The two-part TV movie JACQUELINE SUSANN'S VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, 1981, premiered 45 years ago. The first 2-hour installment aired on Oct. 19, 1981, and the next day, a 3-hour conclusion aired. The first part of VOD 1981 was the #6 most-watched TV show of the week, with 23.7 million viewers. The second installment the following night competed with the first game of the World Series (the #1 most-watched show that week, with 29.9 million viewers), but still ranked #20 for the week. Laurence Heath's script updated Jacqueline Susann's novel (which begins in 1945 and ends on New Year's Eve 1965) to the 1980s. Nathan Lane made his TV debut in this "motion picture event." Tom Shales reviewed the miniseries in the Washington Post in 1981: “More may never have been less than in the new five-hour, yes five-hour, CBS production of "Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls," the kind of undertaking that inspires the mildly tantalizing question: How good could it have been even if it had been any good? The leaden and laborious remake, at 9 tonight and 8 tomorrow night, supposedly "updates" Susann's 1966 novel and the 1967 movie of it, but the '80s Hollywood in which the film is set is one where no one seems to have discovered cocaine and everyone in the film business is running around making movie musicals, which died even before Susann did. Writer Laurence Heath and director Walter Grauman apparently meant this as a kind of pale shadow cast by the first movie, which seemed lousy enough in its day but which looks like truth, beauty, and your favorite easy chair compared to the remake. You watch something like "Valley of the Dolls" and you wonder how much more dehumanized and dull pop pulp can possibly get. It is a shivaree of the living dead.” The NYT’s TV critic John J. O’Connor wrote, “The film, directed by Walter Grauman, moves along determinedly, draped in splashy costumes by Jean-Pierre Dorleac and punctuated every so often with a fairly elaborate musical number. Long sequences feature the making of a Henry Bellamy film that appears to be a musical version of ''The Love Boat.'' Throughout, incidentally, Mr. Coburn's Bellamy sticks close to an uncanny impersonation of John Huston. But Laurence Heath's script loses much of the book's narrative drive. Whatever may be said about Miss Susann's talents--and a lot already has been--her novel captured the almost bitchy energy of the scene she was describing. This film tends to go limp too frequently. Anne, who is the book's central character, recedes in the movie, partly because of a lackluster performance by Miss Hicks, partly because the script is preoccupied with the more melodramatic stories of Neeley and Jennifer. The net result is that ''Valley of the Dolls'' emerges once again as little more than a glossy soap opera.”
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