It was dud is what it was. It hit the ground hard and the audience left in droves. DYNASTY fell from being #1 to out of the Top 10 a month into Season 6.
But, as I stated above, I'd anticipated this months in advance. Anybody could've. DYNASTY's pattern of not-following-through-on anything was obviously going to apply even to the massacre -- its biggest cliffhanger ever, and TV's second biggest cliffhanger of the '80s (after 'Who Shot JR?', arrived at by the same writer).
And, sure enough, that's precisely what happened. It didn't take psychic powers.
It was too big an event to sweep under the rug -- written up for four months in the media -- but the tone-deaf creators swept it under the rug nonetheless. And this, along with Krystle-in-the-attic for 3 or 4 months, is what told the audience: '
Oh, this show doesn't actually tell a story, does it??'
And they started tuning out.
As Forsythe later said: "Audiences can tell when there's something wrong with the scripts and the stories, and they eventually lose interest in the project."
And that shrug helped derail DYNASTY -- Spelling's biggest hit -- and run the show right into the ground. Which, to be fair, the show was running on name recognition for a season or two before the storylines ever went to Moldavia. DYNASTY was sabotaged very early into its run.
As many of you know, I was appalled at the first episode of Season 3 and its new tone (and S.A.D.) in September of 1982. The show's ratings continued to climb over the next three years, peaking out in Season 5, based on the wardrobe (then, terribly influential), the Spelling/ABC publicity department, and the incredible Q-rating rankings of the perfectly-cast actors... Whenever the lead stars complained about the burgeoning creative problems, they were given lip-service and told "well, just look at the Neilsen ratings," and supporting actors who complained about the same thing were endangered of losing their jobs.
Eileen Pollock was allowed to run the show and its narrative in any way she saw fit (despite a stream of writer-producers who would blow thru the series briefly) and her power was never removed until the show was dead -- despite endless complaints from the press, and a slew of "come back to DYNASTY, we've fixed it!" PR campaigns mounted for three years.
And then they needed to bring in another producer (ironically, a good one -- Paulsen) in order for him to take the blame for program's imminent cancellation.
La Pollock was overt in the press with her contempt for Linda Evans (the person) and Krystle (the character). So what could we expect from Eileen??
And then the cabal of executives praise the Pollocks
forever for "the success" of the show. (They were, reportedly from the set of the '70s daytime soap THE DOCTORS, pretty good with casting and unformed, promising story ideas -- but were deadly poor at pacing and detail; and it sounds like Eileen was a Machiavellian monstrosity).
But Esther must've
really found Mike's tongue to have been pretty damned good in order to rest -- and risk -- the legacy of DYNASTY on. (Ending sentence with preposition, and I'm sorry).
