by
Deborah Nam-Krane
I’ve got a confession to make: I grew up
watching Trashy Television. I’ve got another confession to make: I think it
influenced what I write - but I don’t think that’s necessarily
something to be ashamed of. I’m not the first person to say that even low art
can be instructive, and frankly by the standards we have today, much of what we
considered trash in the Seventies and Eighties would be critically acclaimed
today.
Here’s what I learned:
Dallas
Nothing is as much of a game-changer as a high
stakes storyline. “Who Shot JR Ewing?” picked Dallas up from a middling show
that many said was in danger of being canceled to one that everyone and their
grandmother had to watch. Their strategy worked for two reasons: first, their
lead was a compelling but a frequently bad character; second and almost as a
corollary, almost everyone on the show, with the exception of his sainted mother, had a reason to want him dead or at least out of commission.
That story also worked because for the next
several years it continued to reverberate. The would-be murderer was really his
sister-in-law Kristen, but she escaped punishment because she was pregnant with
his child. Those revelations further poisoned the marriage between JR and Sue
Ellen, and years later it would come back to complicate the lives of his
brother Bobby and his wife Pam- which is exactly what you’d expect from a toxic
family secret.
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| J.R. and Sue Ellen Ewing- the perfect couple from Hell |
Dynasty
There was so much here. The Carringtons were
as wealthy as the Ewings, but they were more glamorous and ran with a slightly
more international crowd. The family dynamic was made for drama- the wealthy
divorced patriarch Blake marries his former secretary Krystal, who had just
ended an affair with Matthew, one of his other employees after she discovered
he was married, and his spoiled daughter Fallon can’t stand her but is devoted
to her gay brother Stephen (a breakthrough character for the Eighties)- but it
wasn’t until the second season that it took off. Why? Because Blake’s ex-wife Alexis
walked into a courtroom to give damaging information about Blake and spent the
rest of the show warring with Krystal for Blake’s affections while building her
own empire. There’s a lot to be said about Joan Collins’ performance as Alexis
Carrington Colby, and nuanced isn’t one of them, but at the time it was a
breath of fresh air to see an older female character who didn’t want to be a
matriarch but wanted to be just as powerful as the men in her life.
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| Alexis Carrington, showing it's possible to be beautiful, glamorous and powerful after the age of 30 |
