Reviewing Season 1
I finally broke down and got the FALCON CREST Season 1 DVD.
I hadn't seen the show in quite a while, so a lot of it I frankly didn't remember.
It's slower, of course, and less serialized than it would become by the next season.
The dialogue in the early episodes is kind of B-movie-ish, with the actors assigned the daunting job of Making It Work -- which they mostly manage to do; certainly the writers don't yet seem to know quite what they're trying to achieve, sometimes not even with a single scene.
But the quiet, gothic mood is good, if not very intense. And the locations are as gorgeous as I had remembered, not yet ruined by that post-1986 computerized film-to-video post-production process blur. (If only this show had grown into looking like A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, that old Keanu flick, instead of LORIMAR'S LACK OF RESOLUTION). But the early seasons still look vivid.
Although the DVD prints are mediocre, Warners obviously utilizing any old broadcast print they could find which wasn't too deteriorated.
It also feels very "'70s" (in a good way). In fact, it feels just slightly like Season 1 of DYNASTY in tone, in part because of the use of Bill Conti's theme and DYNASTY composers like Peter Meyers. (An early comparative reference to "The Waltons" is a bit shameless, since this show is created and produced by the same team).
Troubled Emma's belfry bedroom existence is fun, Julia wasn't nuts yet, Chase is laughably bombastic in a Season 1 way he never quite was again (Chase and Maggie's dueling 24/7 explosiveness/exasperation remains as funny as I'd remembered, their fights will always seem contrived and unnecessary, the constant belittling and degradation of the couple's relationship which shouldn't have happened), they're still trying to convince us that Maggie was a frustrated NYC writer, Douglas Channing is still alive, Vicky is far less irritating than I'd recalled, and Melissa Agretti does not arrive on the scene until the latter part of the season. I remember kind of liking Mario and the underclass side story, and Cole now looks to me like an angry lesbian.
And I've convinced myself that Lance harbors shameful feelings for an oblivious Cole which feed his resentment; 30 years later, that subtext seems to work. (Lance, while he seemed well-cast but despicably smarmy years ago, now comes off to me as more innocent and vulnerable --- which is kind of funny today).
If only FALCON CREST had maintained this less-is-more feel as the years wore on, and all the '80s nighttime soaps (except KNOTS) spiraled into tacky, pointless, drunken hyperbolic excess unstoppably for no apparent reason at all.
It's funny how this show gets by on actors and location-location-location: the scripts really are, at this point, very paint-by-numbers with the plotting deceptively stronger than the dialogue. It's all very 1978/79 (only it's 1981/82) but it's to the show's credit -- and the cast's credit -- that we develop a very strong sense so early on of the characters' issues and motivations and, to a degree, their relationships.
Watching the S1 DVD, I can't help thinking of Blake's and Alexis' visit to Italy, filmed within a week or two of Angela and Douglas Channing's similar trip: the mansion set masquerading as their Rome hotel room, the same panoramic footage used for an establishing shot, the bouquet of John Saxon wafting from around the corner... Was the Carrington saga peeking over the fence in the fall of '81?
Furthermore, both Season 1 of FALCON CREST and DYNASTY end in two episodes focusing on climactic court cases -- cases which hinge on the testimony of the shows' respective resident nut jobs -- revealing the secrets of deaths that occurred on-screen earlier in the year that we already know all the details about. (It's a testament to FALCON CREST that the viewers are nudged into convincing themselves that there is some additional mystery to uncover about Jason Gioberti's demise, when -- y'know -- there isn't).
And, yes, those locations... DYNASTY never had much of a sense of geographic (or psychological) place after its own Season 2, a lacking which arose in part from the fact that essentially no Colorado shooting occurred at all. DALLAS, naturally, filmed for several weeks each summer in Texas, so it had a much stronger locational authenticity to it, with its dialogue enhancing the Lone Star mythology in the viewers' minds... But FALCON CREST may have been the strongest in this area, at least in the beginning: one generally buys the isolated, lush pastoral setting. And, unlike Southfork or the Carrington Mansion (try as they might), the big house at Falcon Crest really is a House of Secrets, the gently gothic Hush... Hush, Sweet Chardonnay flavor of the show coming off effectively because the earthy organics of the vintner business and bucolic lifestyle are still presented organically.
In other words, the series is not yet being over-produced (as it would be once Earl Hamner leaves the show in '86, and probably shortly before). It really does feel like a slightly-demented THE WALTONS.
I'm not sure FALCON CREST ever entirely attained the creepy coziness it seemed to be initially aiming for, but the effort is appreciated... If only the show had been secure enough to have completely accepted and embraced this as its identity -- other than the way it did in its later campy fashion when Apollo (the bird) was replaced by Apollonia (the bimbo).
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LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA