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The Show's History
March 26, 1982 - March 20, 1987
By Gerard J. Waggett

 

         

  In January of 1981 former movie star Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as President of the United States. Fourteen months later CBS would try to capitalize on the public’s fascination with the newly reglamorized Washington, D.C., by launching the political soap opera Capitol. To make room for this new series, CBS cancelled its longest-running soap opera Search for Tomorrow, which it deemed too old-fashioned. The network wanted a daytime show that could bring in the audience watching the more fashion-conscious primetime serials, namely Dynasty and Dallas, which at the time were the two hottest shows on TV. Toward that end, John Conboy, who had glamourized daytime during the ’70s as executive producer on The Young and the Restless, was hired to work his magic on Capitol. CBS could not have given Capitol a better timeslot for its premiere. The primetime soap Falcon Crest was preempted so that a special one-hour episode of Capitol could air immediately after the number one ranked Dallas, marking the first time that a daytime soap opera had debuted in primetime. Ratings for the show’s first week in its daytime timeslot - 2:30, right between As the World Turns and Guiding Light - averaged 5.8, the highest any soap had ever pulled in during its premiere week. Unfortunately, the show’s ratings would never climb much higher than that. They peaked at 6.4  two years later, then began a sharp decline.

 

Although the series was titled Capitol, much of the action took place in the fictional suburb of Jeffersonia. In the beginning, two core families dominated the show, the Cleggs and the McCandlesses. The long-running feud between them dated back to the 1950s when - in an inspired use of real-life political history - Myrna Clegg (Carolyn Jones, later Marla Adams and Marj Dusay) had branded Clarissa McCandless’s (Constance Towers) father Judson Tyler (Rory Calhoun) a communist, thereby ruining his political career. Despite the fascinating back history, the show followed the conventional Romeo and Juliet route with the family feud storyline: Mryna’s daughter Julie (Kimberly Beck, later Catherine Hickland) fell in love with Clarissa’s son Tyler (David Mason-Daniels, later Dane Witherspoon). Although Stephen and Elinor Karpf had created Capitol, they were replaced as headwriters a few months into the show’s run. Replacing them was another husband and wife team, Joyce and John William Corrington, who, among their varied credits, had created Texas. The Corringtons saw the appeal of Capitol as being not merely the elaborate wardrobe and homes, but the public’s lust for political scandal. They refocused on the character of congressman and presidential hopeful Trey Clegg, pairing him up with a former prostitute by the name of Shelley Granger - the sort of political/sexual scandal that makes national headlines.

 

      

The Corringtons did not stay with the show long. They left to work on One Life to Live, the second half of which competed with Capitol for the 2:30 - 3:00 timeslot. Thus began an interchange of headwriters between the two shows. The Corringtons were replaced on Capitol by former One Life to Live headwriter Peggy 0’Shea, who eventually returned to ABC to replace the Corringtons. Taking over for 0’Shea at Capitol was Henry Slesar, who also had worked as a headwriter on One Life to Live. During Capitol’s final year, actor-turned-writer Jim Lipton was writing the show. During Lipton’s reign, the character of Prince Ali (Peter Lochran) from the mythic war-torn country of Baracq was brought on as a love interest for newscaster Sloane Denning (Debrah Farentino). It was probably no coincidence that less than a year before Prince Ali was introduced, Dynasty had scored high ratings with a royal wedding between its young heroine and the prince of a mythic country. To facilitate the romance between Prince Ali and Sloane, Capitol devoted an entire episode to the pair. Their episode-long love scene in a cabin was picked by Soap Opera Digest as the year’s most romantic scene.
 

 
 Two other storylines of note took place during this time. Ex-prostitute Shelly Granger, now using the name Kelly Harper, was hooked on drugs by the villainous D.J. Phillips (Grant Aleksander). Jess Walton, who’d taken over the role of Kelly, was widely praised for her performance as an addict, and later went public about her own real-life battle with drugs and alcohol. In another case of art imitating life, Todd Curtis, who played playboy Jordy Clegg, was severely disfigured in a car accident. Rather than take time off from work, Curtis asked the producers to let him recover onscreen. So Jordy Clegg was written into a car accident similar to the one in which Curtis had been involved. During the storyline, the make-up people added fake scars and scrapes to Curtis’s face for dramatic effect.

Between 1985 and 1986 Capitol’s ratings fell from 5.8 to 5.l. CBS cancelled the show to make room for a new soap by The Young and the Restless creator Bill Bell. The decision was somehow fitting. Search for Tomorrow had been dumped for the more glamorous Capitol, which in turn was being dumped for the even more glamorous The Bold und the Beautiful. Rather than tying the remaining plot twists together, Capitol ended with a cliff-hanger. Following Prince Ali’s 'death', Sloane Denning had been sentenced to death in Baracq, and in the last scene faced a firing squad. The show ended with the words, ”Ready, aim...” It was the exact same cliffhanger that the primetime serial sitcom Soap had used to end its final episode some six years before.

GERARD J. WAGGETT

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