Stellead
Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Skyler
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
gregoryshnly
Knots Landing started off as a spin off to Dallas,dealing with Lucy's Mum and Dad,Gary and Valene remarrying and moving to a Southern California Cul De Sac after Miss Ellie buys them a house,to make up for all the ill treatment they both suffered from the Ewings. Joan Van Ark and Ted Shackleford were both excellent throughout the entire run as was the wonderful Michele Lee who through the seasons lost her beloved husband Sid(Don Murray)got his murderers convicted and married the fiery Mack(Kevin Dobson) Karen was the only character to appear in all the Knots episodes and she was the voice of the people,in one episode when she spoke of wanting to be able to trust people,send cash in the mail etc. After a fairly quiet first season,the Cul De Sac was rocked by the arrival of Sid's sister Abby(Donna Mills)who stole Gary from Val and really brought sex and scandal to Knots Landing. Donna Mills played the part with great gusto and humour,when she left around season 10,she was sorely missed. When popular character Ciji Dunn(Lisa Hartman) was killed off,the was an outcry from fans,so the writers,created a new character lookalike Cathy Greary(Lisa Hartman again)with the plot being Abby hiring a lookalike to send Gary off the rails while she spend his inheritance! When Joan Van Ark left in the last season,Val appeared to die in a car crash but returned in the two episode finale,she'd been kidnapped for a year,a happy ending for the show!. The show didn't shrink from the reality of death though,with Sid's death and later popular character Laura(Constance McCashin)dying from brain cancer. A great show with a great cast,special mention also to William Devane for a great performance as Greg Sumner. It deserved its very long run!
vs661966
Knots Landing was an excellent drama. I watched all 14 seasons of this series. I especially liked the first few seasons when the show focused on the families in the cul-de-sac, but after the fifth season the show's story lines became similar to other prime time soap opera fare with more of a focus on greed and the desire for wealth and power. Although the show changed direction, the writing, directing and especially the acting remained top-notch and were always superior to the other shows.Knots Landing premiered on CBS in December 1979. It followed the lives and relationships of Gary & Valene Ewing (Ted Shackelford & Joan Van Ark), recently remarried and new to town; Sid & Karen Fairgate (Don Murray & Michele Lee), the strong married couple with three children; Richard & Laura Avery (John Pleshette & Constance McCashin), the couple with marital problems; and Kenny & Ginger Ward (James Houghton & Kim Lankford), the young newlyweds.Abby Cunningham (Donna Mills), Sid's younger divorced sister in the "bitch" role, came to town with her two children at the beginning of the second season; she was added to stir up the pot, so to speak, and began trying to seduce everyone's husband; she eventually set her sights on Gary and married him after ruining his marriage to Val. Donna Mills, who had for years played weak female and "victim" roles in various TV shows and movies, was thrilled to play a strong, powerful female lead. In fact, the show had many strong female characters.In the beginning, these characters were a lot like people that lived down the street. They wore jeans and did the dishes... something you would never see on "Dynasty" or "Dallas"! Also, the early episodes (first 2 seasons) were self-contained and did not have the serialized format that was standard for most of the other nighttime soaps. Early in the third season, Sid Fairgate died during emergency surgery after a car crash because Don Murray wanted to leave the show. By the end of the fourth season, original characters Richard Avery, Kenny Ward and Ginger Ward were all written off the show. The new characters of Mack MacKenzie and Gregory Sumner became more prominent. The biggest mistake was when the powers that be fired actress Constance McCashin during the 1987-1988 season due to her real-life pregnancy. They had written her two previous pregnancies into the story, but they did not plan to do so this time. Granted, the storyline involving Laura's brain cancer and subsequent death was very well written and poignant, and superbly acted by Constance McCashin and William Devane as her husband Greg Sumner; however, they could have just had Laura leave town or written the character out of a few episodes to accommodate the actress' pregnancy since Laura was not very heavily involved in a big story at that time. Apparently, many other reviewers liked this character and felt that letting this actress go was a mistake.There were many great actors on this show, but special mention must go to Julie Harris as Lilimae Clements, Valene's mother, and Michelle Phillips as Anne Matheson, Paige's shallow, self-absorbed mother and Mack's ex-girlfriend. They both brought lighter comedic moments to the show with their roles.The fact that the show lasted 14 seasons demonstrates that it was far better than the other prime time soaps. The show managed to stay true to form for the most part throughout the entire series run by focusing on the characters and their motivations and not on overly outlandish plots.
Brian Washington
When this show first premiered, many didn't give it a chance due to the fact that it was a spin off from the hugely popular Dallas. A lot of people didn't think that a show featuring the least known of the Ewing brothers, Gary, and his wife Val would last. However, it did last and boy did it ever. For fourteen years we saw the saga of the cul de sac and their various residents and the main reason that this show became great is the fact their was such great chemistry among the leads and that led to some great performances, especially from the woman who eventually became the lead, Michele Lee. Also, many of the stories, unlike most nighttime soaps, were based in reality. Subjects such as drug and alcohol addiction, colon cancer and rape were all covered in this show. But, perhaps the most dramatic change occurred several seasons after the show debuted when the Williamses, an African-American couple and their daughter, were introduced in 1987. This was at a time when many blacks were becoming upwardly mobile and this was just a reflection of that trend. This show definitely will always be fondly remembered by everyone.
jpyates
Knots Landing was many things over an extraordinary amount of television years....14 seasons is an astonishing feat for any television primetime show. It was the best of shows and at times the most frustrating of shows....Executive Producers Jacobs and Filerman pushed and tested the boundaries and constraints of serial drama by daring to be mundane where other shows were exciting and changing the fundamental landscape of the show three times.It is also worth noting that this show focused largely on it's female charactors and gave rise to one of the most popular women on television Karen Fairgate Mackenzie, played by the multi talented Michele Lee.The first four seasons of the show were an attempt to look at the lives of five family units in a suburban cul de sac in Southern California. There were great strengths of performances, notably from the stellar female performances of Michele Lee, Joan Van Ark,Donna Mills, the brilliant Constance McCashin and Julie Harris. Some of the episodes were gentle some of them were harder and gave the promise of what was to come in later years, but there is no doubt that without the early, subtle and largely ignored first years of the show it could not have garnered the huge audiences it did later in it's run.And so as the eighties swept in, so Knots Landing changed. Subtley and slowly over the fifth season, the producers changed the focus of the show from the cul de sac to the larger town. And while they changed the look of it, they didn't actually make it different. The sweeping dramatic music, the pathos, the drama and the humour all remained intact so that by it's sixth season when the writers came up with a bizarre and heartwrenching story, whereby Valene Ewing 's babies are stolen and secretly adopted, the show finally jumped into the top ten ratings and held it's time slot, beating off Hill Street Blues and later LA Law. In fact the show was the only primetime show around this time that didn't suffer a drop in ratings the next season.Many would argue that by it's eight and ninth year things were wearing thin and when budget cuts forced producers to loose some of it's core cast Julie Harris and Constance McCashin, writers and producers again shifted the emphasis of Knots toward a new set of characters. Looking back, with hindsight it's easy to see that this was a big mistake and one that the show never fully recovered from, although the 10th season is regarded as one of it's finest years.And as always there was a fine performance from the supporting new female lead Lynne Moody.And so it sailed into the sunset as quietly as it had begun. The later years had brought some fine performances from William Devane and Kevin Dobson, thanks to some terrific writing and a touching story involving child abuse. Other notables include the outrageous Anne Matheson character, played with glee by ex Mamas and Papas Michele Philips....Don Murray's gentle Sid Fairgate and Lar Park Lincoln's wickedly good performance as Linda Fairgate.But when all is said and done, and the re runs keep fans old and new tuned into this shows many facets, it's a credit to Jacobs and Filerman, Lee, Shackelford, Van Ark, Mills, Harris , McCashin and Dobson that this legacy of quality entertainment is still so fondly remembered.Knots Landing. Noises Everywhere. We will never see it's kind again.
