I understand that this a generalization and I'm sure there are many people (including young'uns) who love the classic tv shows, but overall I think that modern television has created a demand for slickness that cannot be reveresed.
The slickness has to do with production values, and that is something for which posters have praised peach Dynasty. But while later-seasons DYNASTY actually wrote the book on choosing style over substance, early on it was
substance first,
story and
character first, and in that area I don't find newer shows improved, but rather lobotomized. To mention a successful drama of many decades, Grey's Anatomy, the characters and the patients pour out their whole life story to complete strangers and do so in convenient intervals between commercial breaks. In other shows, such as Riverdale or Scandal, for instance, the plot twists happen at breakneck pace that would make even DYNASTY and the Rita storyline the epitome of verisimilitude. You mentioned Miami Vice, but that was also chewing-gum taste focusing on the songs and the apparel of the two male leads--quite DYNASTY for men if you ask me. I mentioned
Downton Abbey because the plots of the first three seasons are not full of the histrionics and the blow ups of modern drama, even with a World War happening in its storyline. The modern drama on network TV has tried, unsuccessfully, to rival venues such as HBO and Netflix by upping up the cheap thrills, so that there are fall finales, explosions, murderers, rape, what have you in every episode. Again, DYNASTY in its worse years was quite like that.
But you are right that Downton Abbey was in a sense "modern," because I remember criticism in the UK press when characters would use phrases that had not been coined at the time period when the drama was set.
I think something that modern TV, mostly cable in the US, has done in terms of substance is to try to make all characters live in the grey area: the decent ones have a dirty past, the evil ones are redeemed, etc. In that, I think, DYNASTY and DALLAS would indeed suffer, although Adam went through enough permutations to perhaps qualify.
