To come in cold and watch for the first time an episode of this show--which has been on the air since the spring of 1897--is an experience which can only be compared to going back for a weekend to a class reunion at your old school and getting not only the wrong weekend and class but also the wrong school. In other words, if you haven't got a score card, a cast of characters, and an English-speaking guide thoroughly versed in the intricacies of who's already done what to whom and why, you won't have a clue as to what's going on in The Edge of Night. Above all, although you will know whom to root against (there's always one real horror, a woman everybody, now matter how terrible, can feel better than), you won't for the life you know whom to root for . Our suggestion is to root for the commercials. The first day we saw the show, we had a soap bar that made us feel cleaner, a detergent that made water softer, and a bathroom bowl that was self-cleaning. They were terrific--and with all that dirt around, they had to be.

How do even regular fans, you may well ask, follow the story? They must have to miss certain episodes. The answer is simple. If a regular viewer cannot be there, another viewer takes over and the plot is handed down from mother to daughter unto the fourth generation. Furthermore, a giant whammy is put on all these people, which apparently enables them to take so much misery on the screen that no matter what their troubles in real life, these seem, after an afternoon at the show, like a day at the races. Seeing The Edge of Night for the first time, however, is something else again. You have just one urge... to call the cops.

In the first couple of episodes we saw, a little girl who is suffering from autism and aphasia as a result of an automobile accident (which may well not have been an accident at all, but planned by a loan-shark syndicate, and which, in any case, took the lives of her father and sister) has just run away from her mother, who is preparing a dinner party at which she plans to murder one of the guests. The mother is reciting the Macbeth dagger soliloquy and is about to stab her victim when she is interrupted by the appearnace of a lawyer whom she tries to poison, and then, just as he is about to drink his drink, he too is interrupted by. . . do you really want more? Of course, you don't. Just go quietly with that nice man in the white suit.

Some weeks ago in a TV GUIDE article, soap author James Lipton declared that the reason soap operas are so popular is that they are real--that in Mission Impossible , for example, you know that the IM Force will all get back safely, but in soap operas you have no such assurance. In soap operas, he said, when heroes and heroines get sick, they may just die--and the viewer knows it. We agree with every word of this. The only thing we don't understand is why other television shows die, while soap operas, no matter how sick they are, don't.

Finally, a word about the writing. The word is no .

[This article first appeared in TV GUIDE April 25, 1970.]