- Awards
- 27
I was completely bewildered and eventually I gave up on it.
It doesn't look like prime time or day time soap....it was something else but I have no idea what it was.
It doesn't look like prime time or day time soap....it was something else but I have no idea what it was.
- Awards
- 7
It had the potential to be a trashy guilty pleasure but instead it was just trash. My main recollection is that it was painfully slow. Having watched different US daytime soaps, I was used to their sometimes sluggish pace (compared to the European & Aussie soaps). Fashion House took this to another level. As the series wore on, episodes were often filled with flashbacks to scenes from previous episodes. Again, I know that flashbacks are often used in soaps but here it felt like they were using them as filler and the action was going nowhere fast. For a show set in the fashion world, it also never felt particularly fashionable or glamorous because it looked cheap and the bulk of the action (if I remember correctly) took place in drab offices. Basically, I reckon most of the budget went on Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild’s salaries and the rest of the show was cobbled together on what was left over.
- Awards
- 9
This is what baffled me with it - the whole thing was that it was based on telenovelas and the limited format (65 episodes) meant that they wouldn't have to worry about burning through stories too fast (which is part of why daytime soaps move at the pace they do). I tend to associate telenovelas with a quick pace and crazy stories, not glacial pacing.
- Awards
- 7
Yes. It felt like they only had six weeks of storylines and were trying to stretch them out across thirteen weeks. Which makes even less sense when you remember that it was based on an existing telenovela, so they shouldn’t have been stuck for content. I don’t remember watching any of the other MyNetworkTV soaps, so I’m not sure if they suffered from the same problem.
- Awards
- 9
I heard the companion to Fashion House, Desire, was even worse. The follow-up shows Wicked Wicked Games, Watch Over Me, American Heiress and Saints & Sinners were supposedly an improvement, but by then it was too late and the US telenovela project was dead in the water. I suspect a huge part of the problem was that they made these shows and hour instead of an half hour; had they cut an half hour they probably would've been better paced.
- Awards
- 7
I think Wicked Wicked Games ran here when Fashion House finished but I don’t recall seeing any of the rest of them. It was an odd choice of MyNetworkTV to try and build their entire schedule around serialised dramas at a time when ratings for their US daytime equivalent were on the slide. English language telenovelas like Secrets and Miami Sands never really worked when daytime soap ratings were in better shape, so I don’t know why they thought they would work in the 00’s.
- Awards
- 9
I don't think it's as foolish as it sounds - Telemundo and Univision have a clear cut of the market and now that ratings are getting lower and lower, they're actually beating channels like The CW and sometimes even tying with or beating the regular broadcast networks. But they started out wrong - as you said, they probably shouldn't have built their whole schedule around it and maybe just had Fashion House / Desire as a block of half hour shows, making less damage if they failed. Maybe have the "lesser" one have a smaller episode count as to not having launch a new block each time. Make sure they're fast-paced and addictive, be hands-on and have consultants that actually get the telenovela format.
I think it could work - especially in todays ever shrinking ratings landscape. But no one is going to give it a go, because the notion of a half hour drama airing in prime time seems completely foreign.
- Awards
- 5
These were fun, but Wicked Wicked Games was really special. I loved Tatum O'Neal in that series.