FLASHBACK: Soap Breaks Image of Daytime 1967

Serial Breaks Image of Daytime Programing

By Rick Du Brow
Los Angeles Times
October 10, 1967

CBS-TV has been giving a big promotion push to its new daytime soap opera, LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, but perhaps the most significant thing about it - the racial aspect - isn't being mentioned much.

While night time television programming has been taking on a much more noticeable tone than in the past - although it is still hardly overwhelming - daytime video series have been conservative in this area.

The soap operas, in recent years, have abandoned their generally innocent approach to life, and have been, to say the least, quite frank about such matters as sex other subjects that have become more prominent in contemporary life. Yet only here and there, and very briefly, has the subject of race been treated in these tales.

Well-Known Book

Well here we have LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, which after all, was a well-known book and movie that had a great deal to do with race - not the Negro race, perhaps, but the romance of a woman of the East and a man of the West.

Early episodes of LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING indicated that the standard soap opera format is almost blotting out the original story. But - and it is a big "but" - we do have the fact that the central character of the CBS-TV soaper, and the chief link to the original tale, is a girl named Nancy Hsueh, who gets things rolling in the drama by arriving from Hong Kong to study medicine in San Francisco.

In this updated version of the book and movie, Miss Hsueh portrays a girl named Mia, who, in the story, is the daughter of Han Suyin and an American war correspondent.

Sponsor's Rejection

The sensitivity of daytime soap opera sponsors in the past to anything eyebrow-raising is well known. In my files I have a clipping from a show business trade paper of May, 1965, in which a major soap opera creator is reported as being unhappy over a sponsor's rejection of "significant Negro portrayals."

Now it is two years later, and things really are still quite different in daytime programming than they are on prime time video shows. But LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING may be, in its own small way, an indication of changing times and future happenings