He wrote:
"IS IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO EXPRESS LOVE FOR 'DYNASTY' AND 'THE COLBYS' WITHOUT 'KNOTT'S LANDING' FANS TRYING TO FORCE THEIR AGENDA ON ME?"
And, "WASN'T 'KNOTT'S LANDING' ABOUT A CUL-DE-SAC? HOW IS THAT TRASHY NIGHTTIME SOAP FODDER? WHERE ARE THE RICH JACKASSES MAKING BAD CHOICES????"
He ended this with, "Fine. I'll stop yelling. But stop trying force cul-de-sac soap operas on me, interwebs."I read through some of the conversation below his tweets (many replies containing other incorrect variations on the spelling of Knots Landing) and I considered potential responses of my own.
Of course, there was an initial moment when my first idea was to respond "...*Knots Landing, Chris," but I really like the guy (and I've never engaged his account with anything more than liking or retweeting some of his jewels — and he's often got some good ones).
Now, here's what I know about Christopher Rice, the writer.
He's that rare gay who is educated, well spoken and usually on the same page I am regarding our current political and social climate. When I read his first novel, A Density of Souls, it blew me away. I tore right through it, and I read it at just the right time in my life. It hadn't been out long when I'd gotten out of my first rehab and snagged a copy.
I tore right through it. Here, the son of a woman who'd written some of the most popular paranormal fiction of my lifetime (of the vampire books, I only read the first, but The Witching Hour and Lasher are two titles I really loved), had burst onto the scene of the literary world with this book that felt very close to the life I'd lived up to that point.
I remember staring at his photo (he was a hottie then and he's a hottie now plus, he's smart; if you don't believe me, just Google him or follow him on social media or check out his podcast, it's all worth it) and thinking he'd be the kind of guy I would really like to take out to dinner, to drink a bottle (or two) of wine with and discuss the writers and authors that inspired us. He was, after all, close to my age, and he was actually getting published as a writer (and writing about the same subjects I wanted to write about).
I identified with the characters and remember thinking he'd written the perfect climax — all set in the middle of a cataclysmic hurricane that nearly destroys his home town (and this was years before Katrina and Rita, but I suppose it was always something of a fear in the back of residents' minds).
I passed the book around to friends and later read his second, The Snow Garden. And I've read some of his other work since then. It's all been good stuff, but his first continues to resonate as one of those titles that stays on my top ten list of favorite books I've ever read. It's also one that I'll never re-read because it holds such a special place in my heart to this very day. Kind of like To Kill a Mockingbird (and why I'll never read the sequel) by Harper Lee, I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb and Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
The book was just the right amount of dirty and had the sort of gay romance a college guy in his very early twenties envisions himself enjoying at some point.
And another thing. At its heart, A Density of Souls was a soap opera, a book that falls into a specific genre that's not really a genre at all because it's pretty much just general fiction, but there are all these elements that make it the best kind of melodrama. Multiple, layered characters with secrets and an intricate plot that unfolds with pitch perfect timing.
I guess I always assumed that Rice grew up watching the same types of TV shows I did. The stuff that was on when there were only a handful of networks and cable didn't totally proliferate the country so everyone tended to watch the same stuff. I figured he was a fan of 90210 when it came out, saw the first few seasons of The Real World when it was something of an anomaly on a network that otherwise played music videos and plowed through those initial seasons of Melrose Place when everybody you knew was watching it but nobody was talking about it.
On that same note, I assumed Rice also had an appreciation for the larger-than-life epics of television in the 80s.
Admittedly, his tweets don't discount such an appreciation. However, they do disparage the one show that I still think is one of the greatest ever to grace the airwaves during the prime time hours.
As someone who has officially seen every single episode of the three main staples — Dallas, Dynasty and Knots Landing — I can finally write a blog post that gives a fair estimation of all that makes shows like these so great, so memorable and so very important... if for no one other than a gay dude in his late 30s who grew up in worlds that are (somewhat) a reflection of the worlds these shows portrayed.
Now, Rice is right. Dynasty and The Colbys were much more what people think about when they think about these shows. They were glitzy over-the-top prime time serials about characters that were much more caricatures dealing in plots that required regular suspension of disbelief. In other words, junk food for the brain. The kind of escapist entertainment they were fully intended to be.
But they may never have happened if not for the popularity of the granddaddy of them all, Dallas.
And Dallas never would have happened if the creators of the show hadn't come up with their original idea: Knots Landing (which would subsequently spin off from Dallas). And to be fair, none of these shows would have ever existed if not for their ancestor Peyton Place (which, of course, owes itself to the successful movie based on the successful book written by Grace Metalious). But going back through the history of nighttime soap operas is an entirely different topic for another blog post.
My point to this one is to argue with Christopher Rice the merits of Knots Landing and why it remains the best of the genre.
Now, I didn't watch any of this stuff when it was originally on. Like most fads, I was late to the game and only found out how much I liked it well after the shows completed their runs.
In a lot of ways, it all goes back to two people who were extremely important in my formative years. My sister and a girl named Bijal Patel.
My sister is ten years older than me and a true teenager of the 1980s. As a little gay kid growing up in the south, I worshiped her. I'd watch her get ready for Friday and Saturday nights out clubbing with her friends, getting glammed up with tons of mascara and preppy party clothes with long white gloves and stiletto heels. After she'd leave, I'd lay in her bedroom and listen to her Duran Duran and Oingo Boingo albums and imagine what it was going to be like when I was old enough to don a tuxedo like Simon Le Bon and go a little lighter than Nick Rhodes with the eyeliner and dance the night away at one of the clubs in town.
Everything my sister did, I wanted to do as well. And that often included her reading selections. So when she brought home copies of The Shining and Cycle of the Werewolf, I made my first attempts at Stephen King before I was in second grade. And one night when she climbed on the couch in the living room with my mother, my brother and me and opened her copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear and mentioned a few bits about the risque material she was totally involved in, I wanted to read that kind of thing, too.
"Ayla is pregnant with Broud's baby," I remember my sister saying as she found her place in the book.
"What in the world are you reading, Missy?" my mom asked.
It wasn't a horror novel, so I wasn't especially interested, but I was intrigued.
Fast forward a few years to my middle school days.
I was gay and effeminate and fat and pretty much ostracized by everyone, so I escaped into the world of books more than ever before. Because our last names were close alphabetically, this brilliant and pretty and personable chick was often seated beside me, and she was a reader, too.
Bijal introduced me to the world of Jackie Collins (Chances, which I re-read recently, was the first time I ever read about a gay character and learned about anal sex) and Judith Krantz (Scruples was the first time I ever learned about blowjobs and remember an oral sex scene between two men that sounded like something that would be a lot of fun). More importantly, Bijal became my friend. I missed her over the summers, but I always had my books. We finished eighth grade, planned to see each other when we began high school and I went home to spend a lazy summer on the couch.
One morning, I was hit with this commercial for this TV show that was about to begin running in syndication every weekday morning on TNT.
"Fourteen years of family, friends, neighbors you never wanted to leave. Now, TNT takes you back to the cul-de-sac," I listened to the description, saw images of the characters — including a very young Alec Baldwin — and made a decision to get up every morning in time to watch it from the beginning. I mean, it looked like something that was right up my alley when it came to content and subject matter and it seemed like something I'd like to spend my summer enjoying.
And I did.
By the time school was ready to start that fall, I'd seen the first three seasons and I programmed my VCR to begin recording at 9:55 a.m. and to end at 11:05 a.m. Monday through Friday.
By the time classes began, I was hooked.
In the beginning, it was mostly vignettes and not especially soapy. There were the issue of Sid being accused of attempted rape, Kenny sleeping around on Ginger, Gary's alcoholism, Diana's high school problems, Richard's inability to effectively just be a man and Karen's constant drive to always do the right thing.
But there was just enough to keep me watching. Sid's little sister, Abby, showed up as a recent divorcee and began trying to snag all the men in the neighborhood. She got Gary involved with a stolen parts ring at Knots Landing motors and Sid (kind of a surprise to me) drove off a cliff and died. And this candle was ignited between Abby and Gary, an affair beginning that threatened to ruin Gary's marriage to Val (who reminded me a lot of my mom for some reason), and I absolutely couldn't stop watching.
That was the same summer my parents noticed my interest in a specific type of entertainment and introduced me to movies like A Summer Place and Splendor in the Grass and Valley of the Dolls. It was the same summer I started reading a lot less horror and a lot more "trash." It was the summer I started to realize that I was gay and began the initial stages of accepting it for myself. It was that kind of special time when my senses were first waking up and everything began moving at a more rapid pace and I started to find my footing with the kind of guy I wanted to become.
Maybe that's part of the reason Knots Landing became so special to me: time, place and circumstances all added up to make something of its type really grow on me.
But it was the quality of the show, the brilliance of its pacing, the writing, the acting and the way it unfolded in what I still think was a mostly realistic way that made it one of my favorites (and something that I'll probably defend to my dying breath, even if it means butting heads with a guy like Christopher Rice).
Knots may not have had the high level of camp that Dynasty did. The characters were far too grounded in reality to get to that point.
It may not have had the wealth of its progenitor, but it had members of the Ewing family so it didn't need it.
There may not have been the Gothic decadence of the Tuscany Valley and a crazy woman living upstairs and there was never a single, high profile movie star who moved into the neighborhood (Abby and Greg, the two villainous mainstays, didn't need to compete with people like Alexis Colby or Angela Channing).
Knots Landing wasn't about big costume budgets or breathtaking and explosive season finales (although most of them were) or evening gowns and gala jewelry or the jet-setting elite driving viewership. It was, like that TNT commercial promised before I started watching, about family and friends. These were people who reminded me of my parents and the parents of my friends. They dealt with the kind of trouble that real families dealt with.
The coolest thing about Knots was that it wasn't especially plot-driven. Unlike most other television series, it was driven by its characters.
When Sid died at the start of the third season, it really felt like losing a friend's dad. When Gary's marriage to Val was destroyed by his affair with Abby, it was just as awkward and uncomfortable as it would've been to experience it in real life. The way the show dealt with the insidiousness of addiction — especially Karen's dependence on prescription medication and Olivia's problems related to her drug use — was totally believable and realistic. Greg's dissolve from slippery politician to morally questionable mogul was presented in such a way and over the course of several years so as to appear a natural progression. And there's the way Jill Bennett came on the scene as a potential antagonist to the marriage of Karen and Mack and slowly turned into one of the most evil characters in the show's entire run.
There are countless ways I could extol the virtues of this show, but I think this blog post is already (unnecessarily) long enough.
Besides, I still have the remainder of the Dallas reboot, all of the Melrose reboot, seven seasons of Falcon Crest, all but the first year of Revenge, Paper Dolls, Pasadena, Profit, The Americans, the last season of Flamingo Road and a few of these new shows I keep hearing about.
I guess I have a little more viewing to make a final, official ranking.
But I'm sure Knots Landing will remain at the top.
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