Sometimes I think Linda's subconscious radar puts her in (almost) the right place at the right time: an English teacher forces her to join the highschool drama club to combat her shyness, she doesn't go out for any plays, yet when accompanying her girlfriend to an audition for a TV commercial, the producer walks through his outer office and hires her on the spot. Next thing you know, she's flirting with 40-ish John Forsythe in his BACHELOR FATHER sitcom and she's off to an acting career she never wanted yet supported her family.
Then she winds up marrying the man whose photo she had pinned to her bedroom wall.
She also winds up in two iconic series which become metaphors, of sorts, for their respective decades. The effectively forlorn pilot of BIG VALLEY, shot a year after JFK's assassination, seems to have parallels (the philandering father is "killed by the railroad," countless mourners attend his funeral, and there is little anybody can do about the injustice effectuated by a cabal even more powerful than the Barkleys) and if ever there was a decade since the 1930s which could be rightly described as a large valley, it's the 1960s (even though the series takes place in the 1870s). And then there's the effectively forlorn, almost holy pilot of DYNASTY, airing only days before Reagan's inauguration, a presidential reign vain and self-congratulatory which weakens the labor unions, undoes anti-trust laws, and eliminates progressive tax structures which had once contributed to the rise and economic well-being of the American middle class during the mid-twentieth century, ultimately leading to the long,
nasty dying of the middle class in the present, with parallels to the series' quickly adopted "rich is good, poor is bad" ethos and its excessive focus on vanity and superficiality. And DYNASTY ends shortly after Reagan leaves the White House.
Some of BIG VALLEY's episodes were pretty good, and I find its eventual shift from lost, funereal melancholy to paranoid, almost grand guignol
color noir to be surprisingly acceptable in an inevitable, late-'60s way, although I always wonder if the incessant use of Virgil W. Vogel (Stanwyck called him "the old master" but I found him a flat, by rote director) to guide so many episodes, had a big hand in the series' tendency to simmer in mediocrity; very few of the program's installments I really like are ever helmed by Vogel, and he did 43% of them. (And why wasn't the director of the pilot ever re-used, one wonders?) While
the emperor's-new-clothes-in-reverse dynamic of DYNASTY saw the quietly poignant series quickly slide into deleterious camp and scattered, discombobulated scripting made worse by a static acting policy which kept the characters frozen and even more unconvincing than the writing permitted, that made it also feel so very '80s in tone.
Beauty? Actress? Or small-screen zeitgeistic oracle?
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