The return of sitcoms' popularity in the mid-'80s was a real thing, but the crash of the wealth-based nighttime soap genre was resonate and self-induced.
There was an effectively grim finality to the mood of the cliffhangers in the Spring of 1985: Bobby's death, the Moldavian massacre, the return of Val's babies... and they felt as if they could have ended right there (and perhaps they should have, although I would have sorely missed S10 of Dallas, S6 of FC, and Season 9 of Dynasty , and the next five years of KNOTS as they singularly maintained quality).
But, wow, these shows just fell apart post-Spring 1985. They stopped being character dramas after a while, and just started trying to "impress" viewers in some superficial way and to "fake it" somehow.
What a painful, unnecessary slide it was. But once these shows seemed to lose their identities, their sense of self, their momentum into the dung heap couldn't be slowed.
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soapfan770 ·
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