In the beginning,
Knots Landing was about four married couples living in a cul-de-sac in Southern California. But as the show grew in popularity, it grew in size, and by the seventh season, there were eleven in the principal cast. The show was riding high in the ratings, so CBS happily assumed a laissez-faire attitude. But then the network got greedy: at the start of Season 8, they decided to move
Knots up an hour, so they could launch a new show behind it. (It's a move that hadn't worked in Season 3, but apparently the network programmers had short memories.) So up it went to Thursday at 9 PM, where it faced off against the formidable
Cheers and
Night Court on NBC, and against ABC's new
Dynasty spin-off,
The Colbys.
Knots star Joan Van Ark predicted, in a bit of pre-season forecasting, "We're gonna whoop
The Colbys" -- but it was
Knots that took the drubbing. Oh, it beat
The Colbys, and rather handily, but it bled viewers in the process. And its absence from the 10 PM slot allowed a new NBC upstart called
L.A. Law to take over and dominate the time period -- so that even when CBS admitted the error of its ways and moved
Knots back to its old home, it never regained its full audience. While it was away,
L.A. Law had blossomed into a hit, and
Knots was relegated to runner-up in the timeslot it once owned.
And so, the following season, instead of the Knots writers being allowed to expand the cast however they saw fit, a demand came down from the network brass: trim the budget. (It was a decree imposed on all the Lorimar soaps that year, but Knots was the hardest hit. Small wonder: Dallas was down just 3% from the previous season, Falcon Crest 4%; Knots had shed nearly 15% of its viewers.) And by the time we were a third of the way into Season 9, there were just six principal cast members remaining.
