Sometimes, even Dallas is too far from reality

The heightened reality of TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty is great – until it seeps into Hollywood life itself, writes Rob Long

A still from the TV show Dynasty

People of a certain age – and unfortunately, that category includes me – will remember two of the most popular television shows of the 1980s, Dallas and Dynasty.

Dallas and its spin-off sister, Dynasty, were juicy and lurid serial dramas where rich people engaged in illicit liaisons, back-stabbing, financial shenanigans, and long-buried secrets.

Dallas was set in the Texas world of oil millionaires and Dynasty was set in the high-altitude world of Colorado aristocracy.

The characters in each show were rich, glamorous, and utterly without moral restraint.

They flew around the world in private jets – this was quite an eye-popping luxury to see in 1980 – and were almost always engaged in the act of buying expensive jewellery while looking dramatic and overdressed.

Each episode, it seems, required at least one character to attempt to bankrupt another character, and entailed at least one glass of something flung into the face of someone else.

It wasn’t very believable stuff. But it was fun and over-the-top, and after a long day at work that’s all the audience really asks for: something juicy and crazy and a little unrealistic, with heightened emotions and lots of intrigue and betrayal, something to click on the television as you put up your feet and relax.

The odd part was, all of the characters in those shows – all of the characters engaged in back-stabbing and plotting and thieving and drink flinging – were all part of the same family. They were all related to each other. In the show Dallas, they actually all lived together in the same mansion. Audiences back then, it seems, couldn’t get enough of watching family members tear each other apart in lurid and affluent circumstances.

It was what we in Hollywood call “heightened reality”. You take something real and believable – family members squabbling over money and inheritances – and you turbocharge it. The best versions of heightened reality shows took normal family discord and added millions of dollars, greed, jewels, murder, mysterious diseases, marital infidelity, and more millions. The result was pretty compelling television. Both Dallas and Dynasty were worldwide smash hits.

Actual reality, though, has a way of catching up with “heightened reality”. Sumner Redstone, the 92--year-old owner and autocrat of the Viacom media empire – which includes blockbuster brands such as MTV, CBS and Paramount – is a swashbuckling figure of American business lore.

He connived and schemed his way up from being the small-time owner of a few cinemas into owning a constellation of movie theatres across the USA. He parlayed those theatres into the ownership of Viacom, at the time a minor and obscure media company, leveraged Viacom into a takeover of Paramount Studios, and then hopscotches his way into assembling one of the most powerful and far-reaching media conglomerates on Earth.

And now he’s in his nineties and it’s all falling apart.

Redstone had two female companions and he lavished each one with cash and gifts and all sorts of compensation.

Redstone also has a son and a daughter, both of whom have been, at different times, estranged from their father and each other. His daughter, Shari, has been a partner in the family business for decades. His son, Brent, has a daughter who doesn’t get along with her aunt. Redstone also has a long-time and trusted lieutenant, Philippe Dauman, who has been running part of his media empire.

Sumner Redstone himself – once a powerfully intimidating titan of business – is a housebound nonagenarian, fed through a tube, and barely able to make himself understood. He hasn’t been out in public in years, and worse, he hasn’t been at a Viacom board meeting lately either.

His desires and wishes for the gigantic company of which he still owns the lion’s share has been variously interpreted by the two women who kept him company, his doctors, the daughter he has occasionally disinherited, the lieutenant who is now one of America’s most lavishly compensated CEOs, the granddaughter who hates her aunt, and at least one judge who has been tasked with adjudicating the criss-cross of lawsuits flying between all of the parties.

Family members, lovers and old friends are savaging each other in the press – and the courts – daily, as they struggle and jockey their way into the best position to be able to take advantage (and there’s no nice way to put this) of the old man’s death.

In other words, it’s Dynasty and Dallas come to life, but turbocharged a step further. It’s heightened reality that’s been, somehow, heightened. It’s Hollywood, both the non-fiction and the fiction version. From a distance, it’s essentially the same show: rich people fighting and clawing their way to the top. But from up close, from the perspective of the almost 20,000 employees of the Viacom universe of companies, it’s probably not all that entertaining.

That’s the problem with lurid and over-the-top melodrama: it refuses to stay up there on the screen.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles

On Twitter: @rcbl