Edgeville, U.S.A.

Monticello is an average U.S. city, populated by people of average earnings, moderate IQ, and substandard life expectancy, but one where life is lived on a hyped-up emotional level that would compare favorably with Leopoldville or Elsinore. Crime, litigation, fraud, false arrest, domestic tragedy and incurable disease are commoner than the common cold. In fact, as Keats said of London, Hell is a city much like Monticello.

The place cannot be found in the gazetteer (those who confuse it with Thomas Jefferson's home will be very confused indeed), but it can be visited five days a week at 4:30 p.m. E.S.T. on CBS. The network and the ad agency of Benton & Bowles, which hold joint fief over Monticello's doom-prone citizens, regard it with loyal affection: it is the mythical locale of TV's most merciless soap opera. The Edge of Night, the greatest hypnotic to appear since the video tube nudged the U.S. housewife away from radio's Stella Dallas.

Under the Scalpel. Edge is the kind of program that TV critics automatically ignore, but it reveals more about U.S. TV--and is hardly worse--than what currently passes for serious video drama. With plots more intricately involuted than anything in Dickens or Trollope. and with up to two dozen actors enmeshed in a plot spread over eight months to a year, the live, half-hour show in effect presents an annual play in 250 acts. In outline, the soaper as reborn on TV is not too different from the old radio formula, but video has added a whole new set of visual symbols--for instance, the ferocious grille-work of a noncurrent Buick under which Monticello's noble and innocent Sara Karr lay unconscious last month.

Over her corpse, her husband Mike, a cop turned lawyer, writhed in a manner to make Orson Welles's Macbeth or Olivier's Heathcliffe seem studies in understatement. Only a few days before, it had been revealed that little Laurie Ann. the Karrs' tot, was suffering from a hitherto unknown disease called paranucleosis, and couid be snatched from death only by miracle brain surgery. Alas, the master surgeon had hung up his trephining kit; his nerves had been shattered since his own daughter died under his scalpel.

On top of all that, the Karr protegee and family friend, Judith Marceau, a beautiful social worker, is currently facing a charge of murder (false, naturally) for the killing by paper knife of her handsome, brilliant husband-of-one-hour, Victor Carlson, of the socially eminent Monticello Carlsons. As the loyal viewer of Edge well knows, the marriage was performed by a fake J.P., the bogus rite having been staged by Carlson himself, a racketeer with a clipped, cultured accent and a Byronic lip twist, who quoted Nietzsche, drank sherry and drove caddish foreign cars. About the only nice thing about this suave swine was that he would occasionally, in a contemptuous Freudian way, massage the nape of his socialite mother's neck with slender, manicured hands. Edge really goes for hands--only last year it disposed of a sadistic multiple strangler called Big Frank, who had an enormous pair of them. For his services to soap, Big Frank's hands were cast in plaster as if they were Stokowski's.

Edge deals with the basic stuff of drama --death, love, betrayal, loyalty and honor. But the Shakespearean richness of plot and prodigality with blood and tears is unmatched by a corresponding richness of language. The actors measure out their lives in coffee breaks. Cigarettes, coffee and apple pie (how eaten or refused) and tone of voice, rather than choice of words, become the idiom in which tragedy must express itself. In this. Edge is perhaps closer to the naturalistic convention than most prestigious art forms; the common man, after all, faces the crises of life with a First Reader vocabulary no more elaborate than the Basic English of Edge. Every woman viewer knows what is meant when Mike Karr, confronted by the extremes of human agony--dying wife and doomed child--cries to the heavens: "Good God, I don't want a cup of coffee. Does it mean I'm breaking down?"

Existential Despair. The extraordinary thing about Monticello is its ordinariness. The habitual viewer knows that it has industry, because Winston Grimsley, a fuddy financier, is the grey eminence of these modest family fortunes. It has an airport --a villain once took off and fell from a plane whose flight originated in Monticello. It also has a sewer system known to those who saw two villains trapped in it for many a long mortal episode. It has a symphony orchestra--a villainess has set up an alibi at one performance. Only one human element, so essential to the life of man elsewhere in the U.S., is missing. No one in Edgeville--perhaps because it is designed for the serious or soap-buying sex --has a sense of humor.

Sometimes, the show's writers are tempted to translate this kind of homely existential despair into more ringing language --but only for the benefit of the actors.

A recent script instructed one character to "speak out of his private Gethsemane."

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