Eunuchs, Scheming Women, Chattering Teeth

Who can hear anything with all the noise?

Random Word: Dynasty.

Sometimes a sports franchise will be dominant for many years and be called a dynasty. The New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were a dynasty. So were the Tom Brady New England Patriots in football. Recently, the Kansas City Chiefs, with their coach Andy Reid and amazing quarterback Patrick Mahomes, were on their way to becoming perhaps the greatest dynasty of all. But that came to an abrupt stop this past season. They did not even make the playoffs, which demonstrates the evanescent nature of dynasties. The Ming Dynasty in China lasted from 1368 to 1644. (It fell apart for a host of reasons, one of them being the role of eunuchs. Apparently there were court eunuchs who organized and exerted some sort of power, and that always leads to trouble no matter how you slice it.)

There was a hugely popular television show in the ’80s called Dynasty. It was developed by producer Aaron Spelling to be a competitor with another hugely popular show, Dallas. Both of them were about powerful oil families. Dynasty was packed with a whole bunch of stars, but didn’t really take off until another star was added to the cast, the British actress Joan Collins. She played a character named Alexis Colby, and boy, could she scheme.

Joan Collins as Alexis Colby

That’s what a soap opera needs: a beautiful, scheming woman, like Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) in the long-running soap opera All My Children.

Susan Lucci as Erica Kane

One quarter in college I came down with a case of mono and had to rest up in my apartment on Del Playa in Isla Vista, California, the little student burg next to UCSB. I didn’t have much to do, so I started watching daytime TV and, for the first time in my life, looked at a soap opera. It was All My Children. I wondered what the heck was going on with all these characters. I wondered why nothing was resolved. I wondered why each room had an organ in it that played music for several seconds just before a commercial, as two actors just stared at each other.

Well, across from our apartment was an apartment of student femmes who were all dedicated All My Children watchers. One of them heard me talking about it and excitedly began to fill me in on the details. Soon, a couple of her roommates joined in. They loved educating me, answering my questions about who was sleeping with whom, who was the illegitimate child of whom, who was married to whom at one time and was now married to somebody else, who turned out to be not who we thought he was, and so on. I did not discourage the attention. But then I actually got hooked on the dang thing.

About this time, a brand new soap opera debuted called Ryan’s Hope. I thought, I’ll get in on the ground floor of this one and…I got hooked on that, too. It was about an Irish saloon owner in New York, and he had a fetching daughter named Mary, played by Kate Mulgrew, who would later go on to play the captain in Star Trek: Voyager.

So there I was, a college boy who played basketball, watching this soap opera. And I still managed to graduate.

A year after college I went to New York to pursue an acting career, and boldly walked into ABC Studios and told them I was a reporter for the UCSB student newspaper, The Daily Nexus. I was doing research on the show for the paper, I said, which was only a little white bluff because I fully intended to submit an article, but mostly I just wanted to meet the cast and crew.

They were very nice to me. They brought me in and let me observe some of the filming. I got to meet the cast, including Kate Mulgrew and Earl Hindman, who would later go on to fame as Tim “Tool Time” Taylor’s next-door neighbor, Wilson, in the sitcom Home Improvement. On that show, you never saw Wilson’s whole face, just his eyes looking over the fence.

Television shows used to bind our nation together. This was before cable and streaming and YouTube and a gazillion platforms started screaming for our attention, which is fractured enough as it is. But back when we only had three networks and a few local channels, we knew what to talk about around the water cooler. That used to be an office staple, the water cooler, where you’d take a break to get a drink and meet up with a coworker and “shoot the breeze” or “chew the fat” or “bump your gums.” Somebody would say, “Hey, did you see The Beatles on Ed Sullivan last night?” And the other would say, “What was with all the screaming girls?” Everybody knew what was going on.

Now I’m not sure if Stranger Things is a show or another name for California.

In one sense, having many choices is a fine thing, but with no barriers to entry that require a modicum of quality, the noise becomes overwhelmingly like the sound of a thousand novelty chattering teeth clacking at the same time.

That describes TV news panels, too. When did that become a thing? Walter Cronkite would give us the news in half an hour, and that was that. Or you had local news covering one’s town, like The Big News on Channel 2 in Los Angeles, hosted by Jerry Dunphy, who led every broadcast with, “From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening.” It had one guy doing weather (Bill Keane), one sports (Gil Stratton), and one special features (Ralph Story). Clean and neat, not a befouled coop of clucking fowl.

A show I’d love to see would be one called Civil Debate. But who would watch it? Which reminds me of a poem my grandfather used to recite to me:

A wise old owl sat in an oak.

The more he saw the less he spoke.

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Now wasn’t he a wise old bird?

Quote:

“I would rather discover a single fact, even a small one, than debate the great issues at length without discovering anything at all.” — Galileo