Poor Linda. Every acting instinct she has in Seasons 1 or 2 is
exactly correct. But, as I've said countless times, the static acting directive (which kicked in with the very first installment of Season 3) and the subsequent script problems just eventually
ruined her performance. Such that people began laughing at her. HILL STREET BLUES creator Steven Bochco said of Linda in 1987:
"She can't act her way out of a paper bag." And given where DYNASTY was at that point, he was only reporting what he saw.
It's a tricky thing playing a good person, the genuine and unpretentious moral conscience among a motley brood of characters -- and no one ever did it better than Linda Evans in the first two years of DYNASTY... Her presence and delivery are like finely-etched --- well--- crystal, Limoges porcelain china in human form, a sensate sage with a certain resolute toughness.
It's a hard balance to strike. And she did it so well, she was up for several awards (and even won a couple) for the first two seasons... And nobody laughed -- yet.
So what happened?
How did Linda go from that to the critics dismissing her as some aging, talentless looker, her once-celebrated on-screen character almost ignored and forgotten about during the last-half of the '80s and the series? (And indeed that happened).
The writing -- and S.A.D. -- clearly had a major role in it. But sometimes I wonder if she was
actually instructed at some point to act the role of Krystle in a more reactive, victimy, slightly-hysterical way, in order to achieve a Tom-and-Jerry dynamic (with Alexis as Tom) somebody somewhere thought desirable... Her performance in Seasons 1 and 2 had such a quiet intelligence about it, revealing those qualities in Linda herself, that somebody somewhere
really had to knock her out of her zone in order to mess it all up.
Her shift from a soulful. adult woman with a measured and balanced countenance (in the beginning) to an infantilized earnestness, her voice changing from a husky melancholy to a never-ending squeaky desperation (with all those head shakes as she bleats on) now seem premeditated. The difference is just too pointed and sudden. Somebody behind-the-camera thought Krystle would seem "stronger" if she started delivering her rants in a more "assertive" and desperate manner -- not understanding the quiet strength she displayed in the first couple of seasons (which resonated far more deeply).
Was it just Linda herself, suffocated by the S.A.D., no longer believing her own lines, feeling "stultified" (as Gordon Thomson described it years later) within the creative morass that DYNASTY had quickly become? Or had Linda, now one of the most famous people on the planet (along with Joan) begun listening to all the fan mail where, at the peak of your career, you're often told to do
the exact reverse in your performance of what you've
been doing which had been working the best (e.g., "don't be so sad/be happier," "you're too nice," "you said that too mean,"...). And she took it to heart?
Or any or all of the above? (I suspect Eileen "Mike" Pollock was the culprit).
Can we imagine how Evans would have performed her intelligent, indignant monologue in the "Rapunzel/JohnD.Rockeffeller'sBirthday" scene from Season 1 had she had to perform it a couple of years later??
There are very few Linda Evanses who could play a Krystle. But they effectively
un-cast her with the excessive constraints and narrative issues that began in Season 3. Her wistful, sometimes angry, poetry replaced by an unfocused, squealy neurosis.
Only once the change in the character was finally acknowledged, with Paulsen's first episode (i.e., "For years she hasn't been
herself!") and a medical diagnosis provided, I could relax a little bit.
And for all the superficial flash and kinetic brittleness of Alexis, so-goes-Krystle-so-goes-Dynasty. The backbone of Blake and the blood of Alexis just don't work if the heart, Krystle, is no longer pumping.
, nuanced often ends up looking like pastel, yuk... 
