I always think of Ellie's "right or wrong" speech when she gives her "even when we knew we wrong" speech five and a half years later in exactly the same spot. Sort of bookend moments for the great post-Jock era of DALLAS.
Ellie has learned something over those years period. But it's too late.
CBS attempted to do a daytime soap in the early 1980s called
Capitol, which involved two feuding politically-connected families. It had similar problems to what
@James from London says about
Emerald Point. Though one could buy that these families were rich and powerful, they could not depict such simple details as which political parties the main players belonged to (leading to such over-used lines as "The party bosses say we can't do this," or "The party won't support that"), and though they were supposedly "connected," the writers could not drop names of real politicians or power-brokers into scripts to make it sound more realistic. One character was a congressman, but he never spoke of what bills he'd voted on that day, or what had gone on in the House chambers that day--
Why were they so hesitant not to align characters with specific real life political parties? Were they not allowed? Or is it down to the fact that a daytime soap films in such a way that it'd be impossible to appear current when it comes to the fast moving world of politics?
It was an '80s thing. You could mention political party -- and specific political ideas -- in the '70s and certainly the '90s and beyond.
But not in the Reagan era.
It's why DYNASTY's Season 8 devoted much of the year to a gubernatorial race, and yet no party and no actual politics ever came up. And that was the result not just of the program's typical passive-aggressive, all-dressed-up-with-no-place-to-go Tomfoolery but
also a manifestation of the unspoken rules of the decade for American TV.
Allusions to
any political specifics were somehow verboten. Such that even subtle little side quips like "wrong party, Bobby" from Donna Krebbs (or however she worded it) during DALLAS' Season 10 when Donna was in Washington, D.C. raised eyebrows and made you tingle ever-so-slightly (if the viewer even caught it).
And why?
I've said before that there was a weird dual political correctness that kicked in and washed over the American media in the '80s, a bogus leftist one (where you knew implicitly that if you disliked, say, the shrilly dislikeable Faye Furillo who'd been cheated on by her husband, then of course you hated women) and a bogus rightist one (where no Reagan/Thatcher trickle down economic policy could be uttered much less maligned) even in the same project.
It was a weird bilateral cognitive dissonance going on, certainly in TV.
So many Hollywood productions in the self-consciously insecure and narcissistic '80s wanted desperately to be important and relevant. And yet they were too chickenshit to commit for fear of --- something .... Not just a fear of controversy or offending someone, but almost of facing or coming to terms with what the project
itself actually thought. Especially in an hour where the United States had just elected the most rightwing president in modern memory, yet one whose countenance the American public loved and whom speaking out against even mildly could stop a room (of caucasians) and plunge it into a stunned silence.
It was this weird Emperor's New Clothes thing. Or, in DYNASTY's case, the Emperor's New Clothes in reverse.
Perhaps that's why the showbiz of the '80s was so fixated on the '60s and Vietnam --- they could convey a quasi-liberal sensibility about a nonsensical war now safely over, but they could also give equal time to fawning over the military by acknowledging the war's cost to the soldiers and their families.
Ahhh, the 1980s: all restless agitation and paralysis. Probably from all those shoulder pads.
