A Disneyland about people
Rewiew
Douglas Mckenzie
Viewers wait loyally and patiently all through the summer and through the repeats of TV high life in the United States as expressed by shows with single-word titles like “Dallas" and -Vegas", and even “Benson,” and what do they get as a reward at the end of it? They get “Dynasty.” Soap opera is a special kind of TV fantasy: it is Disneyland about people. Such ' is “Dynasty.” which Channel One introduced on Tuesday by a huge “pilot” running to a numbing two hours and 35 minutes (less, need it be added, the ads). The show has everything that this particular style of entertainment has taught its audience to expect and value: immense riches based on oil, punch-ups, flowers, guns, a promiscuous daughter, hate, sentiment, a homosexual son, a woman with a mental condition, an amazingly good-looking ageing man who is marrying a young girl; a male juvenile lead whose sincerity is identified by means of lots of eye-blink, a shirt which is always open and unbuttoned almost to the waist, and a
slouch where the arms are hooped out’a little from the sides; you could have written the whole thing yourself. Industrial trickery causing damage which could have meant death has already appeared; the murders and the suicides will come in subsequent weeks.
The relevance of this crass time-filler to the ordinary New Zealand joker would be something equivalent to the grip which skiing at Gstaad would have for the average villager in Fiji. The difference is that the skiing is real. Being American the sexual references in the show are both prurient and precious. Film-makers there seem determined to learn nothing since the techniques of “It Happened One Night” were evolved a half .a century ago. Thus, in company with the man, the girl’s bare feet are shown, and around them thud a garment; then fade-out. By code this means that you-know-what took place. It’s so clean, so decent, so pussyfooting it would make you sick.
"Dynasty” must have been
written by a committee. It accommodated every convention known to the dramatic world while having nothing to say. The worst of it is that it has all been done before. The series claims to be about "the . rich Carringtons and middle-class Blaisdels, and the intertwining of their loves and respective livelihoods.”
Nothing seems to add up. The Carringtons live in the American equivalent of Blenheim Palace. How they are ever going to intertwine their livelihood with the Blaisdels, who come from a sort of superior State house, is by far from being immediately apparent.
It may be added, very hastily, that nothing in that remark should be construed as being encouragement in any way for the programme to be watched for the purpose of finding the answer.
Cricket is doing well dn the screen but it does tend to bring out the worst in adver-
Using. If one Howarth wants to demean himself by following the exact words and style of a former local runner’ who sold fruit juice that is, of course, up to him; bubwhen a car ad, which features one Hadlee, is put together in such a way that a cricket crowd appears to give a standing ovation to the car.
which is advertised, that is disreputable.
A Disneyland about people
Press, 25 February 1982, Page 15
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