Peyton Place

Parts One and Two (Shout Factory DVD)

Forget The Sopranos and The Wire, TV’s best, post-1950s drama series was Peyton Place, which ran for five highly successful years, between 1964 to 1969. Seeing that program amongst Shout Factory’s new DVD release titles resurrects the sort of TV drama that—even when it tested the boundaries of good taste by bringing into American homes the intrigues and controversies of Grace Metalious’ infamous big-seller novel—still had family values. This is only part of what The Sopranos and The Wire lacked with their excessive crime and dysfunction; Peyton Place, for all its outrageous taboo busting was essentially a richly involving moral tale.

It was produced at a time when American morality was itself undergoing fundamental changes. This soap, set in a New England small town, showed how sex and status are such commonplace anxieties that the struggle to attain both become a birthright. The matter-of-factness of this series demonstrates that essential life issues could be the basis of high-drama without the gore and depravity that The Sopranos, The Wire and even the five dozen Law and Order variations all exploit.

These two box sets grab your attention largely through the quality of the acting. Whether it’s Mia Farrow’s good girl Allison Mackenzie, Ryan O’Neal’s young stud Rodney Harrington, Barbara Parkins’ bad/good girl Betty Anderson, Dorothy Malone’s mother-with-a-past Constance MacKenzie, Ed Nelson’s Dr. Michael Rossi, Christopher Connolly’s Norman, Lee Grant’s trouble-causing Stella Chernak, they all just skirt being cornball by being utterly, convincingly sincere. Acting this beautiful is a lost art in the age of plug-ugly pseudo-realism. The Peyton Placers are all archetypal.

Peyton Place is the source of David Lynch’s most audacious experiment, the 1990 nighttime TV-soap Twin Peaks. At his best in that Northwest existential mystery, Lynch merely matched the everyday mysteries of Peyton Place. And though it seems apostasy to say it, Peyton Place’s moral and spiritual clarity remain superior to Lynch’s smirky, pop-culture-fixated terror. Maybe if Lynchophiles acquaint themselves with the melodramatic splendors of Peyton Place, they’d be less gullible for Lynch abominations like Inland Empire. The 20th Century-Fox backlot universe of Peyton Place was what postmodern scholars (those unsnobby ones) would call a simulacrum for the tumult of mores and manners that were happening not only on the Eastern seaboard, but across the country. Not a single Peyton Place crisis mentions the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights Movement (although a black family played by Percy Rodriguez, Ruby Dee and Glynn Turman Jr. eventually busted the block), but no such over-explicitness was necessary. In its subtle, emotion-based way, Peyton Place was all about revolution—of the romantic heart and the community soul.