"Vihreän kullan maa" (1987) TV series 1987-1988

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Director:

Markku Onttonen

Writer:

Kirsti Manninen (writer)

Seasons:

1 | 2

Release Date:

6 March 1987 (Finland)

Genre:

Drama

Cast

Asta Backman

...

Helena Evola (unknown episodes)

Runtime:

Finland:25 min (episodes 2-26) | Finland:50 min (episode 1)

Country:

Finland

Language:

Finnish

Color:

Color

The Finns do Dallas - badly

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Before there was format television to make sure that every modestly successful TV calamity would be replicated dozen-fold all over the world, there was simple rip-off. With Vihreän kullan maa, the Finnish Mainostelevisio tried to rip off Dallas, the most popular soap of the day, whose nefarious infection had left its scars in Finland too. Starting from the aerial shots of the opening credits, the producers made no secrets about trying to copy the whole concept as such. So the black gold of Texas became the green gold of central Finland, the Ewings became the Evolas, J.R. became Jouko Evola etc. Jouko's agenda was also a dead ringer with his American cousin's, from accidentally pushing his squeaky clean brother's sugar-sweet wife down the stairs into an inevitable miscarriage, to cheating and neglecting his wife into alcoholism and then pining after her, once she had sobered up and found new love. The existing blueprint of ever-ailing, long-suffering matriarchs, family feuds and sibling rivalry was duplicated with admirable fidelity.

However, superficial reverse-engineering has never guaranteed that the end product will work like its model. Vihreän kullan maa certainly never did. In place of Dallas' garish, plastic, tongue-in-the-cheek melodrama, it paraded the more domestic, brooding and hopelessly suffocating sentimentality that seemed like a grotesquely out-of-date throwback to the kind of stiff melodramas made by Suomi-Filmi forty years earlier. Like the strings of the shiveringly overbearing score, it suffused the whole series and choked it to death. Granted, Finland is a long way from Texas, mentally as well. The capped-toothed, limousine-driving merger of hyper-conservative family values and work ethics with the cheerfully decadent material luxury and debauchery could never have been transplanted as such to the 1980s Finland without the audience laughing themselves silly. Unfortunately, the producers replaced that inherent silliness and sun-roasted escapism with grey and ponderous literalism, and the audience ended up guffawing just the same.

Like the mini-series Jäinen horisontti - an industrial espionage thriller choked by its own verbosity (which also featured Eloranta and Korkiakoski) - a couple of years earlier, Vihreän kullan maa is best seen as one of those early attempts by Finnish television producers to reach into the international domain, without having an actual clue how its really done (but you have to start somewhere). Not that there is much danger of actual seeing Vihreän kullan maa, for there is unlikely to be some wave of nostalgia to buoy it up from the bottom scum of MTV archives. However, all of us who saw it at the time shall surely carry fond and unfortunately inerasable memories of just how awful it really was.