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Falcon Crest
FALCON CREST versus DYNASTY versus DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them, week by week
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<blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 171856" data-attributes="member: 22"><p><u>03 May 90: FALCON CREST: The Return v. 03 May 90: KNOTS LANDING: If I Die Before I Wake v. 04 May 90: DALLAS: Three, Three, Three (1)</u></p><p></p><p>A week after one no-nonsense matriarch bows out of Soap Land with the minimum of fuss (Miss Ellie embarking on a one-way trip to the Orient), another returns in a similar fashion. Remarkably, the revelation that Angela Channing has awoken from her coma is tacked onto the end of the “Previously, on FALCON CREST ...” recap section prior to the opening titles. “She wakes up like it was just a nap and demands to be checked out,” the nurse who fell under Charley St James’ spell is telling a colleague. “You should have seen her walking down the hall. She wouldn’t even let us notify her family.” The regular cast members don't find out the news until two-thirds of the way through the episode, and even then have no idea where she is. Richard’s reaction is interesting: “I almost feel resentment towards her … It’s like she’s deliberately coming back to interfere with my life.” And then all of a sudden, there she is, standing in the Falcon Crest living room complete with a new hairdo and glitzy evening gown and offering absolutely no explanation for her miraculous recovery. In short, her return is as abrupt and outrageous as her near demise was. In complete contrast, Pat Williams’ comatose state on KNOTS is played strictly by the medical textbook. “Her pupils are fixed and dilated,” her doctor tells Frank solemnly. “Your wife is clinically dead.”</p><p></p><p>“I want things back the way they were,” Angela announces on FALCON CREST. “I think Gary and Val are gonna get back together again!” predicts Karen on KNOTS. But with JR and Cally competing to be the first to file for divorce, it doesn’t look there’ll be any such turning back of the clock on DALLAS.</p><p></p><p>Each of the soaps has an unusual vibe about them this week. With Angela back and Richard having wrested Falcon Crest from Michael Sharpe, the characters on FC are now divided into two camps: the old and the new. In the former camp, Richard squabbles with Lance and Pilar over who should have control of the winery, with Angela appearing to side with her son. Such inter-family disputes are familiar FC territory, yet this one feels energetic and fresh rather than a tired rehash of old storylines. (I particularly like the way Richard equates his taking over Falcon Crest to the fall of the Berlin Wall: “The liberation of Eastern Europe, Lauren, the world is changing!”) In the “new” camp, Anne Bowen has skipped town after dropping her parental bombshell on Michael at the end of last week’s ep (“Danny isn’t your child — he’s Richard Channing’s”), exactly as Anne Matheson did after doing the same thing to Mack in KNOTS Season 8 (“You’re not Paige’s father, Mack, Greg is”). This leaves Lauren, Genele and Danny trying to deal with Michael, who has shut down completely. The scene where he rejects Danny without telling him why is just really sad. “Did I do something wrong? Dad, tell me. Just don’t shut me out,” Danny pleads, trying to hug the man he still believes is his father. Michael pushes him away and tells him to get out without even looking at him. </p><p></p><p>The highlight of the Soap Land week is the scene where Genele finally manages to rouse Michael from his despondency. She does this with a speech that combines elements of the “Get off your butt, JR, we’ve got work to do” lecture Bobby delivered after Jock’s death and Dylan Thomas’s poem "Do not go gentle into that good night”, but with an added dysfunctional twist that could only belong to this season of FALCON CREST.</p><p></p><p>“You’ll never change,” Michael is telling her. “Neither will you,” she replies. “Nobody does. We may talk about it and dream about it. We may even try it, but in the end, we can’t change what we are. We can only accept it.” “And what are you?” Michael asks her. “Me?" she replies. "I’m a creature that lives with the constant pain of destroying what it desires. In other words, I’m your twin. Our only hope is to desire something so strong, so cruel, so twisted that it can’t be destroyed. That’s what brought us together and that’s what will keep us together. Come back to life. Be angry again. Find a war.”</p><p></p><p>Genele’s assertion that “we can’t change what we are” flies in the face of what we’ve been led to expect from TV drama — the idea of people “growing” from their experiences or, in reality TV parlance, “going on a journey.” Her outlook chimes instead with Shakespeare’s — the sense that characters cannot outrun their fatal flaw and/or the world they were born into. It’s also the common thread that links all of JR’s “fish out of water” escapades during the past couple of years. No matter where he finds himself — on a chain gang or trapped overnight in an elevator or on a mystery mission to Moscow or, as is the case this week, committed to a mental hospital, he is fundamentally unchanged by his surroundings. He remains resolutely convinced of both his own importance and his ability to bribe his way out of trouble. Much like a character from SEINFELD, a show that would help symbolise the ‘90s just as DALLAS had the ‘80s, he never learns from his experiences. </p><p></p><p>Bridging the gap between FC’s “old” and “new” camps is Richard and Lauren’s big announcement: they’re engaged! The only apparent obstacle to their immediate happiness is Lauren’s curiosity about Richard’s twenty-year-old affair with Anne, which he is reluctant to discuss (“Who cares? The past is over, it’s gone!”). Nevertheless, Lauren is mere inches away from figuring out that he is Danny’s real father. Meanwhile, Paige and Tom’s wedding plans are underway on KNOTS, where the only obstacle to <em>their</em> happiness is the police allegation that Tom has pocketed a serious amount of cash from a drugs bust. He vehemently denies it — but then $100,000 mysteriously shows up in his bank account. </p><p></p><p>Before learning of Angela’s recovery, Richard had invited Lauren to move into Falcon Crest with him (“our Golden Pond”). Now that she is back, Angela raises no objection to the idea (much to Lance’s annoyance). Conversely on KNOTS, Danny has taken out a restraining order against Val and Gary prohibiting them “from coming within one hundred feet of Daniel Waleska or his residence.” It already felt weird for Val to be living somewhere other the cul-de-sac, but now she’s banned from even visiting. Indeed, KNOTS suddenly feels very … un-knotty, with characters locked into their specific storylines — Val and Gary at the ranch, Frank and Julie at the hospital with Pat, the Mackenzies pre-occupied by Karen’s stalker, and Paige and Tom by the allegations against him — with very little overlap in-between. </p><p></p><p>The vibe on DALLAS is even odder. For the first time in the series’ history, no-one (with the possible exception of James) is living at Southfork. JR is in the sanatarium, Cally is lying low at April’s and everyone else is overseas. Fortunately, Cally and James — whether he’s ministering to her pregnancy cravings (shaved ice and tomato juice) or they’re both sneaking into Ewing Oil in the dead at night to forge letters from JR to Sly — make an extremely likeable whatever-they-are. The idea of them getting together romantically seems both soapily inevitable and morally unthinkable. Despite their shared desire to strike back at JR, they're both too gosh-darned nice to cross that particular line. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to have occurred to them. It’s kind of sweet that that sort of innocence still exists in Soap Land.</p><p></p><p>The “old” and “new” come together very satisfyingly in the final scene of this week’s FALCON CREST. Angela’s and Michael’s cars pull up alongside each other and, Michael having mimicked Angela’s “back window of a limousine slides down to reveal …” pose throughout this season’s opening credits, they both now repeat that same pose simultaneously. “Well, if it isn’t the incomparable Angela Channing,” Michael begins. She cuts him off: “Spare me the chit-chat … Your sister intends to marry my son and together they wanna run Falcon Crest … You can’t stand the idea of Lauren spending the rest of her life with Richard, and I want Falcon Crest for myself … I think we have something in common — to see to it that that wedding never takes place.” He smiles in agreement. </p><p></p><p>While Angela plots to prevent her son’s marriage on FALCON CREST, Anne Matheson is anxious for her daughter to tie the knot on KNOTS. Mack is surprised by her concern, which provokes an unusually angry response from Anne. “Everybody judges me,” she snaps. “<em>You</em> judge me. Don’t deny it. You think I’m a joke. Paige calls me a cartoon character whose sole interest in life is shopping. Well, I have never had a facelift and I don’t intend to. And yes, I have compensated for the mistakes that I have made by having fun. But I don’t want my daughter to have to compensate for anything. I want her to do it right the first time and she will do it right if she marries Tom!” It’s an impressive speech (and one that contains what I think is Soap Land’s first reference to cosmetic surgery) — but then the other shoe drops when we hear Anne on the phone to a lawyer and it becomes apparent that she is being just as devious about her daughter’s nuptials as Angela is about her son’s. “They’ve set the date, May 17th,” she informs the lawyer. “Father didn’t want her to know about the trust fund until she got married … Would it be possible to transfer the money directly into her account?” We’ve already seen Anne stealing Paige’s driving licence to open herself a bank account. Twenty-nine years later, Paige, in the guise of Future Alexis, will go one better by simply stealing <em>her</em> daughter’s face. </p><p></p><p>Elsewhere, KNOTS demonstrates Karen’s paranoid mental state via the use of thriller-style fantasy sequences. She is shown going about her daily business when she suddenly “sees” her floor manager advancing towards her with a gun or her make-up man doing the same with a knife or, most explicitly, an autograph hunter forcing his way into her car and climbing on top of her. For some reason, whereas the Amanda/Danny rape plot from earlier in the season was given the earnest “social issue” treatment, the not dissimilar threat to Karen is deemed ripe for gimmicky exploitation. This attitude is mirrored within the plot itself by Dianne who leaks the story of Karen’s ordeal to the press, in the hope that the resultant publicity will prompt Karen to quit the show, thereby enabling Dianne to replace her as host of OPEN MIKE. </p><p></p><p>Karen subsequently arrives home to find a TV crew harassing Meg on the front lawn. She then launches into an updated version of Miss Ellie’s “get me the shotgun out of the hall closet” speech from twelve years earlier. “You hear a rumour that a plane is down, my two boys missing and with no respect for human feeling or private grief, you come circling around here like a vulture,” Ellie told the reporter she found on her doorstep back then. “There isn’t any tragedy, any accident, any personal grief, no matter how terrible, that can’t be made worse any the presence of reporters,” Karen tells the reporter outside her own house now. Both reporters respond the same way: “I’m just doing my job,” in ’78; “We’re only doing our job,” in ’90. “Then find another job or a better way of doing this one!” barked Ellie. “Doing your job does not mean terrorising a four-year-old. What I saw today is child abuse and I won’t stand for it!” snaps Karen. Had she a shotgun in her hall closet, Karen would undoubtedly call for it at this point, but as she has already made clear earlier in the episode, keeping a firearm in her home is an anathema to her. While there’s not a syllable of Karen’s speech I disagree with, within the context of this episode, there is nonetheless a whiff of hypocrisy about it — KNOTS has clearly been having a ball with all this sensationalistic “woman in peril” stuff, but still feels the need to wag its finger at the press for doing the exact same thing.</p><p></p><p>In her imagination, Karen has already faced guns and knives and would-be rapists during this episode. How can reality possibly top that? There can only be one way — “Snakes in a cul-de-sac!” The slithery critters appear in a box of flowers Karen opens. She then wails her head off and disaster is soon averted. </p><p></p><p>Unsurprisingly, Dianne’s plan works and Karen quits the show. She is not the only character to forego their celebrity status this week. “Whoever you thought you were on the outside, Mr Ewing, doesn’t matter in here,” Dr Wexler, chief psychiatrist at the sanatarium where JR is currently residing, informs him. Yes, it’s Haleyville all over again — they didn’t know or care who he was there either. At the risk of damning with faint praise, JR’s obligatory psychiatric sessions are the highlight of the sanatarium scenes in this week’s DALLAS. Inevitably, the subject of his father arises. “My daddy was like a god to me,” he declares. “And made you feel inferior by comparison?” ventures Dr Wexler. “No, not inferior,” JR replies. “I just wanted to make him proud of me.” Over on FC, Michael Sharpe mentions his father for the first time. Whereas JR owes his success to a lifetime spent trying to emulate his daddy, Michael owes his to a life spent doing the opposite: “What’s a father? I had one, a scared little man, a three-dollar-an-hour bookkeeper. He taught fear by example. His life scared the hell out of me.”</p><p></p><p>JR’s fellow inmates include Bob from the Sumner Group, Harris Ryland from Future DALLAS and a man who laughs maniacally while playing chess with himself, even switching seats between moves to argue with his “opponent.” In other words, this is multiple personality disorder played for yuks. While bemusing, it’s too feeble and creaky a gag to niggle one in the way the double standards on this week’s KNOTS do, or to grate like Melissa’s high-pitched “isn’t mental illness hilarious?” histrionics used to on FALCON CREST. In any case, JR is too focused on his primary objective — securing Jessica Montford’s signature on an all-important document — to pay his new dorm mates much attention. But in order to gain access to Jessica in the women’s wing, he must first tangle with the amorous Anita. </p><p></p><p>So it is that JR and Karen end up in similar predicaments at the end of their respective shows. Spooked by the snakes, Karen summons Wayne the Security Guard to her house for protection — unaware that he is the person most likely to be her stalker. While she naps in her bedroom, Wayne the weirdo lurks downstairs. JR, meanwhile, ends up in the clutches of Anita, who is sort of a cross between Marilee Stone and Hannibal Lecter, “a woman with insatiable sexual appetites — by the time the authorities caught up with her, she had disposed of four husbands … They were unable to satisfy her needs.” </p><p></p><p>And this week’s Top 3 are …</p><p></p><p>1 (3) FALCON CREST </p><p>2 (1) DALLAS</p><p>3 (2) KNOTS LANDING</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James from London, post: 171856, member: 22"] [U]03 May 90: FALCON CREST: The Return v. 03 May 90: KNOTS LANDING: If I Die Before I Wake v. 04 May 90: DALLAS: Three, Three, Three (1)[/U] A week after one no-nonsense matriarch bows out of Soap Land with the minimum of fuss (Miss Ellie embarking on a one-way trip to the Orient), another returns in a similar fashion. Remarkably, the revelation that Angela Channing has awoken from her coma is tacked onto the end of the “Previously, on FALCON CREST ...” recap section prior to the opening titles. “She wakes up like it was just a nap and demands to be checked out,” the nurse who fell under Charley St James’ spell is telling a colleague. “You should have seen her walking down the hall. She wouldn’t even let us notify her family.” The regular cast members don't find out the news until two-thirds of the way through the episode, and even then have no idea where she is. Richard’s reaction is interesting: “I almost feel resentment towards her … It’s like she’s deliberately coming back to interfere with my life.” And then all of a sudden, there she is, standing in the Falcon Crest living room complete with a new hairdo and glitzy evening gown and offering absolutely no explanation for her miraculous recovery. In short, her return is as abrupt and outrageous as her near demise was. In complete contrast, Pat Williams’ comatose state on KNOTS is played strictly by the medical textbook. “Her pupils are fixed and dilated,” her doctor tells Frank solemnly. “Your wife is clinically dead.” “I want things back the way they were,” Angela announces on FALCON CREST. “I think Gary and Val are gonna get back together again!” predicts Karen on KNOTS. But with JR and Cally competing to be the first to file for divorce, it doesn’t look there’ll be any such turning back of the clock on DALLAS. Each of the soaps has an unusual vibe about them this week. With Angela back and Richard having wrested Falcon Crest from Michael Sharpe, the characters on FC are now divided into two camps: the old and the new. In the former camp, Richard squabbles with Lance and Pilar over who should have control of the winery, with Angela appearing to side with her son. Such inter-family disputes are familiar FC territory, yet this one feels energetic and fresh rather than a tired rehash of old storylines. (I particularly like the way Richard equates his taking over Falcon Crest to the fall of the Berlin Wall: “The liberation of Eastern Europe, Lauren, the world is changing!”) In the “new” camp, Anne Bowen has skipped town after dropping her parental bombshell on Michael at the end of last week’s ep (“Danny isn’t your child — he’s Richard Channing’s”), exactly as Anne Matheson did after doing the same thing to Mack in KNOTS Season 8 (“You’re not Paige’s father, Mack, Greg is”). This leaves Lauren, Genele and Danny trying to deal with Michael, who has shut down completely. The scene where he rejects Danny without telling him why is just really sad. “Did I do something wrong? Dad, tell me. Just don’t shut me out,” Danny pleads, trying to hug the man he still believes is his father. Michael pushes him away and tells him to get out without even looking at him. The highlight of the Soap Land week is the scene where Genele finally manages to rouse Michael from his despondency. She does this with a speech that combines elements of the “Get off your butt, JR, we’ve got work to do” lecture Bobby delivered after Jock’s death and Dylan Thomas’s poem "Do not go gentle into that good night”, but with an added dysfunctional twist that could only belong to this season of FALCON CREST. “You’ll never change,” Michael is telling her. “Neither will you,” she replies. “Nobody does. We may talk about it and dream about it. We may even try it, but in the end, we can’t change what we are. We can only accept it.” “And what are you?” Michael asks her. “Me?" she replies. "I’m a creature that lives with the constant pain of destroying what it desires. In other words, I’m your twin. Our only hope is to desire something so strong, so cruel, so twisted that it can’t be destroyed. That’s what brought us together and that’s what will keep us together. Come back to life. Be angry again. Find a war.” Genele’s assertion that “we can’t change what we are” flies in the face of what we’ve been led to expect from TV drama — the idea of people “growing” from their experiences or, in reality TV parlance, “going on a journey.” Her outlook chimes instead with Shakespeare’s — the sense that characters cannot outrun their fatal flaw and/or the world they were born into. It’s also the common thread that links all of JR’s “fish out of water” escapades during the past couple of years. No matter where he finds himself — on a chain gang or trapped overnight in an elevator or on a mystery mission to Moscow or, as is the case this week, committed to a mental hospital, he is fundamentally unchanged by his surroundings. He remains resolutely convinced of both his own importance and his ability to bribe his way out of trouble. Much like a character from SEINFELD, a show that would help symbolise the ‘90s just as DALLAS had the ‘80s, he never learns from his experiences. Bridging the gap between FC’s “old” and “new” camps is Richard and Lauren’s big announcement: they’re engaged! The only apparent obstacle to their immediate happiness is Lauren’s curiosity about Richard’s twenty-year-old affair with Anne, which he is reluctant to discuss (“Who cares? The past is over, it’s gone!”). Nevertheless, Lauren is mere inches away from figuring out that he is Danny’s real father. Meanwhile, Paige and Tom’s wedding plans are underway on KNOTS, where the only obstacle to [I]their[/I] happiness is the police allegation that Tom has pocketed a serious amount of cash from a drugs bust. He vehemently denies it — but then $100,000 mysteriously shows up in his bank account. Before learning of Angela’s recovery, Richard had invited Lauren to move into Falcon Crest with him (“our Golden Pond”). Now that she is back, Angela raises no objection to the idea (much to Lance’s annoyance). Conversely on KNOTS, Danny has taken out a restraining order against Val and Gary prohibiting them “from coming within one hundred feet of Daniel Waleska or his residence.” It already felt weird for Val to be living somewhere other the cul-de-sac, but now she’s banned from even visiting. Indeed, KNOTS suddenly feels very … un-knotty, with characters locked into their specific storylines — Val and Gary at the ranch, Frank and Julie at the hospital with Pat, the Mackenzies pre-occupied by Karen’s stalker, and Paige and Tom by the allegations against him — with very little overlap in-between. The vibe on DALLAS is even odder. For the first time in the series’ history, no-one (with the possible exception of James) is living at Southfork. JR is in the sanatarium, Cally is lying low at April’s and everyone else is overseas. Fortunately, Cally and James — whether he’s ministering to her pregnancy cravings (shaved ice and tomato juice) or they’re both sneaking into Ewing Oil in the dead at night to forge letters from JR to Sly — make an extremely likeable whatever-they-are. The idea of them getting together romantically seems both soapily inevitable and morally unthinkable. Despite their shared desire to strike back at JR, they're both too gosh-darned nice to cross that particular line. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to have occurred to them. It’s kind of sweet that that sort of innocence still exists in Soap Land. The “old” and “new” come together very satisfyingly in the final scene of this week’s FALCON CREST. Angela’s and Michael’s cars pull up alongside each other and, Michael having mimicked Angela’s “back window of a limousine slides down to reveal …” pose throughout this season’s opening credits, they both now repeat that same pose simultaneously. “Well, if it isn’t the incomparable Angela Channing,” Michael begins. She cuts him off: “Spare me the chit-chat … Your sister intends to marry my son and together they wanna run Falcon Crest … You can’t stand the idea of Lauren spending the rest of her life with Richard, and I want Falcon Crest for myself … I think we have something in common — to see to it that that wedding never takes place.” He smiles in agreement. While Angela plots to prevent her son’s marriage on FALCON CREST, Anne Matheson is anxious for her daughter to tie the knot on KNOTS. Mack is surprised by her concern, which provokes an unusually angry response from Anne. “Everybody judges me,” she snaps. “[I]You[/I] judge me. Don’t deny it. You think I’m a joke. Paige calls me a cartoon character whose sole interest in life is shopping. Well, I have never had a facelift and I don’t intend to. And yes, I have compensated for the mistakes that I have made by having fun. But I don’t want my daughter to have to compensate for anything. I want her to do it right the first time and she will do it right if she marries Tom!” It’s an impressive speech (and one that contains what I think is Soap Land’s first reference to cosmetic surgery) — but then the other shoe drops when we hear Anne on the phone to a lawyer and it becomes apparent that she is being just as devious about her daughter’s nuptials as Angela is about her son’s. “They’ve set the date, May 17th,” she informs the lawyer. “Father didn’t want her to know about the trust fund until she got married … Would it be possible to transfer the money directly into her account?” We’ve already seen Anne stealing Paige’s driving licence to open herself a bank account. Twenty-nine years later, Paige, in the guise of Future Alexis, will go one better by simply stealing [I]her[/I] daughter’s face. Elsewhere, KNOTS demonstrates Karen’s paranoid mental state via the use of thriller-style fantasy sequences. She is shown going about her daily business when she suddenly “sees” her floor manager advancing towards her with a gun or her make-up man doing the same with a knife or, most explicitly, an autograph hunter forcing his way into her car and climbing on top of her. For some reason, whereas the Amanda/Danny rape plot from earlier in the season was given the earnest “social issue” treatment, the not dissimilar threat to Karen is deemed ripe for gimmicky exploitation. This attitude is mirrored within the plot itself by Dianne who leaks the story of Karen’s ordeal to the press, in the hope that the resultant publicity will prompt Karen to quit the show, thereby enabling Dianne to replace her as host of OPEN MIKE. Karen subsequently arrives home to find a TV crew harassing Meg on the front lawn. She then launches into an updated version of Miss Ellie’s “get me the shotgun out of the hall closet” speech from twelve years earlier. “You hear a rumour that a plane is down, my two boys missing and with no respect for human feeling or private grief, you come circling around here like a vulture,” Ellie told the reporter she found on her doorstep back then. “There isn’t any tragedy, any accident, any personal grief, no matter how terrible, that can’t be made worse any the presence of reporters,” Karen tells the reporter outside her own house now. Both reporters respond the same way: “I’m just doing my job,” in ’78; “We’re only doing our job,” in ’90. “Then find another job or a better way of doing this one!” barked Ellie. “Doing your job does not mean terrorising a four-year-old. What I saw today is child abuse and I won’t stand for it!” snaps Karen. Had she a shotgun in her hall closet, Karen would undoubtedly call for it at this point, but as she has already made clear earlier in the episode, keeping a firearm in her home is an anathema to her. While there’s not a syllable of Karen’s speech I disagree with, within the context of this episode, there is nonetheless a whiff of hypocrisy about it — KNOTS has clearly been having a ball with all this sensationalistic “woman in peril” stuff, but still feels the need to wag its finger at the press for doing the exact same thing. In her imagination, Karen has already faced guns and knives and would-be rapists during this episode. How can reality possibly top that? There can only be one way — “Snakes in a cul-de-sac!” The slithery critters appear in a box of flowers Karen opens. She then wails her head off and disaster is soon averted. Unsurprisingly, Dianne’s plan works and Karen quits the show. She is not the only character to forego their celebrity status this week. “Whoever you thought you were on the outside, Mr Ewing, doesn’t matter in here,” Dr Wexler, chief psychiatrist at the sanatarium where JR is currently residing, informs him. Yes, it’s Haleyville all over again — they didn’t know or care who he was there either. At the risk of damning with faint praise, JR’s obligatory psychiatric sessions are the highlight of the sanatarium scenes in this week’s DALLAS. Inevitably, the subject of his father arises. “My daddy was like a god to me,” he declares. “And made you feel inferior by comparison?” ventures Dr Wexler. “No, not inferior,” JR replies. “I just wanted to make him proud of me.” Over on FC, Michael Sharpe mentions his father for the first time. Whereas JR owes his success to a lifetime spent trying to emulate his daddy, Michael owes his to a life spent doing the opposite: “What’s a father? I had one, a scared little man, a three-dollar-an-hour bookkeeper. He taught fear by example. His life scared the hell out of me.” JR’s fellow inmates include Bob from the Sumner Group, Harris Ryland from Future DALLAS and a man who laughs maniacally while playing chess with himself, even switching seats between moves to argue with his “opponent.” In other words, this is multiple personality disorder played for yuks. While bemusing, it’s too feeble and creaky a gag to niggle one in the way the double standards on this week’s KNOTS do, or to grate like Melissa’s high-pitched “isn’t mental illness hilarious?” histrionics used to on FALCON CREST. In any case, JR is too focused on his primary objective — securing Jessica Montford’s signature on an all-important document — to pay his new dorm mates much attention. But in order to gain access to Jessica in the women’s wing, he must first tangle with the amorous Anita. So it is that JR and Karen end up in similar predicaments at the end of their respective shows. Spooked by the snakes, Karen summons Wayne the Security Guard to her house for protection — unaware that he is the person most likely to be her stalker. While she naps in her bedroom, Wayne the weirdo lurks downstairs. JR, meanwhile, ends up in the clutches of Anita, who is sort of a cross between Marilee Stone and Hannibal Lecter, “a woman with insatiable sexual appetites — by the time the authorities caught up with her, she had disposed of four husbands … They were unable to satisfy her needs.” And this week’s Top 3 are … 1 (3) FALCON CREST 2 (1) DALLAS 3 (2) KNOTS LANDING [/QUOTE]
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FALCON CREST versus DYNASTY versus DALLAS versus KNOTS LANDING versus the rest of them, week by week
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