Secrets of Midland Heights

[Paul Raven]

Correcting this post from 9 years ago!!

 

Secrets debuted Sat Dec 6 @10 with an 11.8/21- the lowest debut of the season so far.

The episode in the Dallas timeslot was actually Fri Dec 26 and rated #5 for the week but it was not enough.

By Jan 3 the rating was 11.2/18 #62 for the week out of 66

Cancellation was announced Jan 9 to be replaced with Concrete Cowboys.

[Paul Raven]

Fort Lauderdale News Thurs Dec 4 1980

'Midland Heights': Not a true high school picture

"To get on the air and be a hit, you have to do what you have to do." Listen to that man when he speaks. He's David Jacobs, the producer at Lorimar Studios who created Dallas, now honored as the most-watched TV show of all time.

He also created Knots Landing, the official Dallas spinoff and is the man behind Secrets of Midland Heights, CBS's newest entry in the soap opera arena. Secrets, which premieres Saturday on WTVJ-Ch. 4, is to Dallas what Gary Ewing is to J R. an incomparably inferior version of the original. Secrets also has an identity crisis, having been moved from a restrictive 8 p.m. slot to a more permissive 10 p.m. slot, opposite Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters and Fantasy Island. 

Secrets of Midland Heights was created with an emphasis on the town's high school students, and was scheduled accordingly to grab the youthful Saturday night TV viewing audience. CBS noticed,however, that all the other prime time soaps (all the ones mentioned above, plus NBC's upcoming Flamingo Road) were ensconsed in the latest prime time slot possible, and doing quite nicely. So Secrets is giving equal time to its adult community while simultaneously introducing a cast that in sheer size makes Peyton Place look like a ghost town.

What kind of place is Midland Heights? If you limit your, input to the pilot episode, as most discerning viewers will (if they watch at all), the bottom line is that Midland Heights is a boring place. The program is boring, true. But so are the inhabitants, the teachers, the hay-rides and even the TV stations of Midland Heights. Elements of the script sound like one-liners written for Henny Youngman. Secrets of Midland Heights would have us believe that this town is so small (how...small... is... it?) that it broadcasts a high school football game on the radio and on television. This town is so small that two generations of the same family coincidentally rendezvous at adjoining rooms of the town motel to engage in the throes of sexual passion. This town is so small that the high school kids go on hayrides, which are big deals in Midland Heights even if one dejected young lady manages to put the whole thing in perspective.

' "I think I'm mature enough to miss one Founders' Day hayride . without going to pieces," she says bravely.

It's easy to see why CBS wanted this series out of the reach of children. The actors and actresses are attractive enough to be immortalized on posters, but they're also eerily dissimilar to high school students of the current generation. High school seniors are no longer innocent and stupid (if, indeed, they ever were), but Secrets of Midland Heights has its young characters frozen in the anachronistic amber of the Dobie Gillis era. On the notorious hayride, for example, the students of modern-day Midland Heights break into a rousing chorus of Tom Dooley.

Now I don't mean to split hays, but Tom Dooley was a hit song for The Kingston Trio in 1959... three years before a modern-day 18-year-old would have breathed his first breath, much less hummed his first folk song. I doubt that you could find one high school senior in 100 who could identify Tom Dooley, let alone sing it. (Their follow-up number, incidentally, was Bottle o' Wine, a newer but much more obscure song that even Cameron Cohick, rock critic for The Fort Lauderdale News Sun-Sentinel, admitted was "before my time." If Cohick is incapable of dredging up more than the chorus, how can a Midland Heights teenybopper break into three-part harmony without so  much as a moment's hesitation?) It's worth discussing such picayune details at length because these very details can make or break a show of this type.

To reach a young audience, Secrets has to be believable to a young audience - and this one hasn't got a prayer. In the later time slot, CBS might be able to get away with more because parents won't know how outdated the show's portrayal of young people really is. It might, in fact, be a source of great comfort. In the soap opera sweepstakes, Secrets of Midland Heights comes in dead last. Dallas has the ultimate villain and a handful of delectable men and women: Knots Landing has good directorial style, and both it and Flamingo Road have female, versions of J.R.Ewing.

Secrets, conversely, has little to offer. The cast members aren't worth mentioning, so they won't be mentioned. The acting is minimal to somnambulistic, and the script is straight from the "One plot twist from Column A, two from Column B" school of building-block TV writing. The only thing Secrets has actually, is the best double entrendre line among the season's new pilot shows.

One howlingly funny line, though, is no reason to watch Secrets of Midland Heights. Nor, when you think about it. to make it.

When the question "What function does Secrets of Midland Heights fill?" was put to David Jacobs, the producer responded with the only acceptable answer. "What function?" he repeated: Then he smiled, obviously deciding to 'fess up. "Saturday at 10 o'clock.,.".

[j swift]

Dude, could've at least told us the line...

And the cast wasn't worth mentioning - harsh

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Edited October 23, 2023 by j swift

[Broderick]

I agree with the reviewer that "Secrets of Midland Heights" wasn't very entertaining.  Aside from Linda Hamilton being beautiful and Lorenzo Lamas being handsome, there really wasn't much to offer an audience.  

But I have to laugh at the reviewer's rant about the kids singing "Tom Dooley" on a hayride.  He says, "I doubt you could find 1 in 100 high school seniors who could identify Tom Dooley, let alone SING it."  Where in blazes did this reviewer go to school??  When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, you couldn't find a soul who couldn't sing Tom Dooley.  Whenever there was a PTA meeting, school assembly, or operetta at my school, the boys in my class were expected to get on-stage and sing some hokey old standard like that, with little (if any) practice.  We had to belt out "This Land is Your Land", "City of New Orleans", "Home on the Range", Marty Robbins' "El Paso", Waylon & Willie's "Luckenbach Texas", and of course "Tom Dooley" at the drop of a hat.  The music teacher often wouldn't even provide us with a lyric sheet -- she just assumed that every kid in America knew those songs, and well, most of us did.    

[Chris 2]

I wonder if it’s a regional thing? I grew up in the 70s and 80s and I didn’t remember “Tom Dooley” at all (though I listened on Youtube and the melody sounds vaguely familiar). But we definitely sang “This Land is Your Land” and “Home on the Range” and I could probably still belt out all the lyrics today lol. They taught us in music class in school. I didn’t learn them at home.

Do they still teach those old standards in school?

[Broderick]

I doubt music is as much a part of the curriculum now as it was back then.  "Tom Dooley" might've been regional.  I was in the middle third of the country.  

[Paul Raven]

CBS Saturday night schedule had been a disaster for several years after they failed to find sitcoms to replace Mary Tyler Moore/Bob Newhart and ABC swooped in with Love Boat/Fantasy Island and dominated the night.

Flops like American Girls,Big Shamus/Little Shamus and fading sitcoms (Rhoda/Good Times) didn't help. Dallas was rescued by being moved to Sundays.

Secrets had Freebie and the Bean as a lead in so it was 2 new shows up against Love Boat/Fantasy on ABC and an NBC movie.

SOMH ratings history

Ep 1 Dec 6 Founders Day 11.8/21 # 57th  of 65 shows

Ep 2 Dec 13 The Searchers 15.1/27 53rd of 66

Ep 3 Dec 20 Decisions 9.1/18 70th of 71

Ep 4 Dec 26 Hooverville  Special Friday episode after Dukes of Hazzard, pre empting Dallas  22.2/41 6th of 63

Ep 5 Jan 3 Letting Go 11.2/18 62nd of 66

Ep 6 Jan 10 The Race 10.4/18 67th of 68

Ep 7 Jan 17 The Birthday Party 9.7/17 65th of 67

Ep 8  Jan 24 Facing Facts 10.7/19 66th of 67

I don't know why CBS didn't put the first episode on after Dukes of Hazzard in the Dallas timeslot. It would have got a great sampling which could only have helped its chances on Sat night. Maybe they didn't want to interrupt Dallas at that point (it was up to its 5th episode of the season).

And when they did show it on Frday and got great numbers they didn't show it the next night to capitalize on that, instead making viewers wait a week by which time interest would have wained.

[te.]

Honestly, I'm not sure why they thought a youth-oriented program would do well on Saturday at 10PM? 

[Khan]

I'm not sure either, @te.  Younger viewers (who aren't in bed already) tend not to be home on Saturday nights if they can help it.  I wonder if they would have been more successful airing, say, on Monday nights, as an alternative to "Monday Night Football"?

[Soaplovers]

I'm guessing that Lorimar/David Jacobs/CBS were aiming to make this into a Peyton Place type of primetime soap for the 80s.

Putting a show aimed at the teen/young adult crowd on Saturday night was not smart, and it didn't seem as though there was anything that would make people want to check it out (i.e. no hook).

It seemed like the producers figured maybe there were too many characters/plots for people to keep track of and they redid the show as Kings Crossing focusing on one family moving back home to start over.  A more soapy version of the 70s show Family.

Edited 3 hours ago by Soaplovers

[DRW50]

Broadcasting Magazine (May 5, 1980) : Future US-Next TV : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Looking at an old Broadcast issue with a fall schedule preview. Their description of the show:

Lorimar Productions turns its cameras "below the surface of a small, traditional, thriving college town still large controlled by its founders, the Millingtons." Plot elements include "nurtured dreams, closely-held desires, closeted shame and vital truths about friends and family." Lee Rich, Michael Filerman and David Jacobs are executive producers of the Roundelay production, in association with Lorimar. 

They also mention the show in a small section about advertising's point of view. 

Advertising agency reaction to the new fall line-ups announced by ABC and CBS last week varied. But upfront, some agency types were apprehensive that their advertisers might be turned off by some of the new "titillating" entries. "I'm concerned about the amount of permissiveness," said one executive, with CBS' Secrets of Midland Heights commonly mentioned as one possible offender.

Edited 4 hours ago by DRW50