Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure

With Dallas riding high in the ratings, abc decided to make Forth Worth – a show about a rich family in Texas. Producer Aaron Spelling rejects this project for what it is. Meanwhile husband and wife writing team Esther and Richard Shapiro are trying to their project off the ground; a series about the newly rich and privileged in Regan's America. The two projects get run together and Dynasty is created. Te first season does so-so in the ratings but it is not long before the producers and writers find themselves aiming lower for a bigger audience.

As the title suggests, this is a celebration of the ludicrous television series Dynasty and as such will be of interest to those of us that remember it. This is not to suggest that the film is any good though, because it has tvm writ large across every single scene. A potted history, this film allegedly avoids anything that would see the makers sued (eg the truth) and instead just flows through the making of the series with its various ridiculous twists and turns. The film matches the tone of the series and is all a bit silly and exaggerated. It is all a bit too affectionate though and doesn't have any teeth – seeing the rather insulting methods of winning ratings as daft fun rather than something detrimental to mass media etc. This will probably appeal to fans of the series though and, to be honest, who else will be watching this? The cast are very average. Reed and Singer are both good fun but the majority of the cast are overshadowed by the real people they are portraying. Everyone tries hard but Hardin, Hammond, Krige and John all just mug along with the easy caricatures given to them to work with. Overall then a trashy TVM very loosely based on the broad sweep of a decade of one television show. It entertains in a very basic way but one can't help wonder how it would have been if it tried to do more.

I was watching this film with great interest. Dynasty was one of my favorite programs growing up in the decadent 1980's. I was anticipating watching this film because I really liked Dynasty. However, the acting was awful. I couldn't remembered most of the story lines myself. I didn't remember that Alexis was suppose to be queen of Moldavia. Alice Kreig did a great job portraying Joan Collins. She got her mannerisms down to a t. The show Dynasty downfall was back in 1988 (towards the end of its run.) The country was going into a different direction at the end of the Dynasty run which is why middle America wasn't too interested in the show anymore. Dynasty was a social commentary of the Reagan years. It was a show of pure escape at the time.

I was a big Dynasty fan so needless to say I watched this crap carefully! Seems to me that they failed to do some of the obvious research before filming this crap! Heather Locklear's character, Sammy Jo, was not in attendance at the wedding in Moldavia!! So how is it that Esther Shapiro ordered more blood be spilled on her??? I refused to believe that Linda Evans was this blond air-head they made her out to be! The chick playing Joan Collins, what a joke!! We have seen Alexis wannabes come and go ever since Dynasty debuted, and this was the best they could do???!!! And where the hell was Fallon? No mention of the Carrington's number one daughter, Pamela Sue Martin or Emma Samms. They did however show us daughter number two. Another joke! Catherine Oxenberg who first played Amanda Carrington did not exit the show via a car crash as they showed in this movie. During the summer hiatus of 1986, Oxenberg was fired and then replaced by Karen Cellini by the time the show returned for the season premier in the fall. I could go on and on about all of the errors shown in this thrown-together-piece-of-crap!! The folks at Dynasty may have done themselves in with the over-the-top story lines after season 4, but this movie certainly did an injustice to the entire run of the show and I hope for the one who have never seen Dynasty will watch it on Soapnet or if it is ever released on DVD. Trust me, the first 4 seasons of Dynasty and even the final season are great! Dynasty: The Making Of A Guilty Pleasure should never be shown again!

In what has now become a genre unto itself (deliberately campy/tacky "behind the scenes" TV movie on the making of a 70's or 80's hit series - see also the ones about "Three's Company" and "Charlie's Angels" to name a few), this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel. A disclaimer at the beginning mentions name changes and time compression in order to account for the less than factual film that follows. They needn't have bothered. Virtually every detail of the film is completely and totally inaccurate!!! Told from the point of view of Esther Shapiro (Reed), the show's conception to it's peak to it's demise is shown through snippets of recreations and backstage squabbles. Reed, though NOTHING physically has been done to make her resemble her character in the slightest, manages to turn in a compelling and interesting performance. She is the sole bright spot of the movie. Singer, as her husband Richard, is also amusing and they stir up a little chemistry together. Hammond, again looking NOTHING like his real life counterpart, does an energetic job of trying to convey Aaron Spelling. Every other actor playing a real-life performer is miscast and horrendously badly acted. John neither sounds nor looks like John Forsythe, airheaded Hardin has nothing whatsoever to do with Linda Evans and, while the hair and clothes occasionally suggest her character, Krige is just plain bad as Joan Collins. None of these actors is portrayed as a human being. They're just cartoon cutouts in dress up. The film was going for a light touch with an intentionally kooky script and tongue firmly in cheek. But when the facts of the real story vary this much from the supposed behind the scenes expose, the whole thing just turns into a mess. To name just a FEW of the inaccuracies: Forsythe would not have been recording "Once upon a time there were three little girls..." in 1980. That voice-over was in the can half a decade earlier. Linda Evans would not have been out in the parking lot as part of a cattle call to read for Krystle. Though hardly a major star, she had more clout than that! In fact, "Dallas" had been touted as "The Linda Evans Project" during preproduction! She was to play Pamela Ewing. Joan Collins was only absent from ONE EPISODE of "Dynasty" during her contract dispute, yet she's shown here watching the show on TV without her. The whole thing was said and done before any new shows aired. Heather Locklear wasn't even AT the Moldavian Wedding, so her scene there is ludicrous. Catherine Oxenberg didn't exit the show in a car crash. Actors are already in costume and on set before they find out their lines? Maybe every so often, but this is treated as commonplace here. The Shapiros were ousted by the last season. There isn't enough space to list everything. The clothes are mostly wrong, the hair is nearly always wrong (Linda NEVER had the golden blonde color that Hardin sports throughout the film, Joan's big wig look didn't kick in until a few years after her arrival) and the whole thing is just garbage. How can there be a movie about "Dynasty" that doesn't even MENTION Fallon, Jeff, Adam or Claudia? Worse than that, the REAL dramas behind the scenes are either ignored fully or glossed over. For example, George Peppard was the first Blake. What happened? Pamela Sue Martin was a major player on the show, but she quit. Why? Linda and Joan both went through at least one divorce during the run. Joan's daughter was nearly killed in an accident with a car. These are just a couple of points. What does this film offer up?? John Forsythe occasionally checked out Heather Locklear's ass? Linda Evans did yoga on set? Joan Collins was self-involved and money-hungry? Wow...... What an expose. A few goofy, funny moments do not make up for this turd of a movie which borders on slander to the real life actors involved. There was already an "E! True Hollywood Story" that revealed far more (even if not a lot) than this. And if anyone should play Joan Collins, it should be Lesley-Anne Down, though she should be glad she had no part in this disaster.

I'm sitting here watching it on PVR and I can't really believe the slapdash nature of the whole thing, but there is one comment I really must make: Alice Krige is a phenomenal actress.

She seems so vivid and ephemeral a talent, that, really, the only time she can knock it out of the ballpark is when she has sufficient makeup and costumes to allow her to, in essence, channel herself.

She looks nothing like Joan Collins, but she is a riot, "doing" Joan Collins. And the last time she registered on the pop culture radar was her unsurpassable performance as the Borg Queen in "Star Trek: First Contact." (Backing up my earlier point.)

This is not a very good movie, and even I, twenty years later, can tell you how badly wrong they got the blocking of the first season finale (a fact, about which the knowledge of, I'm not altogether proud) but Krige OWNS this stupid thing.