Knots Landing season 7

Over its fourteen seasons, Knots Landing saw its share of soft reboots and wholesale revamps. Sometimes they occurred at the start of a season, as new headwriters took the reins and charted their own course for the series; sometimes they happened mid-season, as story-lines deemed unsuccessful were jettisoned and new ones quickly devised. But for three seasons -- 5 through 7 -- Knots maintained unparalleled stability in terms of its principal cast and story arcs.

Season 5, Knots' best season, is a dizzying display of confident story-telling that builds to an adrenaline-rush conclusion. Season 6 suffers from a static start and a noticeable tonal shift two-thirds of the way through, but it's blessed with a middle section -- an acting showcase for co-star Joan Van Ark -- that's at once novelette-ish flight of fancy and piercing character drama, and that sees you through. So if you're a fan of Knots Landing Seasons 5 and 6, you should -- by all outward appearances -- love Season 7; in many ways, the three seasons form one long arc. The cast remains intact; all the Season 6 principals stick around for Season 7. The characters who are romantically paired in Season 5 -- author Valene Ewing and reporter Ben Gibson, real estate whiz Laura Avery and politician-turned-tycoon Gregory Sumner -- finally tie the knot in Season 7, while the one Season 5 marriage -- that of hapless millionaire Gary Ewing to aspiring businesswoman Abby Cunningham -- eventually runs its course. The plots left hanging in Season 6 -- the turbulent relationship between newlyweds Joshua Rush and Cathy Geary; Gary's plans to turn his newly-acquired Empire Valley acreage into "a community of the future" (all while Greg and Abby conspire to build a secret communications center beneath it); the hunt for Val's twins (the result of a one-night stand with Gary in Season 5) who were stolen at birth early in Season 6 -- all continue into Season 7, and most are tidily resolved.

So what's not to like about Season 7?

My Top-Ten One-Season Wonders (part 2)

Following CBS's cancellation of Limitless last month, I decided to look at ten great shows that were canned after one season. I intended to limit this post to shows that came out of the gate fully formed (like Limitless), that had solid first-season runs. But I realized that if I were discussing "one-season wonders," then just as wondrous were the shows that took time to get their bearings -- often much of their first season. Sometimes, that feels like the greater loss: when a show is trying diligently to refine itself during its early months, to tap into what's working and discard what isn't, and then, just as it seems to be coming into its own, it's gone. Everybody Loves Raymond was certainly a show that took almost a season to fully distinguish itself, to learn how best to use the family dynamics to mine laughs; can you imagine if CBS hadn't rewarded it with faith, patience, a better time slot and (ultimately) a renewal? Anyway, my first five one-season wonders can be found here; here are the final five:

My Top-Ten One-Season Wonders

CBS cancelled Limitless last week; there goes another great TV series, jettisoned after one season. The network seemed to lose interest early on; they never tried a new timeslot to see if a more compatible lead-in might boost its ratings. (Mondays at 10 PM, after Scorpion, seemed a good option.) And ironically, the serialized elements that the network itself had encouraged made it less valuable to them in syndication than their more static procedurals, Code Black and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, both of which got second-season pick-ups. Limitless's cancellation got me thinking of other worthy shows that disappeared after one season: shows with unexplored potential that seemed, well, limitless. Ten instantly came to mind; here are the first five. If you've read any of my blog entries, you know this list probably won't match anyone else's; my tastes remain emphatically, occasionally erratically, my own. (You also won't find Limitless on this list -- but only because I discussed it, and its brain-twisty brilliance, last November. It's a post entitled "Welcome Home, CBS," written at a time when I thought the network was finally reinventing itself with novel programming; now that it's prematurely cancelled both Mike & Molly and Limitless in the same season, I find myself watching less on CBS than at any point since the late '60s.)

Knots Landing season 9

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.

Letting Go: notes on The Flash and Arrow

How bad does a show have to get before you bail? I'm 56 now. My earliest television memory is an episode of Lost in Space called "The Keeper" from January of 1966 (the day after it aired, all the kids in the neighborhood took turns walking around as if hypnotized, repeating "I'm being summoned," as Dr. Smith had the night before) -- so I guess I've been a devoted TV viewer for half a century now. In the old days, if a show you loved got rotten, you kept watching; there were only three channels, and unless there was something compelling on one of the other two, you stuck with your show through even the dreariest lows. But today, chances are, there are more shows that interest you than hours in the day: not just those airing weekly on network television, but streaming series with dozens of episodes instantly available. How do you stick with a show through the dry patches when you know your viewing time could be put to better use: when there's that show on iPlayer or On Demand that's going to be disappearing soon, or that series from thirty years ago that you'd always heard about, that someone just uploaded to YouTube and might vanish any day due to copyright infringement?

The Flash and Arrow return to the air this week, after a four-week hiatus, and I'll no longer be watching. I made up my mind after their last airings that it was time to let go: over time, they'd managed to both bore me and offend me. (You'd think indifference would numb you to feeling actively insulted, but no.) And watching another comic-book adaptation, Agent Carter, which aired from January through March and basically got everything right, only further reminded me how much The Flash and Arrow were suffering creatively.

The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching

I was put on six months medical leave in September, and decided to join Twitter: my husband figured it would be a good way for me to stay "connected" while I was housebound. I found a lot of folks who shared my passion for television, but I also started to feel that -- with so many choices these days in terms of "what to watch" -- my new online friends were overlooking some of the very best series. I've spent the last few months talking them up on Twitter, but I thought, why not gather them and praise them here, where I wouldn't be limited to 140 characters? Herewith: five series that add immeasurably to my viewing pleasure, but that haven't yet reached the audiences I feel they deserve. Three are UK productions, and although they've done well there, a lot of US viewers are only now discovering them. The other two are US shows that -- splendid as they are -- have never blossomed into huge hits. But all five are so worth a look, or better, a binge.

Mike & Molly: an appreciation

A friend and I like to poke fun at folks who issue hyperbolic statements about their favorite TV shows, because -- well, because we're a little mean. But you know how it is when fans post about shows they love. If a favorite character is leaving, it's "I'll never watch another episode." If the show is prematurely cancelled: "I'm boycotting the network." And heaven forbid, if a long-running show leaves of its own volition: "I no longer have a reason to own a TV." So given my aversion to over-the-top pronouncements, this is not an easy admission to make: when Mike & Molly concludes its six-season run this spring, my world will be a lot less bright.

Madam, I'm Adam: 2015 in review

My annual year in review. You can check out 2013 here, and 2014 here. As always, I do not purport to have watched every great show on television this past year; this is not a "best of 2015" list. These are simply the shows I watched, the trends I noted, the risks I saw taken, and the mistakes (plenty of 'em this year) I saw made.

The good got better, and the bad got worse -- but only the bad got rewarded. That's what I got from my TV viewing in 2015: the saddest life-lesson ever.

Blake Hunter, of WKRP in Cincinnati

Decades after his heyday, Blake Hunter remains one of my favorite sitcom writers, and like so many of my favorites (e.g., Bernard Slade on Bewitched, Charlotte Brown on Rhoda, David Pollock and Elias Davis on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bud Wiser on One Day at a Time, Bob Bendetson on Newhart, Tucker Cawley on Everybody Loves Raymond), I love him for the scripts he wrote for a single show, in this case WKRP in Cincinnati. Hugh Wilson created WKRP, but Hunter was there all four seasons, and his scripts are the ones I still marvel at.

Knots Landing season 14

The great soap writer Ann Marcus was first brought aboard Knots Landing in 1981, to shore up the series after a shaky Season 2, and here's what she gave us in Season 3: Karen (Michele Lee, Emmy-nominated that season) coped with the death of her husband Sid; Abby, the vixen (Donna Mills), inserted herself into Val and Gary's marriage (that would be Joan Van Ark and Ted Shackelford); and long-suffering Laura, who'd left her jerk of a husband Richard, decided to return to him out of guilt and obligation.

With the series finally on firm footing, Marcus departed at the end of Season 3, and here's what happened over the following ten seasons, in 300 words or less: