Showtime's "Hard Knocks", a summer replacement show in 1987 that starred Bill Maher, I think this one has fallen off of the edge of the earth, never to return.
