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.
anonymous
