People just like crazy bitches.
I think there's a karmic connection between the Grande Dame Guignol genre of the '60s and the wealth-based nighttime soaps of the '80s -- one of the commenters in the "BATTLE AXE" mini-doc about STRAIT-JACKET asserts that the impact of WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE "was comparable to what happened when DYNASTY came out" twenty years later.
No, most of the nighttime soaps weren't
as focused on malevolent older women -- you had villainous men, business scandals, youthful bed-hopping, etc. But they all seemed to strangely
take focus, suddenly and unavoidably, when the mad Machiavellian former maiden stories were introduced.
FALCON CREST had Angela and, most obviously, Jacqueline Perrault (nazi-bedding, baby-stealing-and-selling super slut whose character, long-after she'd been killed off, seemed the catalyst for anything bad that happened in Tuscany Valley -- at least if that plotline was gonna work. And when the writers eventually forgot about her, replaced by inferior divas, the stories just
didn't work).
DYNASTY, of course, had Alexis but the dragon lady roles the show needed -- the Denver dowagers -- largely didn't materialize; Sable and Caress were a bit on the young side; Constance was almost entirely a THE COLBYS entity and was only around for a year, and I always want Gloria Swanson (as Alexis' & Caress' mother) and Bette Davis (as Sable's mother) and Dame Judith Anderson (as Moldavia's Queen Mother
and Jason Colby's aunt
and the Fallmont matriarch) to make cameos which the tone-deaf producers never thought of. (But then DYNASTY, much like STRAIT-JACKET, had the most potential of the lot and yet did the absolute least with it).
Oh, I forgot about Mother Blaisdel. Yes, there's great potential there -- still angry that Krystle picked up her phone without asking.
KNOTS LANDING had the strongest female cast in all of series television at the time, but even it benefited from the presence of Ava Gardner and Ruth Roman. (In fact, Olivia de Havilland turned down a role on KNOTS). And even chauvinist-dominated DALLAS seemed to reach its apex when Lady Jessica (one episode was even named "Hush, Hush, Sweet Jessie") rode onto Southfork, the show dropping the ball when, five years later, Jessica returned for a serial murder plot the producers chose to play for campy laughs, thus neutralizing its potential impact; and Sue Ellen, who looked like Crawford's daughter already, seemed headed into granddame territory herself before being routed out of Texas before she could fully percolate.
People just like crazy bitches --- But why? Does it remind folks of their own maternal issues? The maniacal moms and grandiose grandmas or nutty aunties and bullying big sisters in their lives??
Is there some recognition factor going on?
My paternal grandmother had a whiff of Bette Davis and Angela Channing in her (and you'd all see it immediately); my maternal grandmother had a dose of Judith Anderson (whom she adored) and Miss Ellie in her; and my mother, whom I referred to (not to her face) as "Joan Crawford Lite" when I was a teenager, indeed still seems to me rather pointedly like Crawford in BABY JANE and STRAIT-JACKET (not in her homicidal moments but in her histrionic "tormented" shtick, almost exactly).
The camera just seems to tilt when these women enter those spaces.
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