Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure

This was being pushed as a sexy camp TV movie. It's not. It's a (purportedly) factual account of how the TV show Dynasty was developed and what eventually killed it. It follows the married producer and writer team of the show--it shows how their lives were affected and why they came up with the more outrageous plot lines (the lily pond fight, the Moldavian massacre, etc.) and the 1991 reunion show that wrapped up everything. There are also a few vicious but funny jabs at the Dynasty spin off The Colbys.

I do like the fact it doesn't ignore the gay fans of the show and on it and Alice Krige is obviously having a whale of a time playing Joan Collins. The most fun out of this comes from seeing unknown actors playing well-known actors! With a few exceptions (Krige especially) they look nothing like the people they're playing! Also it shows all the actors in a positive light--even Collins and Evans are shown as being great friends (no way that's true).

Still, it was not that good. It moved slowly and, on TV, they loaded the commercials during the last hour so it took forever. And I do question how factual this movie is. Still it's fun for a mindless two hours.

As a former fan of Dynasty (though I confess not remembering some of the plot lines described in this movie), I must say I was appalled and horrified at this pathetic TV movie. There is a certain kind of "camp classic" - like Valley of the Dolls - that's so bad it's good. This wasn't it. This was just so bad it was bad.

I realize I may be alone in my opinions. First of all, I read in several places that Alice Krige "nailed" Joan Collins. She nailed her, all right, but not in the way one might think. One of the message board posters asked if Lesley-Ann Down was offered the role. I for one would have found this refreshing. Down has the glamour to do the role, and I think she would have been great. But if she was offered this role, it's no wonder she turned it down.

The casting of this whole movie was just sad, and the thing looked cheap. As for the acting - awful. Even the normally wonderful Pamela Reed couldn't pull this off.

I don't know if any of the behind the scenes stuff was true or not. There didn't seem much interesting about it, however, if it was.

I can't say I was disappointed. I had seen the previews and knew what I was in for, but I guess I was hoping against hope that it might be at least fun. It wasn't.

After watching the Gilligan's Island, Charlie's Angels and Three's Company exposé/fantasy romps, I really did not expect much when I tuned into this latest exploitation of an old television series. Even with my VERY low expectations, however, the thing still stunk.

This felt like whoever wrote the script decided not to interview or speak with anyone actually affiliated with Dynasty's production; and instead chose just to read some old National Enquirer gossip stories about the show for background, watched only a few episodes of the series (thereby confusing or omitting many major characters) to see what it was about, opted to portray the actors as having the personalities of their television characters, then wrote a trite script of what they imagined might have gone on behind the scenes based upon what they saw in some bad Hollywood cliché movies about television and movie productions. It appears the producers, network, actors, and everyone else involved bought into that thinking as well.

There had to have been a real story somewhere in the history of this television series, but there is no way this could have been it.

Okay, folks, enough caterwauling about the two hours you won't be able to get back because you watched this movie. Don't tell me you didn't see the PREVIEWS? And even if you didn't, COME ONNNN!!! It's a TV movie about a glam-trash series that celebrated the greedy excesses of the Reagan Years, by snatching the torch from another show that did exactly the same thing...except it did it in Texas. We are not talking Shakespeare or Ibsen here. Hell, we're not even talking Harold ROBBINS, for cripes' sake! Yeah, it wasn't juicy enough, or camp enough, or as tongue-in-cheek as it should've been if it were intended to spoof or lighten the behind-the-scenes antics of the actors who starred in it, the producer who launched it (Aaron Spelling), or the writing team who created it (Richard and Esther Shapiro.) But consider this, too, folks: most of the principal cast members are still very much alive, and some of them even get work from time to time. The permission of each and every one of those folks has to be secured before the REAL story can ever be told, and I'm pretty damn sure that not everyone was happy about THAT idea.

So writer/director Michael Miller worked with what he could. Bravo for him, since bits and pieces of the REAL guilty pleasure this movie could have been still manage to shine through in spite of itself.

As is, Bartholomew John couldn't have looked and sounded less like John Forsythe if he tried, but consider whom he's playing. That would've be about like trying to find a look-and-soundalike for Charlton Heston, (who incidentally did appear in the horrid DYNASTY spin-off, THE COLBYS.) The main thing here was to convey the ESSENCE of the personalities involved, and in that case, the actors pretty much succeeded, but none with more success than Melora Walters as Linda Evans, and the ever-so-underrated Alice Krige, as close to Joan Collins as you'll get without employing the services of 'la diva' herself.

Perhaps the 'definitive' expose of what went on behind the glitz and glamour will someday be commended to film. And maybe that won't happen in any of our lifetimes. Till then, there's this, so either deal with it, or as one reviewer already did, flip over a couple of channels to Fox and watch "The O.C." Or if you want REAL trash, stay tuned for "Who's Your Daddy?"

What a wreck of a movie! Camp classic (Valley of the Dolls - so bad it's good, as another comment above aptly points out) it was not. I'm kicking myself all day today for wasting two hours of my life on this thing. Were these actors deliberately trying to sabotage their own careers? My antidote this morning was to waste two more hours (of repeats) on the newest guilty pleasure on TV - The O.C. - which is already starting to veer into "absurdist" territory in its plot lines, the "formula" having simply been tweaked for the present decade. Formula writing is the bane of American TV. This is always where it ends up - a parody of a parody, exhausted and flopping around like a fish on the beach.