TV: Evening Soap Opera on ABC. Peyton Place Returns in Cleaner Version By Jack Gould September 16, 1964 Allison, Constance, Betty, Mike Rossi, Rodney, Catherine, and Leslie, seven frustrations with but a single thought, ushered in a new television era last night, soap opera in the evening. The celebrated residents of Peyton Place came to the home screen under the nervous auspices of the American Broadcast Company, which is serializing their expectations and subsequent anxieties at 9:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays. If all goes well the network may add Wednesdays. The sanitized derivation from the late Grace Metalious's novel will undoubtedly be greeted with understandable dismay by some viewers, who will wonder where TV will descend next. If so, it will just go to show that they don't know what's been going on. By the present, if little publicized, standards of daytime soap opera, Peyton Place is highly conventional. In purchasing the rights to Peyton Place, the ABC network acquired at one effortless stroke the basic need of a soap--a setting of dark unpleasantness that is the approved milieu for upstairs brinksmanship. But where Paul Monash, the executive producer of the TV serial, encountered instant difficulties was in the awesome task of exposition. Since he paid for all the liaisons, he apparently felt he had to use them. Two by two everybody goes up to the volcano's edge only to be left there while Mr. Monash trudges back to the waiting queue and brings on the next couple. For evening wear, a soap should unroll its passions more leisurely, not on a yo-yo. The première was almost a satire of soaps. It would be nice to think that Peyton Place will perish of its opening night boredom, and conceivably it could. But the odds are not encouraging. The program has nowhere to go in coming weeks but toward more contemplated considerations of the individual dilemmas of the distraught New Englanders. Then will come the soap opera's hypnotic appeal of sharing in intimate close-up the ordeal of others coping with temptation and surrender. There is no greater box office than life on the verge. Premiere of Serial Is Almost a Satire In its introductory sequence, Peyton Place was fairly skillful in creating the reckless mood of ominous restlessness designed to last until the next installment. What remains to be seen is whether the viewer will sit on his cliff from Thursday night until the following Tuesday, which is a long time to wait, and see whether the protagonists did or didn't. As Allison, Mia Farrow is notably effective in suggesting the hesitant girl on the threshold of womanhood. Dorothy Malone, playing Constance, was impressive as the mother with her residue of unspent affection. Distaff viewers may have an entirely different opinion, but most of the TV men in Peyton Place have the dullness that goes with one-track minds. The settings and camera work were first-class. The disquieting aspect of the evening presentation of Peyton Place, of course, is to introduce the youthful nighttime audience to all the Metalious sordidness, to make a household attraction of love and romance bereft of the slightest redeeming trace of beauty, to dwell on a community that never knows the exhilaration of wholesome laughter. It is hard to down the thought that something else could have been chosen to fill an hour of nighttime TV. But it might be well to note that it was the book publishing industry that first unloosed the blight of Peyton Place and that untold millions of adults obtained copies of the book in fine stores and libraries so they could cluck at their disapproval with personal authority. If self-appointed censors scream out against ABC, it would be interesting to learn if they looked only at their picture tubes or also in their mirrors. Courtesy of Ryan HOME