On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television ANOTHER DYNASTY BY MARVIN KITMAN Boob-tube history was made in November the night the Carringtons of Denver met the Colbys of Los Angeles in a special two-hour run-on of Dynasty...
...The scene was appalling...
...The Colbys are richer...
...The largest all-star cast in the history of series television," they said...
...One sleeve, belonging to Alexis, was severely ripped...
...Finally they came face-to-face, and I wondered: Wouldn't he notice her increased bustline...
...Fortunately, I don't have that problem...
...But she was too busy trying to talk her present husband, Dex Dexter, into taking the 8:42 back to Moldavia so she could rescue King Galen—which eventually she did...
...You' re Holly Scorpio (Emma Samms), from General Hospital...
...The only people killed in the terrorist attack were Steven's lover, Luke, and the noted international photographer and bad actress Ali Guffaw (MacGraw...
...He was testing her to prove she still had her mind...
...In the second crash, you recall, they found the body of a woman passenger that was charred beyond recognition, except for her rings...
...As every reader of the National Inquirer knows, she was Fallon, although she called herself Randall Adams...
...She was Nun of the Year in her Nolan Miller habit...
...The purpose of the meeting was to introduce the spin-off, a prime example of Empirical programing: Two Dynasties are twice as good as one...
...No problem...
...For Esther Schapiro, who has her priorities straight, was not going to be denied by those Geneva summit specials...
...The widely witnessed revolution against King Galen of Moldavia lasted 30 minutes, including time out for commercials...
...It was a wonderful episode...
...It'sBabs' first TV role since playing the embalmed rich woman in The Thornbirds lusting after a priest, Father Richard Chamberlain...
...The hidden agenda of this summit was to introduce the Colbys...
...But it didn't seem flimsy at the time the burial was taking place...
...That would sound too much like an old Chinese vase, as in Ming Dynasty V. So Esther Schapiro, the creator along with husband Richard, hit on Dynasty II: The Colbys all by herself...
...There is an old Moldavian folk expression, Brnyzwzmygdrewytzqkly brn wp, or "How the hell did that happen...
...But I digress...
...Not only is he living with a double of his wife Krystle (Linda Evans), named Rita (giving Evans a dual role...
...These days, some people are OD-ing on Dynasty...
...Immediately we were informed he was incurably ill...
...A maj or problem with this poor woman is that her face changed...
...I missed his second preintroductory appearance the next week, unfortunately...
...In case you don't know it, you're not Pamela Sue Martin...
...What really threw me was how Fal-lon's own father, Blake Carrington didn't blink at having an all-new, unimproved daughter...
...Early this season, hanging around the polo field, she runs into that other intellectual, Miles Colby (Maxwell Caulfield), the polo player and son of Jason...
...The Colbys is a fantasy of the extremely rich...
...Fallon's little boy threw flowers into the grave...
...Well, the country can't have everything...
...They repainted her portrait in the Carrington mansion and everything...
...Actuallythere were only30-40 characters in the double bill, counting the living and dead, any of whom could come back to life...
...She more than succeeded...
...I'll bet Esther Schapiro's family came from Moldavia in the old days...
...I felt especially sympathetic to poor Jeff...
...On the November night The Colbys went solo, Miles (Marco Polo) Colby stopped riding around in his red Ferrari and introduced his new bride to the rest ofthe family...
...Everybody was crying...
...She simply took to running the two Dynasties back-to-back for a few weeks, with the order of presentation seeming to depend on whether a show was preempted on a Wednesday or a Thursday, so sometimes II preceded I. They don't call her "Hurricane Esther Schapiro" for nothing...
...EST)axi&DynastyII: TheColbys(now Thursday, 9:00-10:00 p.m...
...But it was clear before The Colbys itself got under way that his Jason would live on in the annals of acting with his memorable El Cid...
...As you will surely recall, in last season's cliffhanger a Carrington daughter was being married to a Prince in Moldavia when the festivities were rudely interrupted by uninvited paratroopers of the Moldavian Provisional Government...
...When the show came back in September with the first pictures from strife-ridden Moldavia, it answered the question that had kept viewers going all summer: Who lived and died in Dynasty...
...He did something original—his Ben Hur performance...
...When you have amnesia, you also forget how to put on make-up...
...They were stunned...
...Would he make it to the end of the hour, let alone to the start ofthespin-offin November...
...Based on that flimsy evidence, Fallon was declared dead...
...The Car-ringtons of Denver are welfare cases compared with the Colbys of California, poor relations in the mountains...
...I expected the shrewd Blake to say, "For God's sake, Holly Scorpio, it's three o'clock in the afternoon, why aren't you on your own program...
...Miles asked...
...Besides, in so-called real life, it had been revealed during the summer, Heston had decided to give up a chance to run for the U.S...
...Otherwise, they're the same mishpocha...
...Blake is so wonderful...
...Any scholar could tell them apart, though...
...You're really sick...
...I couldn't be sure...
...His first wife, Alexis (Joan Collins), could have figured it all out...
...All the bodies were piled up one on top of the other...
...Fallon says in one of the great lines of modern television writing...
...I don't know how it happened...
...Heston did not do his usual Moses interpretation as Jason...
...Terribly sick, near death, even dead, can be nothing in soaps...
...It was as if he were trying to memorize what she looked like, in case he ran into her in the following scene...
...I guess this was supposed to add to the suspense...
...On Television ANOTHER DYNASTY BY MARVIN KITMAN Boob-tube history was made in November the night the Carringtons of Denver met the Colbys of Los Angeles in a special two-hour run-on of Dynasty (ABC, Wednesday, 9:00-10:00 p.m...
...It was a big funeral, and I mean Big...
...He tells her to see a doctor...
...That's all you have to know...
...FOR WEEKS they prepared us for the climactic moment of Fallon's return...
...She is some smart fortune cookie...
...Why can't I remember anything," she said to Miles one week...
...In The Colbys she is shtuping, as they say, an old cowboy (Joseph Campagna) who is a psychiatrist in Western clothing...
...Missing in action was Krystle's silly little hat...
...It'sarealplaceintheUSSR, near Bessarabia and next door to the infamous Romanian province of Transylvania...
...The November summit of the Colbys and Carringtons had as its announced purpose announcing the new joint Colby-Carrington pipeline that Jason Colby was forcing Blake Carrington to build—running from Denver to Shanghai, or some such thing...
...But Jeff is so stupid, he hasn't noticed the difference...
...I only watch it secretly every Wednesday and Thursday...
...What day is it...
...What Hurricane Esther was trying to do was confuse me...
...If it's Wednesday," I think she answered, "it must be Dynasty...
...Blake Carrington might as well be running a little corner grocery store alongside Jason Colby's operations, headquartered on the 60th floor of Century City, which it owns...
...They say she had amnesia...
...Remember the episode in October where art and Dynasty collided when Jason Colby (Charlton Hes-ton) first confronted his lifelong adversary Blake Carrington (John Forsythe...
...Baseball was preemptingDj-rtasfy so often on abc in October, I thought I saw Charlton playing third base for the Cardinals one Wednesday night...
...Too much Dynasty the local repairman said...
...In fact, if you look at the map it doesn't have a coastline at all...
...I'm losing my mind...
...In addition, she makes such dramatic gestures as giving Jeff Colby (John James) $500 million in Colbyco stock...
...Most people think Moldavia is a fictional country located somewhere between the principalities of Beverly Hills and Bel Air in the People's Republic of Los Angeles...
...Why is everybody staring at me as if I was some kind of freak...
...And she got it right...
...That was the famous episode where Collins went to a nunnery...
...It was the biggest cultural event on TV since the Wedding Massacre on Dynasty...
...He's so unflappable...
...EST...
...But then, as one LA newspaper writer observed, "What does that matter to a show that uses major downtown skyscrapers as stand-in for Denver architecture...
...She had been spending so much time with him at the Polo Grounds, I'm surprised she didn't get to think she was Mel Ott...
...There had been a funeral, a truly moving scene...
...Not since Godzilla met King Kong, and took him out for drinks at the Biltmore, have we seen anything of such magnitude, judging from the network's ads...
...That alone should have brought him out of his fogged state...
...ABC's spokesperson couldn't fool us, however...
...She had died several times last year—in an automobile crash, just as she was about to remarry Jeff Colby, and for good measure in a plane crash...
...Of course, we had already met many of the Colbys...
...He had been mooning around nasty all fall, saying "I love you Fallon" to a book of snapshots of Emma...
...It was really weird...
...I jumped up in my TV den and explained: "I'll tell you why Fallon Car-rington Randall Adams Colby-Colby...
...Jason's sister (Barbara Stanwyck) also had been introduced several weeks in advance...
...Clad in cute Nolan Miller jump suits, the terrorists crashed through the chapel windows and began spraying the wedding party with lead...
...To me it was the same program, on two different nights...
...In late September the denizens of Denver who had attended the nuptials were amazingly hearty and healthy...
...His being sick didn't really mean anything...
...The camera angle was bad...
...The tubes were fratzing from double doses...
...Before long my VCR burned out...
...Nothingphas-es him...
...She was Fallon...
...She has headaches 10 nights in a row...
...Senate from California in order to appear in Dynasty II...
...Last May it had looked like everybody was dead...
...ABC couldn't simply give us "Dynasty II," though...
...Yet being weak, soft-hearted, a person concerned about the sick and mentally disturbed, the character I most looked forward to seeing resurrected in The Colbys was Fallon (Pamela Sue Martin...
...Then, in the concluding two installments of Dynasty last season, a character started wandering around Los Angeles trying to find out who she was...
...The casualties included three Nolan Miller dresses, which were smudged...
...If one day you looked like Liz Taylor and the next day you found yourself staring into Farrah Fawcett's face in the mirror—you'd have an identity crisis, too...
...He decides to marry her right away, having been hit by too many polo mallets...
...What Moldavia doesn't have is the Riviera-type coastline seen in Dynasty...
...They recognized the ring Jeff had given Fallon when he was her first husband...
Vol. 68 • November 1985 • No. 15
