New Soap "Passions" Hits The Airwaves

By Bob Thomas

LOS ANGELES -- Does the world need another soap opera? NBC apparently thinks so and the network is premiering a new soaper with the appropriate title of Passions.

You can't imagine what goes on in the seemingly ideal community of Harmony, Me. You can find out by tuning in to NBC or CTV weekdays, starting today, at 2 p.m.

Passions replaces Another World, which ran out of gas after 35 years.

NBC is sinking millions into the new starter, which has already shot locations and background scenes in Paris, France; Camden, Me., and Oxnard, Calif., just up the coast from Malibu.

But most of the drama is produced at Studio City's CBS Studio Centre, onetime home of Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other classics.

James Reilly, the soap guru who pushed Days of Our Lives to the top of the ratings with his outrageous plots, applied his talents to Passions. He has called the show Peyton Place meets Dark Shadows meets The X-Files.

At Studio Centre, Passions occupies Stages 4 and 5, which are crammed with sets -- a carnival, a hospital office and sick room, a cafe, a wooded area, an apartment, plus the town's leading family's mansion, including the kitchen, a room missing from soap operas in recent years.

The other day the company was shooting a scene in which actor Dana Sparks raced frantically through woods made spooky by injections of fog-simulating smoke.

"Paul, where are you?" Sparks cried, stumbling through the greenery.

The scene was captured quickly by three cameras, eliminating the need to reshoot from different angles. Time is precious on soap operas, which film at the rate of five one-hour dramas per week.

Of the cast of 22, two are carrying on family legacies: Juliet Mills, daughter of John Mills and sister of Hayley; and Liza Huber, daughter of Susan Lucci, Emmy daytime winner this year for All My Children.

Mills, 57, first came to films as a 10-month-old in In Which We Serve, the wartime flag-waver by Noel Coward, who was her godfather. She has spent the last few decades in the U.S.

In the new series, she plays Tabitha Lennox -- "everybody's next-door neighbour."

"She seems to be one thing and is quite another," Mills said of her character. "She seems to be the sweet little Tabitha, next door baking cookies; underneath she's a bit of a nightmare, practising sorcery and meddling in everybody else's affairs. The thing that I love about it is she's so awful she's funny."

Soaps are tough on the actors because they need to learn a huge number of lines each week. How do actors cope?

"Well, you give up drinking to start with," said Mills. "It's the total focus of my time at the moment. Even when I'm not at the studio, I'm at home studying the work for the week over and over. It's the only way I've been able to learn lines: Cram them in."