Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City
ABC-TV, Sundays
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Would you give up your Sunday movie for a soap? Next time the ratings are published it will be interesting to find out how many do, because Tales of the City is as sudsy as any midafternoon weekday melodrama.
There's love and lust aplenty. "So too go the days of our own lives", you would think, given half the chance. But this one has a twist.
Instead of just boy meets girl (or power dressing with immaculate coiffure), the tales here are boy meets boy, boy loses boy, girl meets girl and other such variations of desire. The relationships in Tales of the City are freely and passionately entered regardless of gender. Being gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight is OK in this nostalgic recreation of San Francisco in the 1970s. Whatever the characters may choose to do in bed with one another is merely part of the business of relating. Here, homosexual is an adjective, not a person.
In this series it is accepted that people get horny as part of going about their everyday business. So you go and pick up someone by cruising a range of venues — laundromat, roller skating rink, supermarket, steam bath etc — and bed them when you get home.
But this is not a fuck feast. The intertwining lives coincidentally overlap because of human passion as much for caring as for sex.
The major connection for these various San Francisco lives is a rambling block of flats run by the mysterious matriarch, Anna Madrigal (played by Olympia Dukakis). She may be doing it too — just like her youthful tenants — but her affair with a dying businessman is threatened by a secret.
And that is what soaps are made of. What is Madrigal's secret? Will Michael find Mr Right? Does Dede have an abortion? Tune in next week and more will be revealed.
I'm hooked. Armistead Maupin's characters are total charmers. They will live in your mind well past Monday. Despite the rages and passions of their personal lives, you cannot help but care about them. He forces you to accept them as they are. If only the rest of the world were so considerate.
I understand that further adaptations of Maupin's Tales are pending. What started as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle and was later published in book form, seems ideal fodder for addictive television. This British production may move slowly, but its quietness and visual austerity focus character by paring the storyline down to essential nuances. With the occasional guest spot of such talent as Rod Steiger and Karen Black, it makes for unusual television. Watch it and be addicted.