Was The Colbys the best thing on TV?

It had Stephanie Beacham as the star. Up front and centre. Therefore it was amazing.

 

Yes... Sabella and Zach ... fire and dynamite!
Too bad she couldn't get over Jason in time, it was like a greek tragedy.

 

Well she was married to the man for 28 years. You can't just walk away from something like that. I always thought Zach seriously overplayed himself when it came to getting Sable to get over Jason. Although I loved Sable and Zach's "break up" scene where she slides his ring off her finger and tosses it at him with such venom, and then slides a piece of debris away from the door with her foot with the cutest act of dismissiveness. lol

 

That's true. Would be the same if you say Dallas was one shit just because of that stupid last paranormal episode with an imaginary devil forcing JR to shoot himself. Same crap-level as UFOs. Was Dallas shitty because of that one scene? No. Neither were the Colbys.

And yet she was quite over it just a few months later on Dynasty.

Yeah, that was great!

 

Actually it was a year later. And I like to think that she was putting up a front at times; there were a couple of hints that she still missed her old life.

 

I am fascinated by the ardent support for the COLBYS. I will admit that I have not watched the show in decades, and maybe giving it another chance decades later I might get a different picture. But here is what I remember from the COLBYS from my 80s watching of it:

The show had the following going for it: A kick-ass theme, a wonderfully complex and amazingly acted character in Sable and a very hot Maxwell Caulfield. Beecham as Sable is such a gem--in fact she is so three dimensional and warm toward her children and resolute toward her enemies that her radiance makes so many of the others seem even dimmer. And Caulfield, unfortunately not always a passable actor, was the hottest thing on prime time soaps at the time. Miles should have had a career as an underwear model and the show would have stayed afloat.

But everything else--I was very quickly bored by it. In my view, the show reached Dynasty "S7 latter half" boredom pretty quickly. Unlike Dynasty, which was sliding in consistency and quality through the years, so many of the actors and characters were deathly dull right from the get go. Connie, Jason, Frankie, Hutch, Garrett, Bliss, to name a few. Zach was the poor man's Cecil Colby, and was never a believable antagonist for Jason Colby, who was never a believable man for Sable and Frankie to fight over in the first place. Fallon--nuff said, and she kept Jeff tied to her boredom a lot.

The initial "Jason is dying" is also such a huge slap in the audience's face: it is the kind of bold-faced lie which Dynasty could pull off in S3 with Claudia dropping a doll off the roof and making us thinking--FOR A MOMENT--that the doll was a baby and then making fun of us for believing it. Because Dynasty had the bravado/balls to do that at the time and knew how quickly to reign it in. The Colbys just shoots itself on the foot right from the starting line, and its footing becomes lamer as the seasons progressed, though S2 is somewhat better.

I kept watching and there were some storylines that had potential (JROG's "watching" thread has reminded me of many of them). I won't even go into Emma Samms' portrayal of Fallon, because that horse has more than been beaten to death. But what a waste Frankie was because of Katharine Ross! Unlike Dynasty, where the stupid scripts of the latter seasons were often saved by the actors, here the story sounds explosive on paper, but Ross ruins them. The show has also made little effort to show Frankie invested in Roger, but then again maybe it was better than having to watch Ross portray her brand of angst. When Phillip re-appeared, it was again one of those great plot twists that quickly became a missed opportunity. Some later stories did take off: Channing, and how she complicated the Miles/Sable relationship, was a great addition but overall, the show has been a series of missed opportunities for me, occasional bright spots notwithstanding.

Miles and Fallon were the biggest waste. Imagine that Miles is a playboy and a daredevil with zero interest in Colby enterprises. In fact, he loves that Jeff has come in and he can be the son Jason always wanted, because he will never be. Then Fallon, written like she was in Dynasty's S8 and S9, not like on the COLBYS, remembers who she is and that Jeff never lets her be who she wanted to be (again as she did in Dynasty's S8). Then you have her really torn. The show was also dying to have Sable and Jason divorce and have her be his rival a la Alexis on Dynasty, but the two of them being together despite storm after storm made much more sense.

 

And which audience would that be that got a huge slap in the face? The almighty Dynasty fans worldwide who had staked their claim to all the Colbys characters created or the global audiences of either one of the 2 series (Dynasty & The Colbys) who had never watched the other?

Neither series lied. And when Jeff was rebooted yet again, the past was erased yet again.

During the time when Dynasty was broadcast contemporaneously with The Colbys, I don’t think – I might be wrong on this – Dynasty (a) ever mentioned the change in Jeff’s paternity; (b) ever referred to Jason again beyond Garrett’s only one-on-one talk with Blake in S6.

To my recollection Jeff never referred to his parents on Dynasty between S6 (a reboot season) to mid or latish S8 (another reboot season). A period of time when some audiences could have assumed that Jason had died.

And when Jeff eventually mentioned his dad, in connection with Dynasty’s still unfinished oil pipeline project, he simply said “my father” without naming him.

Up to this point there had been no word of explanation to long-time Dynasty viewers (who hadn’t watched TC) as to how Jeff had come to have a living father; since the last they knew, Philip was his Korean War veteran dad who’d long been dead and buried. But, this was a newly rebooted Jeff who had spoken, whether they realized it or not that season. That depended entirely on the nature of the home-induced snooze fest they’d had.

TC’s opening episode had Jason already been told he was dying – that news the trigger for Constance asking Francesca to return – but Jason was holding out for a second medical opinion. He got it at the start of the 3rd episode, and the news was worse. The happy ending came at the end of that episode. Please forgive TC for misleading audiences for 3 whole episodes.

That TC storyline might have been drawn from the Ricardo Montalbán TV movie Face of Fear; where the actor with a limp portrayed a cop protecting a woman from the unknown contract killer she’d hired through a 3rd party to kill her. She’d asked for the contract killing after she was told that she was terminally ill. Wrongly diagnosed as it turned out. The sub-tale of her misdiagnosis is similar to Jason’s.

Sable giving in to Alexis to help save Blake from ruination in Paulsenian Dynasty is the tale of The Colbys being offered up in sacrifice to give Dynasty a new lease on life. In my humble opinion, of course.

 

Just finished The Colbys for the very first time. Quite enjoyed it.