Dallas Vs Dynasty

[cardiff1984]

From the outset, Dallas had more to offer in it's first seven years, with great plots, (Sue Ellen and Cliffs affair, who shot JR, Pam and Bobby's marriage, Barnes/Ewing Feud, Ellie's masectomy etc), the actors lived up to the standards and the audience loved it week in week out. But, then, it kinda went silly after Bobby got killed off. The dream idea was ridiculous and could have been written much better. It paid the price for so many loved characters and actors leaving in quick succesion at the end of each season, in order, Victoria Principal, Steve Kanaly, Linda Gray, Barbara Belle Geddes etc, it spelled the end of Dallas. Dynasty did have it's moments, with the Moldive Massacre and the slanging fights between Alexis and Krystle. Pamela Sue Martin was hot, I remember her from 'The Poseideon Adventure.' Although I did take quite a fancy to Emma Samms. Dynasty I felt could have ended a little better, instead of a cliffhanger, but I have to say it ended miles better than Dallas did. I was very much expecting a reunion between Bobby and Pam, and what did we get.........The Devil and a suicidal JR. Not JR's style by any means. Over the course, it's Dallas for me, but I sort of got attracted to Knots Landing too, it was between glamerous and non glamerous and it's series finale was great, better than Dallas's and Dynasty's.

[flipper]

maybe it hasnt been said. i havent read all.
i think dallas in the beginning was destined to a male audience and dynasty was created for a female audience.
let's remember that women are a majority to watch tv.

[Principal Rules]

I will never understand why people get so attached to one person playing a role on TV. I personally am of the few that didn't mind Donna Reed as Miss Ellie and I loved Emma Samms as Fallon. I couldn't stand Pamela Sue Martin in the role so the switch was good for me. I watched both when they premiered. Dallas was my favorite but that was because of VP. I think had Emma Samms been on Dynasty from the beginning it may have been a different outcome for me. All in all for this viewer both had their moments of smelling like a rose and both had their moments of stinking. I liked them both.
And before the question is asked I'll answer it, Yes I would've accepted Dallas replacing VP. In fact I think they should've hired that chick that looked so much like her for the role. It would've made sense. But then it's TV it's not supposed to make sense it's just supposed to be entertaining and for me both shows were.

[Dallas*Dynasty]

I liked Dynasty more than Dallas years ago. Now I like both series as the same.

[JR's Darlin']

I loved both Dallas and Dynasty as a little kid, when I was twelve. As an adult rewatching, I still love Dallas while I can't get through Dynasty much at all.

Same here. I was 12 when Dallas premiered and was instantly hooked. I started out with Dynasty too and I liked it, but never as much as Dallas. I have very little interest in Dynasty now, whereas I'm still hooked on Dallas.

[Angela Channing]

I will never understand why people get so attached to one person playing a role on TV. I personally am of the few that didn't mind Donna Reed as Miss Ellie and I loved Emma Samms as Fallon. I couldn't stand Pamela Sue Martin in the role so the switch was good for me. I watched both when they premiered. Dallas was my favorite but that was because of VP. I think had Emma Samms been on Dynasty from the beginning it may have been a different outcome for me. All in all for this viewer both had their moments of smelling like a rose and both had their moments of stinking. I liked them both.
And before the question is asked I'll answer it, Yes I would've accepted Dallas replacing VP. In fact I think they should've hired that chick that looked so much like her for the role. It would've made sense. But then it's TV it's not supposed to make sense it's just supposed to be entertaining and for me both shows were.

Totally agree with your comments, Princliple Rules.

I remember wheh Stephen Fry was interviewed by Terry Wogan on his chat show and Mr Fry revealed he was a great fan of Dallas and described Dynasty as being "rubbish". I also totally agree with Stephen Fry on his comments too.

[Canyon340]

It's the most mature DALLAS ever gets. And I, for one, felt it was totally right for the show, and we were the lesser when it was gone.

Oh my goodness, yes. The show looked magnificent in that season. The lighting wasn't always flattering to the female contingent of the cast, but it gave the show a kind of realism (albeit polished) that amplified the characters to as close to 3 dimensions as they were ever going to get. The sets were superb - for the one and only time the offices, the ranch and the drinking holes looked like real places that were populated by real people. It's still hard to contemplate that a mere 3 years later the show would look as though it was shot on a cheap camcorder.

I am extremely grateful for Bradford May's woefully short stint on the show.

[SnarkyOracle!]

Oh my goodness, yes. The show looked magnificent in that season. The lighting wasn't always flattering to the female contingent of the cast, but it gave the show a kind of realism (albeit polished) that amplified the characters to as close to 3 dimensions as they were ever going to get. The sets were superb - for the one and only time the offices, the ranch and the drinking holes looked like real places that were populated by real people. It's still hard to contemplate that a mere 3 years later the show would look as though it was shot on a cheap camcorder.

I am extremely grateful for Bradford May's woefully short stint on the show.

Yes, I liked DALLAS grown up. And I think everybody else did, too.

Except the producers.

[ronald mascot]

Season 7 had a lot of class, it oozed it, like oil.

[JohnRossEwingtheBest]

Daytime did it all the time, recast the actors. Several times the second or third actor became the one most associated with the role, Susan Seaforth Hayes, Julie from 'Days of our lives' was the third actor to play the part and became an icon. Victoria Wyndum from 'Another WOrld', played Rachel the third actress and she too went on to great frame too. Emma Samms was a bad choice simply because she was demure and timid compared to Martin's gruff, pushy performance.
I agree about Pam, they should have gone with the dead-ringer actor. I don't think most fans would care about a recast as long their is at least some resemblance and she was. They could have taken her to the end of the series and prevented those final years from becoming so dull. Just think of the dramatic paths taken if Pamela had the brush with death and was covered with scars, had to deal with issues of being intimate and her self-worth. It would have saved the show creatively, but I think by that point, after Duffy had returned, Dallas felt it couldn't dare take anymore risks after the dream experiment polarized so many.
Donna Reed was fated to leave anyway since she was dying and died a few months after being fired. I preferred over BBG simply because she was the better actor in every regard. She didn't have those annoying pronunciations, PAMMMMMMM, LU----CEEE, GUH-ARYYY, JUH RRRRRR, or emote on three speeds- Angry, calm, weepy. She even looked the part, hair was coiffed like a rich old lady and her wardrobe too. She didn't look like she was ashamed of her wealth by wearing stupid, boring sack dresses. People fawn over BBG but even her movie roles, she's annoying as hell. I used to always wish just one time ole Jock would have gave her a good cuffing for saying, PAMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

[Kirby]

I loved both shows, to be honest!

[abbylexis]

I too enjoyed all the primetime soaps (Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, 90210, Melrose Place) some more some less, but the prime time genre in its crude aspect not the re-invention seen in today's show, but in its original format is great, watching human conflicts, stories that bring out all types of human emotions and sides the better and the worst mixed with a dose of over the top storylines, what can be called melodrama.

[ronald mascot]

I've been re-watching some seasons of Dynasty again and I have to admit, it's a good show! I had forgotten about all the things they got right- and it's a lot. I have so far watched Seasons 2, 3 and 4. Season 2 is great! I think their Season 2 is the season of Dallas where Cliff Barnes tries to commit suicide and I have to admit, I think Dynasty might have had the better season that year. Some of the shows and plots are just brilliant, and not all are a copy of Dallas- they had some good ones of their own. Season 4 seemed to be a turning point where the plots became less important than the dresses and the glitz because there is not that much going on in Season 4, yet the ratings kept getting better. But seasons 2 and 3 are great seasons and although 4 is shaky, there are still some good moments in there- mostly at the end, though, for me. It's not a consistently good show like Dallas- and parts are a blatant rip-off, but it's definitely worth watching, some very rewarding, thrilling and brilliant episodes.

[SnarkyOracle!]

This weekend I’ve been re-viewing Season 3 (per DVD count, the year that ends with ‘Who Shot JR?’) just because I’ve felt like it.

Tonight in particular, I watched the episode “Love and Marriage.” Plotwise, I supposed it’s a routine installment: JR trying to nudge Jock into coaxing Bobby back into Ewing Oil in order to get Daddy out of the office, Pam and Bobby bicker soapily about her lengthy work hours at The Store, Ray and Donna have their first date on Sam Culver’s grave, Ellie waxing wistful about her family’s coming apart (even though they’re not).



Yet this episode epitomizes the things that made the series (or at least the first half of it) so uniquely effective; despite the obligatory office shenanigans that must go on in order to fuel the family fortune, it’s the night scenes at the ranch which define the thing: there is the hushed, hovering sense of leisurely doom which hangs over the family somehow isolated in their own alternative dimension at Southfork. It’s a kind of creeping damnation – a description I’ve often given to the tone of DARK SHADOWS, but that one’s got vampires and werewolves; here, the Ewings are quite enough.

It’s hard to say what incantation exactly conjures this eerie, almost witchy DALLAS mood, this cattle ranch twilight zone. Obviously, the chosen actors have something to do with it. Presumably, Leonard Katzman’s guiding hand still restrained by Philip Capice, David Paulsen influencing the scripts (though he’s not yet on the show by the time of “Love and Marriage”), and the hypnotic scores from Bruce Broughton all converge to cast this spell. But it's easy to imagine this is the dark vortex in which Kennedy was killed.

For a good half dozen years, from early 1979 thru 1985, DALLAS was able to evoke some version of this weird, compelling mood. Some periods and some scenes and some story arcs tap into it more than others, and even DALLAS had a pedestrian dry period for a year or so after “Who Shot JR?” subsided. Yet there are so many moments from that dinner a few episodes earlier when JR offers Kristin a job while the family’s collective eye rolls, through the battle over Jock’s will three years later, and Bobby’s death ----- it’s almost macabre, if subtly so.

After that, of course, producer and cast changes, off-camera power struggles, and a reductive, increasingly overt parodic flavor turned DALLAS into something less engrossing. But for several years, it had its own little séance potential which could be unleashed at the drop of a stetson.

Somehow, even in DYNASTY’s best days (Seasons 1, 2 and 9) it never quite had any of that. Well-cast and well-dressed though the Carringtons were, even before the narrative tumble and creative disarray of Season 3 onward had begun, it never really possessed the haunted corners and shadows that Southfork suggested. That’s not to say that DYNASTY was lacking in possibility: Alexis in the art studio on the lawn of the mansion, the backstory of how Blake caught his first wife with her lover, even the Moldavia massacre gave hints of what could have been. But the writer-producers of DYNASTY seemed to understand little of what they had in front of them, fighting nature all the way, demanding the actors emote as talking trees overwrought dialogue addressing stories no one had bothered to flesh out.



Strange that DALLAS could tap into a Halloween mood so easily even when the early seasons of that show were overly resistant to anything even vaguely “arty.” While DYNASTY, despite its bottomless pretensions, spent all its energy ineptly squelching its inborn potential --- such that we never quite found out what that potential might be.

So it’s different. And sometimes the actors said it best.

DALLAS felt curiously biblical, an Old Testament parable, or as Susan Howard once described it, "a great big morality play about all these wealthy people with every advantage imaginable constantly stabbing away at each other ---- for nothing." While DYNASTY, as John Forsythe once pointed out, "was much harder to delineate." Even if it shouldn't have been.

[JR.SUPERSTAR]

Dynasty is good but DALLAS RULE!

[SnarkyOracle!]

Thank you!

[witchboy]

Alexis did defend Adam on Dynasty. They more or less were the two characters closest to eachother on the show in a quite weird and un-nerving way. Sometimes they were too close for comfort, they are very alike. Adam is undoubtedly his mothers son. And she clung to him more than Fallon who at first rejected her, Alexis always worked better with males. She also was close to Steven but I felt that she sometimes was disapointed by him although this was never said in the show.

Alexis and Adam did have an untertone of incest to their relationship, but then Adam had inapropriate sexual chemistry with a lot of his relatives, including Steven. Adam was just too sexy for his own good.
It does occur to me that Adam is the only child Alexis didn't abandon, as he was taken from her, so he didn't have a right to resent her for that the way her other kids did. Although it is debatable just how responsible Alexis was for her seperation from Fallon and Steven, since she may well have had legitimate reason to fear for her life if she had defied Blake and tried to see them.

I do get the impression that Alexis was dusapointed that Steven was gay. She's more reasonable about it than Blake, but she did want him to change instead of accepting him. Fallon and Alexis clashed a lot, but then Alexis didn't get on with other women anyways, and I think Alexis sees a little bit too much of herself in Fallon, at least in looks and her vulnderable side. Fallon may remind Alexis of the younger woman she was.
Amanda had a pretty decent relationship with Alexis all things considered. Alexis was in her life as a kind of auntie, so they knew each other better than her other kids, and Amanda seemed to get over any anger she had at Alexis for not keeping her pretty fast. I think Alexis was less threatened by Amanda because they weren't as similar. Alexis could see Amanda more as taking after Blake than herself, which she seems to prefer, since Steven is much the same way.

[ronald mascot]

I do get the impression that Alexis was dusapointed that Steven was gay. She's more reasonable about it than Blake, but she did want him to change instead of accepting him. .

I noticed that too watching Season 2 3 4 and 5 again recently, oh she is great to his face or when he is the room, but there is one scene I don't remember the exact words or who she is talking to- maybe Adam or Blake- where she says his lifestyle style was either a mistake or wrong- that was disappointing because there is really NO ONE on the show who supported him, except Fallon, and even she seemed to look down on it at times and say catty things sometimes.

I think the darkness that Dallas presented, also, in the first few seasons, at least, also came from that moody music and score, you could get these heavy bass lines (da-dum!) that out of some creepy horror movie.

[Katherine Wentworth]

Dynasty always felt like it was what gay men wanted Dallas to be, hence its shallowness, cat fights and campy tone.

Idiotic comment and a cheap shot at gays. I never watched a single episode of Dynasty and never wanted it be a "shallow" gay version of Dallas, what's wrong with you? Dallas has a lot of gay fans and I urge the moderators of this board to discourage gratuitous attacks on gays.

[CarlD]

Dynasty is good but DALLAS RULES!

Agree with that !!

Both are tv classics, and made the 80's great to those of us lucky enough to watch them both in first run episodes.