Okay, folks, enough caterwauling about the two hours you won't be able to get back because you watched this movie. Don't tell me you didn't see the PREVIEWS? And even if you didn't, COME ONNNN!!! It's a TV movie about a glam-trash series that celebrated the greedy excesses of the Reagan Years, by snatching the torch from another show that did exactly the same thing...except it did it in Texas. We are not talking Shakespeare or Ibsen here. Hell, we're not even talking Harold ROBBINS, for cripes' sake! Yeah, it wasn't juicy enough, or camp enough, or as tongue-in-cheek as it should've been if it were intended to spoof or lighten the behind-the-scenes antics of the actors who starred in it, the producer who launched it (Aaron Spelling), or the writing team who created it (Richard and Esther Shapiro.) But consider this, too, folks: most of the principal cast members are still very much alive, and some of them even get work from time to time. The permission of each and every one of those folks has to be secured before the REAL story can ever be told, and I'm pretty damn sure that not everyone was happy about THAT idea.
So writer/director Michael Miller worked with what he could. Bravo for him, since bits and pieces of the REAL guilty pleasure this movie could have been still manage to shine through in spite of itself.
As is, Bartholomew John couldn't have looked and sounded less like John Forsythe if he tried, but consider whom he's playing. That would've be about like trying to find a look-and-soundalike for Charlton Heston, (who incidentally did appear in the horrid DYNASTY spin-off, THE COLBYS.) The main thing here was to convey the ESSENCE of the personalities involved, and in that case, the actors pretty much succeeded, but none with more success than Melora Walters as Linda Evans, and the ever-so-underrated Alice Krige, as close to Joan Collins as you'll get without employing the services of 'la diva' herself.
Perhaps the 'definitive' expose of what went on behind the glitz and glamour will someday be commended to film. And maybe that won't happen in any of our lifetimes. Till then, there's this, so either deal with it, or as one reviewer already did, flip over a couple of channels to Fox and watch "The O.C." Or if you want REAL trash, stay tuned for "Who's Your Daddy?"
