International Broadcasts

[Karin Schill]

There wasn't much, but I have a few clippings, it's mostly just photos with Swedish text under it from Swedish tv guides. I can see if I can scan a few.

 

[hatayas]

Wow. That's great. Thanks for posting the article. Unfortunately, I can't read the writing. What does it say about Knots Landing? Is there an episode described? What was the title of the series in Israel? ... and when you write: "there was a big deal about it", do you mean that KL was very popular in Israel? Thank you very much for answering!

You're most welcone!
It is simply a tv guide page with no information on the episode ( like I said, I think it was the third time it was shown, it was on at 1 am).
The first time the show was aired it was on during prime time, and I remember that after every episode, they asked the viewers questions about the episode and viewers had to phone in to answer and win prizes.
The name of the show in Hebrew was the same as in English, they did not change it like they did in Germany and in France.
About the popularity of the show, I was 12 when it was first aired so I wasn't really aware of the buzz around it. I did know very few people who watched it. I don't think it was as popular as Dallas which was aired when Israel only had one TV channel. Back when Knots was aired in the beginning of the 1990's, people here were really into South American Telenovelas.

 

[Billy Nolan]

this is interesting information. Thank you very much. I find it exciting that viewers were able to answer a quiz about the series over the phone at the time. There has probably been an attempt to make the series more popular in an interactive way or to market it in Israel accordingly.
I have a couple of episode reports from a UK TV newspaper. There the readers could answer questions about the series under the table of contents of the respective episode. Also an exciting idea.

 

[Billy Nolan]

here's a quick look at my own episode guide. Sometime as a teenager I started collecting the little TV reports. In the beginning I only collected the ones on which Lisa Hartman was shown as "Ciji" and "Cathy" because I liked her best. Later I collected all of them - including the repetitions of the series a few years later and based on the press and promotional images and texts of the TV stations, I wrote my own table of contents for each episode. Over the years, more and more reports came - also from France, the USA and other countries.
We last watched the series with the whole family from December 2018 to December 2020. My son is arguably the youngest fan of the series. He loves the episode guide very much.
For the respective episodes I always included some background information about the production and the actors, if there was something to report on.

 

[Billy Nolan]

... sometimes I got a batch of various clippings from fans of other series. Something like that was an asset to the episode guide

 

[Karin Schill]

My latest rewatch of Knots Landing was in 2017-2018.

Also here are as promised the Swedish magazine clippings. They appeared in the Swedish tv guide magazine that came with the evening paper Aftonbladet back in 1996 or 1997.










Unfortunately that's all!

 

[Billy Nolan]

Wow. that´s cool. Thank you so much! So did they name the series "Knots Landing" in Sweden? and did they air all Seasons? I thought the Swedish title was "Gary Ewing J.R.´s bror".
The last picture of Gary is from Season 14. They used the same screenshot here in Germany.

 

[Karin Schill]

No unfortunately they only broadcast about 130 episodes of the show.
So we got to see season 1-6 and they left us on the cliffhanger of when Val saw her kidnapped babies!

The first title of the show was "JR's bror". The show was broadcast on TV3 back in the late 1980s. I was too young to watch the show then but my dad watched it and has some old VHS tapes marked with "JR's bror" on them. I found one of the tapes in the mid 1990s and got curious. So the first episode I ever saw of Knots Landing was "Encounters."

Later on between 1996-1997 they showed the same episodes in reruns. That's when I watched the first six seasons of Knots. It came on after the rerun of Dynasty had finished and I remember being really happy when I found out that Knots was finally coming on Swedish TV. That time around they didn't change the title but called it "Knots Landing" when it broadcast on Swedish TV3.

 

[Billy Nolan]

Oh, it's a shame that only 130 episodes were broadcast. Could you see the rest of it? Personally, I found the Season 6 and 7 casting with Alec Baldwin, Julie Harris, and Joan Van Ark particularly strong at the time. Alec Baldwin and Lisa Hartman in particular were very popular in this country.
Why weren't there any other episodes broadcast in Sweden?
Could it have something to do with the Swedish title "J.R.'s bror - Gary Ewing"? After all, the dream season of "Dallas" was the reason that from then on "Knots Landing" was no longer related to the mother series "Dallas". That would have meant that the 7th season of "Knots Landing" would have been dreamed of too.

Did Knots Landing also air in Denmark and Finland, Karin? Do you know more about it?

 

[Billy Nolan]

I found a discussion in a Swedish Forum about KL
There seems to be more fans in Northern Europe.

 

[Billy Nolan]

More articles: from Germany about KL´s last episode, Italy: KL´s reunion, UK: fanclub and "Golden Moments"

 

[Seaviewer]

"The Landing Party" - great name for a fan group.

 

[Billy Nolan]

rare reports from the Netherlands. KL was not broadcast in the Netherlands, but the program guides referred to the German and English TV channels. The Dutch were able to watch the soap opera on ZDF (Germany) and BBC (UK).

 

[Karin Schill]

Oh, it's a shame that only 130 episodes were broadcast. Could you see the rest of it? Personally, I found the Season 6 and 7 casting with Alec Baldwin, Julie Harris, and Joan Van Ark particularly strong at the time. Alec Baldwin and Lisa Hartman in particular were very popular in this country.
Why weren't there any other episodes broadcast in Sweden?
Could it have something to do with the Swedish title "J.R.'s bror - Gary Ewing"? After all, the dream season of "Dallas" was the reason that from then on "Knots Landing" was no longer related to the mother series "Dallas". That would have meant that the 7th season of "Knots Landing" would have been dreamed of too.

Did Knots Landing also air in Denmark and Finland, Karin? Do you know more about it?

Unfortunately I don't know if Denmark and Finland broadcast Knots Landing or not.

Then as for in Sweden, I think the reason they only broadcast the first 130 episodes was because it didn't get a big enough audience. TV3 was the new cable channel when they got Knots Landing in the late 1980s. Maybe they had hoped to get the kind of success that Dallas had. But Dallas was on SVT, which is public service and at the time was the only network. So with only two channels naturally half of the population watched Dallas!

TV3's audience was smaller as most people didn't even have access to the channel. In the 1990s the channel and it's audience had grown. But I guess they still considered it too expensive to buy the rest of the series so they just rerun the episodes they still had the rights to broadcast.

I checked out the forum you mentioned and the posters were mostly just lamenting how the show had never been showed in full in Sweden and wondering if some channel could broadcast it.

Then as for me, yes I have watched all of Knots Landing twice. I think I have watched the first 6 seasons three times.
I was able to get hold of the rest of the episode through fan friends I've made in the UK and USA that made me copies on VHS or DVD. A friend in Germany also sent me the mini-series reunion from 1997. So yes I 've got to watch it all but it took me about 14 years to do so, as years could pass by before I got hold of "new" episodes.

 

[Billy Nolan]

Sometimes I think Knots Landing was broadcast too late in some European countries. In the late 1980s, people no longer wanted to see the fashion and lifestyle of the late 1970s / early 1980s. Nevertheless, the series was broadcast with success in France and Germany, where it also was broadcast in 1988. In Italy, the series was broadcast as a prime-time series in a weekly cycle as early as 1981. So I assume that it ran successfully there for at least a few years. The Italians weren't far behind with the episodes. Therefore, I am also very surprised that the series was simply ended shortly before the end of season 9 and the remaining seasons have not been broadcast there until today. In Italy, Knots Landing also had a completely different opening credits (see screenshot picture below).

 

[Billy Nolan]

I always liked it when our TV Guides pictured the supporting actors or guest stars of the series - and not always the "Holy Trinity - Karen, Abby, Val".
... like here Eric and Michael, Mary-Frances Sumner or Ray Geary and Phil Harbert




.

 

[Monzo]

Danielle Brisebois is biggest Knots Landing surprise to me. In mid-90''s she suddenly appeared first in UK charts, then in German charts, too. It took me a while to realize it's Mary-Francis! Since then she co-wrote many songs I love like Natasha Bedingfield's Unwritten, Kylie Minogue's Boombox and Donna Summer's Stamp Your Feet.

 

[Knots4ever]

Amazing thread I love hearing about international broadcasts of Knots Landing. I had started a thread a few years ago with some videos of what different countries did to the opening. A lot of the videos are no longer available on YouTube but I have managed to find some, so good time to post them here

Germany

Go to 1:48

France

 

[Knots4ever]

Part 2

France

Quebec

 

[Knots4ever]

Part 3

Quebec

Italy