Television: Edgeville, U.S.A.

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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 protégée 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.