Again, most of us knew what to expect with this project, and the trailer matched it precisely.
What oldDYNASTY was based on, at least intially, is now something most people don't remember; it was a post-war throwback to the aspirations of the 1950s, where concepts of "class" didn't just mean money and clothes, but
taste and bearing. Or the pretensions of such.
A lot of that was bull$h!t, naturally, and the show itself quickly went for a strictly clothes-and-cash motif where genuine class and taste were anathema. In other words: it became crap, about people who were crap, in a story crappily told.
Nevertheless, the ambitions of the tastefully grand pilot movie from 1980, and the early casting, kept in mind (for some of us) what oldDYNASTY was once tied to.
In the modern era, the vulgarization of the culture (not a priggish phrase, just descriptive) which "the kids" have grown up with over the last several decades, where the most grisly bodily functions are discussed with great artless hilarity thru the media, and video footage of mass murders are available with the click of a button, and women dressed in gold lamé gowns tossing over glass tables and throwing champagne flutes while screaming, "You stay away from MF man, you GD MF!!" (which I realize is very, very 2012) populate an endless slew of reality shows, seems to leave little or no room for subtlety.
But as others have pointed out, shows like GAME OF THRONES have proven yet again that you don't need to scream at the audience as loudly or as rapidly as possible in order to get them and keep them. But as long as there are Hollywood executives who insist something
has to be done a certain way in order to guarantee contemporary "commerciality" (and there always will be) we're stuck with nearly all the product following those guidelines.
They say in Hollywood, no one knows anything. But that the executives know less than anybody else. And one assumes there's a lot of truth to that.
Matthew Weiner said that when he was shopping around MAD MEN to the various cable netwoks, some of them got visibly angry at him that he even had the pretense or ambition of doing something "good" that wasn't cut to a trite, predictable pattern. And he only finally sold the concept of MAD MEN to AMC because they hadn't produced their own series content before, and had fewer preconceptions of what you "have to do" to make the show a success.
Anyway, when even the oldDYNASTY quickly betrayed its promise and dished out only clothes and catfights and crass cash, how can we expect the new version to be above that? OldDYNASTY was only briefly connected to "old rich" concepts and quickly went
nouveau riche to an absolute fault. Only that casting served to continue to hint at something better, even after the writing and the static acting directive effectively neutralized the effect of that casting.
The nuDYNASTY appears to have the same faults, only in keeping with modern ideas about speed and intensity. And with no sense of the casting of the original, because the present culture doesn't even know what that sensibility is -- they don't know what it means or what it represents or represented.
And we can't really blame them for that, even if we kinda do.
How can we demand that nuDYNASTY not make the mistakes of this era when oldDYNASTY made the mistakes of its era (i.e., '80s cheezy, synthesized style over substance and self-consciously unconvincing self-importance)?
But I'll watch the pilot. And once I tune out of nuDYNASTY, it won't be because it doesn't measure up to the profound flaws of the original show (much less its strengths) but because the new show will likely be so generic that it won't keep my interest... Yet lurid curiosity compels I'll give it a chance.
