The first three seasons were great --- and then they fired the producer

The first three years of FALCON CREST were actually rather good: a gently gothic soap with a sense of humor, a good sense of place -- geographically and psychologically, a good cast, somewhat clever plotting, a terrific theme song by Bill Conti, etc...

The freshman season began as something of a semi-serial, still a bit episodic, and by the end of that introductory year, CREST had really come into its own, becoming an intriguing show which existed within its own alternative-reality kind of zone.

Season 2 and 3 were good "soap" and the show seemed to know pretty much exactly what it was doing. No, it wasn't as character-based and intelligent as KNOTS LANDING, nor as majestically steeped in its own mythology as DALLAS, nor as pretentious and vapid as once-promising DYNASTY had quickly become. But early FALCON CREST had its own, fairly strong identity, and it worked.

And the ratings were good -- a Top 10 show (its American timeslot after DALLAS on Friday nights certainly didn't hurt).

But in 1984, at the close of its third season, something odd happened -- especially for a series doing so well: the show-runner, producer Robert McCullough, was fired (as was his key writing staff, apparently). While it's not unusual for producers and writers to get fired, the circumstances surrounding his firing seemed strange, and seemed even stranger when one listened to the brass's explanation for it... Someone contrived an apparently-untrue gay sex scandal to explain the firings (back when such things were more shocking) and then later amended the explanation to say the rating had dropped and that that had facilitated the firings (except that the ratings were actually at a peak).

McCullough himself would later explain that a Lorimar executive had it out for him, and that the show's executive producer, Earl Hamner, hated to take on studio politics and McCullough's removal was the result. (The top producers, Hmaner and Michael Filerman, liked McCullough's work, but a senior executive at Lorimar didn't or didn't care about that and simply wanted McCullough gone).

Sometimes arrogant executives who have nothing to do but drink their lunches can be amazingly blind about how a hit show happens -- they think as long as you have the brand name title and a key star, the writers and producers don't matter and the show will just make itself.

FALCON CREST proved that just isn't true. The fourth season, with McCullough newly gone, tried to maintain what the show had built up until that point, but it was hit-and-miss at best. Then, two-thirds of the way thru Season 4, a CBS network executive demanded that year's "distasteful" nazi plotline be dropped immediately, leaving the show to paste together a few side stories and ride out the remaining 10 episodes of the season. And you can totally tell this has happened.

To me, FC never recovered from that point forward. (And the move to de-gothicize the series and give it the '80s pastel look of competing, lower-rated shows didn't help).

Season 5 (Hamner's last year) was drab and cluttered, actor Ken Olin removing the show from his resume out of embarrassment.

Season 6 saw Jeff Freilich take over the show, and it briefly looked like it would be a bit of a renaissance for FALCON CREST, but as the season closes, it begins to go too "camp". By Season 7, the show becomes so frenetic and so shlocky and so cheesy and all set to a tacky, synthesized electronic score, it's hard believe this crap was once a good program a few years earlier.

Lorimar-Telepictures' 1986 decision to switch to a new editing-on-video process which made their shows look as if they'd been shot on cellophane only complicated the spiral.

Ratings dropping badly, CBS calls Mr. Filerman and says "fix it!", so they bring in new producers for Season 8, but the series has been so off track for so long, they don't seem to know how to get back into the groove. So it's just boring -- no longer a joke (or too-jokey) but dull. Named "most ruined show" by a popular soap periodical, new producers yet again were brought in for Season 9, and while the writing gets a tad better, it just no longer feels like FALCON CREST anymore.

Did this have to happen? Does this have to happen??

Camille Marchetta, a writer-producer for early DALLAS, mid-DYNASTY, and later FALCON CREST, once observed that, "a hit show can spin around and around a central point, a producer, a star, whatever, only for so long, held together in that force field. But despite hard work and good luck, its elements will always eventually spin apart."

Undoubtedly, that's true -- series television, especially American television, is infamous for eating up talent and spewing it out at an alarming rate, with hit shows allowed to run several years longer than they should despite an abject crash in quality. But the kind of frivolous self-sabotage that FALCON CREST underwent seemed particularly egregious and unwarranted. (And if they hadn't had their cushy post-DALLAS timeslot, they would have been cancelled well-before 1990).

But then, the wealth-based nighttime soap genre of the '80s, then the hottest shows on TV, died an unusually and inexplicably grisly death across the board. In the first half of the '80s, these series were essentially semi-legit character dramas (with some splashes of glamour and outrageousness tossed in for fun) and they totally worked. All eyes were on them. But by the last half of the '80s, they slipped into a too-campy, trying-to-top-themselves incompetence where bad kitsch became the rule and they became as disposable as snobbish critics had once-unfairly dismissed them as being.

The shift was a bit of a shock to the viewers who then began tuning out in droves. (Except for KNOTS LANDING which maintained quality until the end of the decade). And the genre was replaced in the '90s by the youth-based nighttime soaps like 90210 and MELROSE PLACE.

But if one reviews S1 thru S3 of FALCON CREST, or S3 & S6 & S7 of DALLAS, or S1 & S2 (or S9) of DYNASTY, it's hard to believe these programs wound up where they did: just awful. And awful with a sense of conviction.

It's almost painful.

One can only wonder what might have happened with FALCON CREST had McCullough not been removed from the show over workplace politics by an aloof and high-handed member of the brass.

But there are many ways to kill a show.


--
LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA