Rituals

Much as Santa Barbara would try to do but in a tongue-in-cheek way, Rituals sought to be overly serious, not too campy, but it just couldn't find anything original, a problem that plagues numerous soaps.

The show sought to ride on the names it could get on the show (again, much like Santa Barbara) with the likes of Tina Louise, Joann Pflug (they played the same character), George Lazenby, Greg Mullavey and then soap icons like Kin Shriner.

Monte Markham was a seventies staple (perhaps best known as a kidnapper in Airport '77), but the show had soap actress Christina Jones at the center of the show.

She was Markham's wife, Christina Robertson. Markham was Carter Robinson.

Then there was the rich Chapin family, with grown kids named Brady and Taylor. Did no one have a first name for a first name in this place? Carter was at odds with the Chapin family.

Sharon Farrell was good for laughs and was put to much better use on the YOung and the Restless as Tricia Cast's mother.

But by far the strangest thing was the casting with young actresses with piercing eyes, in the case of Brady Chapin, a young moppet haired fellow, whose gaze was clearly supposed to overwhelm the viewers.

When none of these worked, characters would be recast with livelier specimens.

But no longer did they have that gaze! The show would actually do a contest.

"There will be a murder. If you can solve the victim, the motive and the killer, you will win a prize!" Now how on Earth was someone supposed to solve that? I guess the characters went around yelling at each other.

In the end, Greg Mullavey, who was the working class dad, was offed.

Toward the end, Carter Robinson would learn he was actually the illegitimate son of Poppa Chapin, making himself a Chapin, half-brother to Taylor and Brady.

And so the show tanked.

It actually had a conclusion. Characters would marry and run away, Kin Shriner rode off on his motorbike, someone was shot and for the life of me, I can't recall who.

May have been Peter Haskell.

But the shootist was Christina. She in turn would become a nun and tend to a wheelchair-bound Carter.

In the end, it offered nothing, amounted to nothing and resulted in the same.

Silly soap but kind of fun. I barely remember the plot but I DO remember Jo Ann Pflug being very good as an evil woman. George Lazenby was fun as was Greg Mullavy. The rest of the cast was adequate. The worst actor on the show was easily Kevin Spirtas. Ironically he was the best LOOKING actor too. It had the usual plots dealing with sex, murder, rape etc etc. It was no better and no worse than any other soap on the air. However there were multiple cast changes throughout the whole two seasons it was on. Figuring out who played who got annoying and confusing. When Pflug left, the show basically fell apart. I watched up until she left then I stopped. Not a bad soap but no different than the tons of others already on the air.