Cynical Cinema

There may be no better television series in history for aspiring film industry people than Dynasty. It is great because you can grab Season Three, out on DVD October 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment, and keep it lying around your house. Because life is tough for people trying to break into the film and television industry. We’re always hearing about starving actors and writers, people who make their living dressing up as Wonder Woman on Hollywood Boulevard, having their pictures taken by tourists for cash while they continually struggle to break into the business while barely making ends meet at home. It can be depressing and sad and a lonely existence. You need a pick-me up every now and then. And Dynasty IS that pick-me-up.

You can’t watch four minutes of this show without thinking “oh my God! I could do that! I can act better than that! I could write that scene on the toilet at McDonalds! I could have filmed that with my mom’s old home video camera!” There is nothing quite like watching terrible actors deliver terrible dialogue in staggeringly ridiculous scenarios to give you hope that you, too, could make it in Hollywood. What’s truly amazing about Dynasty is that so many of the actors and actresses have made it in Hollywood. A very young Heather Locklear looks gorgeous but is clearly struggling with the whole acting thing. Joan Collins was, at the time, one of the best known “actresses” in the world. Linda Evans, following her time on Dynasty, pursued a successful career as the star of a series of infomercials. It was a star-maker series!

The plot of Dynasty is standard soap-opera fare. Betrayals, sexual liasons, love triangles, jealousy, murder, power struggles, conspiracies and cliffhangers abound. It is all so gloriously cheesy and campy and staggeringly stupid that one can’t help laughing while watching, and enjoying every minute. And it makes you feel good. Because yes you, whoever “you” are, could do that. And you could do it better.

I can remember, to some degree, Beverly Hills 90210 from my childhood. I don’t think I ever watched the show, but I knew all about it because it was one of those pervasive pop culture phenomena the became a part of my young life regardless of any involvement I may personally have had in watching the show. I remember Kelly, and Brandon, and Dylan and Andrea and Brenda and Steve. I remember that Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty and Luke Perry were the stars. And I remember that it was some kind of high-school related soap opera starring thirty-something actors passing for teenagers. And I attempted to revisit this phenomenon again when Paramount Home Entertainment released Season Five of Beverly Hills 90210 today, July 29th.

By season five, the stars of the show have already moved on to college, and now they look like they may well be college kids. Well, except for that girl who plays Andrea, who has a baby and a husband and looks like she could be forty. And Luke Perry, who is a drunken bad-boy this season and looks as though he could be forty-six. It’s almost hilarious to see him show up at a bar and be refused service because he’s underage. He’s clearly in his forties! Season Five is (I can only assume) better than Season Four, if only because Shannen Doherty has left the show (as explained in the first episode - Brenda has received some kind of scholarship to some school and will be staying in some European town and is not coming back). Taking her place is Valerie, played by Tiffany Amber Thiessen, (Kelly from Saved By The Bell), who is much hotter. So far so good.

Donna (Tori Spelling) is a rich little girl with rich old parents who buy her everything she wants. She is scheduled to make her “debut” later this season, because apparently this “debutante” crap still exists somewhere in the states. Her parents are nervous when she exhibits some behaviour unbecoming a young lady, like talking to a black man. But her friends are there for her. Her yes-man friends, who pat her on the head and tell her she’s special and that everyone loves her and she’ll be just fine. So, for all intents and purposes, she’s playing the real-life Tori Spelling. The only thing missing on this show is that her name is not “Tori”. I guess daddy bought her an acting career as well as all that plastic surgery.

Isn’t it amazing, thinking back on that cast now, that currently the most famous of all the cast members IS Tori Spelling? The only one who appears in tabloids and in the news and in the entertainment shows. Whatever happened to Ian Ziering? Or Jason Priestly? Or, more interestingly, Jennie Garth? Jennie Garth (who plays Kelly) was actually good. As an actress. Head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. Well, she’s often acting beside Tori Spelling, which doesn’t hurt. But not only was she the best actress on the show, she was also the hottest girl. So shouldn’t that have meant a bigger career for her after this show had run it’s course?

But the biggest mystery of all, for me, was the disappearance of Luke Perry following the end of Beverly Hills 90210. This guy, in season five, is a drunken, rebellious bad-boy. Compared to the rest of this (as Valerie says in episode 2) obnoxiously squeaky-clean bunch of L.A. dinks, he’s Satan. And the girls love his bad-assery. He’s the sex symbol. And the show never stops doing all it can to remind us of that. They play up his resemblance to James Dean every chance they get, filming him the same way Dean was filmed, posing him the same way Dean posed. And when they aren’t creating a James Dean for the 90s, they are shooting him like Brando! With that kind of exposure, how could he not have become the biggest star in movies? The bad-boy cool kid, the tough guy heart-throb? Perhaps it’s because he started doing all this cool-young-kid stuff when he was forty-one.

This show is amazingly dated. Not just because of the hair - and they all have hilarious 90s hair - but because it’s so much less risque than any similar show today. It’s like watching Biff and Judy splitting a malt down at the hamburger stand, only now it’s Brendan and Kelly at the Peach Pit. The scenes where they try to show how BAD Valerie is by having a close-up of her rolling a joint are almost precious when we see them today. The more dramatic a moment is supposed to be, the funnier it actually is. This show may well have been the biggest thing in the world in 1995, but it got real irrelevant, real fast by the year 2000.

Girlfriends is a TV sitcom that revolves around four African-American women who have relationship problems and job issues and talk woman talk. Think - Sex And The City, with a laugh track. I hate Sex and The City a lot, but the only thing I hate more is a laugh track. This show is not funny enough to be a good comedy, not interesting enough to be a good drama, and not sexy enough to be a good soap. So it just sort of meanders around. Occupying that middle ground between sitcom, soap opera, and dramatic show that was occupied successfully by Sex And the City for so many years, and never really replicated.

There is one girlfriend who is a horrible egotist gold-digger who wants to leave her husband because he went broke buying her jewelry. There is another one who is a horrible lazy mooch who moves around between the houses of her friends. There is another friend who is a horrible self-centred bitter mother of two. Whose kids we never meet. Do they exist at all? Or are they merely a reference point? And the fourth girlfriend, who is basically the centre of the show, the Carrie Bradshaw of Girlfriends, if you will, is more emotionally stable than the other three. But she is still irritating and does a lot of stupid things.

Then there are the supporting characters. The flamboyantly gay office assistant who dishes and sits cross-legged and chats with the ladies, one girl-bonding moment after another. The one who uses the term “girlfriend” like he invented it, and who peppers his speech with an exaggerated lisp and references to famous designers. You know that character? The one who was still kinda new in Will and Grace but is now one of the most painful cliches in pop culture? Or how about the scene where the girl believes the guy is going to ask her to marry him, and so she does all kinds of crazy things, and misunderstands everything he says, which all is basically on millimeter short of “will you marry me” without actually saying it, and then there’s the moment when she finds out that wasn’t his plan at all, and all those things he said are explained differently and incredibly implausibly, and then she is embarrassed and has egg on her face? Seen it before? Seen it more than forty times? If so, you’re still in the majority.

The worst thing about Girlfriends is that it is a sit-com. And it has a laugh track. And that means that the writers try to shoe-horn jokes in when there should be no jokes. And they try to make jokes out of things that aren’t funny. And the laugh track starts when nothing funny has been said. It’s like they need a joke and a laugh every ninety seconds exactly. So they cram in ripped-off lines from elsewhere in pop culture - “Vegas baby, Vegas!” Is about the height of this comedic writing. Which is pretty lame. The drama portion of this show could be decent, but with the tacked-on jokes and the irritating characters, who would care? Who cared about this show at all? Well, enough people to get eight seasons out of it, I guess. Season Four of Girlfriends comes out today, July 29th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.