Dallas is one of television’s greatest successes, premiering in April 1978 as a five-part miniseries, proving popular enough to extend that to a full first season before finding traction with audiences in its second. It loomed large over 14 seasons in all, spawning one spin-off, Knot’s Landing, which debuted in 1979, and a revival series on TNT in 2012.
Its success, as is typically the case, led to a number of similar series, most notably Dynasty and Falcon Crest, both of which debuted in 1981, with the latter airing immediately after Dallas on CBS. They all had success, but only one — Falcon Crest — declined so rapidly in quality that by Season 8, that Soap Opera Digest named it the “Most Ruined Show.” And it earned that honor.
‘Falcon Crest’ Was Meant To Capitalize on ‘Dallas’ Success
Falcon Crest was created by the man behind The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr., who first envisioned the series as a family drama involving the wine industry. A pilot for The Vintage Years was made, but never aired, with CBS requesting that the show be more like its biggest hit, the aforementioned Dallas. The script was rewritten, with many of the cast members being replaced, and Falcon Crest made it to air in December 1981 as a series revolving around the feuding blocs of the wealthy Gioberti/Channing family in the California wine industry.
With its setting in the wine business of fictional Tuscany Valley, Falcon Crest proved more sophisticated, glamorous, and even wittier than Dallas. It was not nearly as over-the-top as Dynasty, with Falcon Crest finding middle ground between the two powerhouse programs. The series stars Hollywood legend Jane Wyman as Angela Channing, the overbearing, authoritarian head of the Falcon Crest vineyards, and Robert Foxworth as her nephew, the upstanding Chase Gioberti, who inherits a portion of Falcon Crest after the death of his father, Angela’s brother Jason (Harry Townes), in a tragic accident in the winery.
The conflict between the two drives the narrative of the series as a whole, with each relying on others to try and gain the upper hand. On Angela’s side are her two daughters, Julia (Abby Dalton), chief winemaker, and Emma (Margaret Ladd), her ne’er-do-well grandson, Lance (Lorenzo Lamas), and Phillip Erikson (Mel Ferrer), a nefarious lawyer who would eventually become Angela’s second husband. Chase, meanwhile, finds support from his wife, Maggie (Susan Sullivan), a writer for The New Globe, Cole (William R. Moses), who works with Chase at the winery, and his daughter, Vickie (Jamie Rose/Dana Sparks).
‘Falcon Crest’ Starts Strong, but the Grapes Wither After Season 4
The addition of Richard Channing (David Selby), the illegitimate son of Angela’s ex-husband, in the series’ second season elevated what was already a winning battle between two powerful people into a brilliant three-way war between Richard, Angela, and Chase. Their attempts to wrest control from one another results in some of the best, and wildest, moments in the series. Angela forcing Lance into an arranged marriage with Melissa Agretti (Delores Cantú/Ana Alicia), heiress of Agretti Vineyards, in order to expand her operations (“For Love or Money”), or Angela bribing field workers not to pick Chase’s grapes in an effort to ruin his harvest (“The Harvest”), for example, are the moments that spring to mind. Plus, any primetime soap worth its weight in gold has dubious relationships and romances that threaten to upend everything (personal favorite: Melissa marries Lance while carrying Cole’s baby, in “The Good, The Bad, and The Profane.”)
Buoyed by the scheming, skullduggery, romantic entanglements, deft use of cliffhangers, and the acerbic wit of Wyman’s Angela, the series ranked among the top 10-rated shows for three consecutive seasons. However, things started to go downhill. Storylines became repetitious (Richard went bankrupt in Season 1’s “The Tangled Vines” and again in Season 8’s “Decline and Fall”), changes in the creative team were noticeable, a stunning amount of cast turnover (only three original main characters remained by its final season), and a public growing increasingly tired of primetime soaps in general are all cited as contributing factors to the demise of Falcon Crest.
Arguably, one of the biggest reasons lies with expanding the scope of the series beyond its Tuscany Valley setting to include international conspiracy, assassinations, and cartels, neglecting its core focus on the winery itself. All this, and more, led to Soap Opera Digest giving the dubious honor to Falcon Crest as “Most Ruined,” with the series starting off as a focused soap with interesting storylines and characters before morphing into something unrecognizable, without any familiar characters or even remotely plausible plot points. As a result, the series is largely forgotten, rarely mentioned alongside Dynasty or Dallas as famed examples of one of TV’s most dominant genres of the time. But if you’re fans of those two shows, Falcon Crest is definitely worth the watch… at least the first four seasons.
- Release Date
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1981 – 1990-00-00
- Directors
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Reza Badiyi, Harry Harris, Michael A. Hoey, Michael Preece, Robert Foxworth, Jerome Courtland, Philip Leacock, Gwen Arner, Bill Duke, Joseph L. Scanlan, Peter Ellis, Joseph Manduke, Lorraine Senna, Stan Lathan, George Kaczender, Dennis Donnelly, Robert Scheerer, Tim Hunter, Ernest Pintoff, Larry Elikann, Jeffrey Hayden, Jack Bender, Fernando Lamas, Mel Ferrer
- Writers
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William Schmidt, Dick Nelson, Joel Surnow, Lisa Seidman, Robert Cochran, Scott Hamner, Kathleen Hite, Ann Marcus, Sandra Kay, Robert McCullough, Joel J. Feigenbaum, Stephen Black, Paul Eric Myers, Rebecca Pogrow, Bethel Leslie, Mark Edward Edens, Kathy McCormick, Judy Merl, Howard Lakin, Henry Stern, David Ehrman
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David Selby
Richard Channing
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Jane Wyman
Angela Channing
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