Primetime Soaps

[te.]

 

Actually - as much as I like to rant about Aaron Spelling (and I rant a lot) he was decent with giving his 90s shows what could serve as series finales - even with 2000 Malibu Road he got Lisa Hartman back to do an ending narration of what happened next for the European airings. Hell, even Savannah mostly wrapped itself up, even if you can see plot threads that could be picked up for season three.

 

Joan's part in Pacific Palisades is very weird - she first appears, then disappears and then reappears a few episodes later. It makes me think that when the show bombed (and it bombed hard) they were far into production, so they went back and re-filmed parts of the first episode where Joan appears and then didn't really add her to the scripts until later episodes. I almost want to rewatch her first episode to see if this is noticeable as it's my suspicion.

[Huntress]

I watched Pacific Palisades a few years ago. The show even has its own topic here:

 

I still think that the show wasn't bad, but I can see why it failed. For a show that was supposed to be about the residents of a neighborhood, there was no feeling of community between the characters. Even though most of them knew each other, they were trapped in their own little storylines bubbles, much like Melrose Place became in its later seasons. There wasn't even a local bar or a restaurant where characters could have randomly met. They could have used that shopping mall as a popular location, but instead they let it collapse in one of the first episodes.

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[Jagger1966]

I've seen a few promos for King's Crossing and its predecessor Secrets Of Midland Heights, but I find it so strange that you can find clips, episodes, even opening credits of just about any show out there, but you can't find so much as an opening credit of these two shows anywhere (I did see the partial Midland Heights opening that was posted here about a year ago but that only showed about 30 seconds of the intro).  If it wasn't for these promos you'd think those two shows never even existed, and I watched every episode of both. 

[vetsoapfan]

 

I watched both these series, and enjoyed KC quite a lot. SoMH, not as much. Unfortunately, they are not really the type of series that collectors used to preserve on videotape back in the day, and although I do have (I think) three eps of SoMH, the eps of both series on the internet are more or less non-existent.

[All My Shadows]

Jerrold Immel did a fabulous theme song for King's Crossing that ranks right up there with his themes for KL and Dallas.

[vetsoapfan]

 

I agree, it was great.

[Soaplovers]

Kings crossing seemed more sunny and bright (based on promos)..yet from what I read..it looked like some good old fashion Peyton Place activities were going on.

[Jagger1966]

 

 

     I was the opposite.  I loved Secrets of Midland Heights and was really excited when it was announced that it was being retooled.  So I was kind of disappointed that it turned out to be a completely different show, albeit with four of the Midland Heights actors.  I think I related more to SOMH because it was set in small midwestern town like the one I lived in and I was fourteen at the time and related to the high school kids on the show.  But even so, I was really bummed when Kings Crossing didn't take off either.

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[GSGfan2017]

Our Family Honor, anyone?

[Paul Raven]

New York Times July 2 1983

A PRIME TIME SOAP OPERA SPENDS THE SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS

By ANDREW L. YARROW

 

Two wealthy, socially prominent families are locked in a head-on struggle for the fortune they jointly control. A manipulative financier, driven by mysterious motives, wants to topple them both. All inhabit a world of spectacular affluence, vicious power plays and enough illicit liaisons to ruffle all but the most jaded sensibility.

Sound like ''Dallas'' or ''Dynasty''? It is not. It is ''The Hamptons,'' a new five-part dramatic series that will have its premiere on ABC this Wednesday at 9 P.M.

Just two months ago, a television crew descended on the fashionable oceanfront resort area to record the intricacies of this new primetime soap opera, wherein life is rarely peaceful or uncomplicated. The plot of ''The Hamptons'' focuses on two old-line New York families who, together, own a venerable department store chain and commute between spacious Manhattan apartments and opulent East Hampton retreats. Woven in are enough sexual and family intrigues to entice any soap-opera aficionado.

What really distinguishes ''The Hamptons'' from other prime-time serials has as much to do with network fortunes as with any attempt to depict life in that affluent Eastern playground.First, the show is one of nine new prime-time series to be introduced this summer (five are on ABC alone). Instead of the usual off-season glut of rebroadcasts, all three of the networks, for the first time, are offering a remarkable amount of original programming. This is part of a concerted effort to stay the ever-mounting erosion of their share of the evening television audience - lost largely to more engaging or newer fare on cable and independent stations.

Network executives also see the summer - a time of lessened ratings pressure - as an opportunity to nurture shows that might serve as midseason replacements next year. Thus, ''The Hamptons'' is a rather unusual hybrid - part summer series and part extended pilot. ABC is cushioning this videotaped project in a secure niche between two series with established followings - ''The Fall Guy'' and ''Dynasty.''

''The Hamptons have a protected mystique that only certain people know about,'' said Leigh Taylor-Young last month during a break in the shooting. Miss Taylor-Young was one of the cast members who came East on very short notice after ABC gave the go-ahead to begin taping the series. As the cameras whirred behind the gazebo of the sprawling, wood-shingled mansion being used as the Chadways' home, the actress predicted that the series will ''take the veneer off the Hamptons and offer a look in on the very wealthy.''

In ''The Hamptons,'' above the dunes, along Further and Lily Pond Lanes, saltwater ponds bordered by lush, carefully groomed shrubbery separate the stately homes of the Chadways, Mortimers and Nick Atwater. The saga pits the easy-going and relatively unpretentious Peter and Lee Chadway (Michael Goodwin and Miss Taylor-Young) against Jay Mortimer (John Reilly), the younger second husband of Adrienne Duncan-Mortimer (Bibi Besch), who is scheming to take control of the Duncan family fortune into which he has married.

Inadvertently bringing the two clans together is the developing summer romance between young Tracy Mortimer (Holly Roberts) and Brian Chadway (Craig Sheffer). Looming over both families is the Gatsbylike Nick Atwater (Daniel Pilon), chairman of a huge, somewhat shady export business, who gets to and from the city by private helicopter.

Like ''Dallas'' and ''Dynasty,'' ''The Hamptons'' proceeds from the premise that the seemingly charmed lives of the very rich hide a lurid underside. According to Burt Brinckerhof, the series' director, who has summered in the Hamptons since childhood, the story is about ''people who make mistakes, recognize them, and have to deal with them - but, since they're powerful, they try to take shortcuts.'' Nonetheless, he adds, viewers will see ''the wealthy and the powerful having the same problems we all have, with the difference being that they are trying to escape them through a fantasy life.'' Yet, most viewers would be hard pressed to remember when they last had to worry about getting the helicopter out to get away from town for the weekend.

''The Hamptons'' is a Gloria Monty Production in association with Comworld Productions. Charles Pratt is the producer and the series was created by veteran television writers William Bast and Paul Huson, whose numerous credits include last year's ''Tucker's Witch.'' Many of the participants have worked before on soap operas: Miss Monty as producer of ''General Hospital,'' for five years the top-rated daytime serial on television, as well as ''Secret Storm'' and ''Bright Promise''; Miss Taylor-Young was a principal in the original night-time melodrama ''Peyton Place''; Miss Besch has been a regular on a number of daytime serials.

According to Miss Monty, executive producer of ''The Hamptons,'' it was Ann Daniel, ABC's vice president of dramatic series development on the West Coast, who last fall approached her to do a videotaped summer series in New York. However, the network decided to set the show in the Hamptons only a few months before shooting began.

The series was shot entirely on location at two East Hampton homes and at a variety of settings around New York City, including the DuPont mansion in Westbury, L.I. (Nick Atwater's house) and the Apthorp apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side (Peter Chadway's in-town home). Despite the cloudy weather this spring, which made it ''pretty chilly for the actresses on the beach in bikinis,'' Mr. Brinckerhof says, ''it was always sunny in the Hamptons for our purposes.''

Yet, while efforts have been made to evoke the cultivated, well-todo world of the resort area, neither Dean & DeLuca, the gourmet-food shop, nor Guild Hall, the famed artists' workshop/gallery, appear in ''The Hamptons''; these two bastions of status, in Mr. Brinckerhof's words, ''didn't have quite the right flavor'' for the purposes of the televised ''Hamptons.'' And that highly exclusive outpost, the Maidstone Club, does not figure in the series either, because the management would not permit its premises to be seen on the home screen. Consequently, a fictionalized country club, the Canterbury, was concocted for ''The Hamptons'' by filming at a Westchester club.

The Hamptons' calendar being what it is, the social whirl on which the area's reputation rests all but comes to an end right after Labor Day. If the series proves successful in the ratings and ABC decides to put it into its 1984 schedule, this could pose something of a dilemma for the show's story line. Nonetheless, Miss Monty insists that there will be ''a lot of different twists'' to keep the contenders for Duncan-Chadway traveling between Manhattan and Long Island even during the winter.

Indeed, the timeless social and dramatic geography of the series is perhaps best expressed by one brief exchange between David Landau (Phil Casnoff) and his girl, Cheryl Ashcroft (Kate Dezina). When he says to her on the telephone that whatever she has to tell him (she's pregnant, of course) will have to wait for the weekend in the Hamptons, she replies archly, ''Doesn't everything?''

[Paul Raven]

Bradford Dillman, one of the leads in Kings Crossing has died aged 87.

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