Sex and Sanctimony.(Venezuelan soap opera combines melodrama with social conscience)

In his flowered shirt and snowy beard, Manoel Carlos could have stepped off a tropical-cruise ship. Round and tanned, he looks as placid as Buddha. But it's only an illusion. For months now, Brazil's top television writer has been cooped up in his eighth-floor Rio de Janeiro apartment, a prisoner of his own imagination--and the desires of 50 million nightly viewers. Carlos is the 70-year-old author of "Mulheres Apaixonadas" ("Women in Love"), the latest sensation on Brazilian television. Six nights a week, one in every four Brazilians sits riveted to this steamy tableau of passion, folly and betrayal. Too bad for the creator, whose wife and 11-year-old son have just set off for Bora Bora. "I'd give anything to be with them," he says. "But I've got 70 chapters to go."

If it were up to viewers, he'd have 50,000 more. In the United States, where soap operas were born, the programs were always frivolous fare. But Latin America is different. As with black beans or the bikini, no other region of the world has made so much of so little. Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina have all made lavish telenovelas. But it took Brazil's giant TV Globo to turn soaps into a precision industry. More than 80 nations now air Brazilian novelas. And at home, Globo's novelas reign at prime time.

None more so than "Women in Love," which has become one of the highest draws in Globo's 38-year history. But what makes this soap different is its chaotic mixture of the solemn and the silly. Every chapter is a stew of sex, bathos and pathos, with heaps of buttoned-up political correctness stirred in. Torrid bedroom scenes and domestic squabbles mingle randomly with rank preachifying to drink wisely and be kind to the elderly. Globo, fittingly, calls this "social merchandising": pitching good behavior like detergent. Network officials speak proudly of the kudos they've won (from UNICEF and the Pan American Health Organization) for novelas that champion such noble causes as condom use and breast-feeding.

Globo was one of the first networks to marry melodrama with a social conscience. The network has long aired story lines dealing with subjects considered taboo, such as prostitution, homosexuality and interracial relationships. But now Globo has gone even further, ...