![]() #Soap opera series#Karr was a cop and defense attorney in the series but most memorable was his role as prosecuting attorney for Monticello. The character was introduced along with the show and stayed on until the final episode, in which he is seen, in a kind of video montage, coordinating response to a murder. #Soap opera tv#(With cable TV reruns that continue to this day, there’s no question the Mason series has had far more lasting cultural impact than “Edge.”)Īnd while “Edge” had plenty of characters vying for prominent storylines, its top role was that of a crimebuster: Karr. The weekly, primetime series “Perry Mason” began airing on CBS in 1957. The TV series was instead built around attorney Mike Karr, who initially was played by actor John Larkin, who had played Mason on the radio series. But Gardner reportedly didn’t want his protagonist to be featured in a five-day-a-week daytime TV drama and didn’t want Mason to be saddled with a romantic partner, so Vendig retooled the show that became “Edge.” “Edge” was a TV original and was from Procter & Gamble Productions, the TV-producing arm of the maker of Tide soap and dozens of other household goods.Ĭreated in 1956 by Irving Vendig, a writer on the “Perry Mason” radio show, “Edge” was supposed to be a daytime drama based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous defense attorney. ![]() ![]() Their genre carried the name “soap operas” because they were often sponsored by – and even produced by – companies that made household products, particularly cleaning products. When “Edge” premiered on CBS in April 1956, a lot of TV soap operas were carryovers from radio or new variations on tried-and-true radio soaps. I clicked on it to discover it was my own pop culture blog in a post from 2013 that I’d completely forgotten about.) (By the way, I was chagrinned during the research process for this piece to find an online site with an intriguing photo of a couple of my favorite characters. But before its swan song – and it ended on a cliffhanger involving a killer, of course – “Edge,” as its fans call it, ran for nearly 30 years on two different networks. It’s not hard to guess why: The show has been off the air since 1984. The remaining soaps don’t have nearly the audience they had decades ago, mostly because the supposed target audience – housewives who bought the household products featured in each show’s commercials – is largely non-existent: Women are no longer the cliché stay-at-home moms they once might have been (but never really were), and it’s safe to say that women and men who stay home now are working or otherwise too busy to park themselves in front of a TV all day to catch the latest incremental installment of their “stories.”īut among soap operas, “The Edge of Night” – simply “Edge of Night” in its final few years – might be particularly east to forget. ![]() Soap operas are probably considered a dying art form today. While most soaps dabbled in murder and sensational courtroom trials, “The Edge of Night” was more of a dabbler in traditional soap tropes but specialized in noirish tales of murder and madness. Two soaps quickly became favorites of mine: “Dark Shadows,” the Dan Curtis-produced supernatural soap that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971 and introduced vampire Barnabas Collins to the world, and “The Edge of Night,” a long-running soap that did what few other soaps ever did. She was partial to the shows on NBC, like “Days of Our Lives” and “Another World.” When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, on days I was out of school and during summer vacation, I’d sometimes be around the house and I’d check out some of the soap operas – daytime dramas, as they were also known – my mom watched. ![]()
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