My Top-Ten One-Season Wonders (part 4)

The final installment of a four-part series, this latest set constitutes #15-20 of my “top-10” one-season wonders: a numerical oxymoron that only makes sense if you’re counting in the vigesimal numeric system — or if you know my aversion to rules and common sense. As I noted in Part 3, I published my top 10 back in 2016, but so many late, lamented series have since reemerged on YouTube, Daily Motion, DVD and streaming channels that I decided the initial list was worth expanding. So here are my final five series — spanning more than 50 years — that vanished much too quickly.

Knots Landing season 5

Knots Landing Season 4 was a transitional year, in which the tone was heightened and the format broadened, but the story-lines themselves -- Karen's romance with the local DA, Val and Gary's tumultuous divorce, Richard's failed restaurant venture, Kenny's quest for a hit album -- remained as comfortably middle-class as ever. Season 5 serves up the last piece of the puzzle -- the enlarging of the situations -- required to bring the series closer in content to the other, higher-rated primetime soaps. But Knots never loses its identity or its way; on the contrary, the result is the series' most exhilarating and satisfying season.

Knots Landing season 6

Knots Landing Season 6 asks: can you build a successful primetime-soap season atop just one great storyline? -- and surprisingly, the answer is "yes."

Season 6 is the one where Val's newborn twins are stolen, an event that impacts most of the core characters, but none, heaven knows, more than Valene Clements Ewing herself. And although there's a lot more than just "Val's babies" to the season -- it juggles at least as many characters and plotlines as Season 5, and probably a few more -- nothing else really and truly pays off. Some of the story-lines, in fact, go off the rails so badly, they're jettisoned early in Season 7.

But through it all, there's Joan Van Ark, in an acting showcase unmatched in the series' fourteen seasons. Oh, other actors have seasons that play to their strengths, as well as to their characters' (Michele Lee and Ted Shackelford in Season 3, Kevin Dobson and Donna Mills in Season 5, Teri Austin in Season 10, Kathleen Noone in Season 14), but there's nothing quite like the tour-de-force that Van Ark offers up in Season 6, as Valene -- struggling to accept an explanation she knows in her heart is false -- develops a dissociative disorder, becomes convinced that she's Verna Ellers (the lead character in her latest novel) and takes off for Tennessee.