Back in the 1970s Aaron Spelling brought us such execrable TV shows as "Charlie's Angels", "Starsky and Hutch", "Fantasy Island", "The Love Boat", and others. Spelling didn't attempt to promote the shows as great dramatic art, preferring to produce (as he called it) "candy for the mind". These were shows that had cardboard characters, childish plots, stupid dialogue, and no real value. Spelling was very perceptive, since he realized that when people came home from work, they wanted something simple and unchallenging, with no real plot or substance.
"American Dreams" ran from 2002 to 2005 and had intelligent plots, great acting, good cinematography, and complex characters. I guess that's what its problem was—people had to actually think while they were watching, instead of drooling over Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith or watching David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser screeching around town in a hot red car while acting out insultingly sophomoric scripts every week.
"American Dreams" told the story of a middle-class Catholic family in Philadelphia during the mid-1960s. The show was basically a soap opera, with many intertwining plot elements every week. The show's story began in 1963 and featured such subjects as the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Beatles, sexual orientation, the U.S. space program, and many others. The intelligent scripts were enacted by a dynamite cast of virtual unknowns, all portrayed against the backdrop of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand". Viewers didn't have to tolerate great quantities of snickering, suggestive dialogue, car chases, or constant gunplay.
The show lasted three seasons and unfortunately never achieved top ratings. The cast members were uniformly excellent and included Brittany Snow, Tom Verica, Will Estes, Gail O'Grady, Vanessa Lengies, Jonathan Adams, and many others. The younger members of the cast were surprisingly professional and believable, but everyone performed at a very high level.
It's a shame that "American Dreams" was canceled after only three seasons. I suppose people would rather watch John Ritter fall down and Suzanne Somers jiggle in "Three's Company", because that idiotic show lasted a lot longer. That's unfortunate, but it does indicate why American prime time television is so bad and why our expectations are so low.
"American Dreams" ran from 2002 to 2005 and had intelligent plots, great acting, good cinematography, and complex characters. I guess that's what its problem was—people had to actually think while they were watching, instead of drooling over Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith or watching David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser screeching around town in a hot red car while acting out insultingly sophomoric scripts every week.
"American Dreams" told the story of a middle-class Catholic family in Philadelphia during the mid-1960s. The show was basically a soap opera, with many intertwining plot elements every week. The show's story began in 1963 and featured such subjects as the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Beatles, sexual orientation, the U.S. space program, and many others. The intelligent scripts were enacted by a dynamite cast of virtual unknowns, all portrayed against the backdrop of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand". Viewers didn't have to tolerate great quantities of snickering, suggestive dialogue, car chases, or constant gunplay.
The show lasted three seasons and unfortunately never achieved top ratings. The cast members were uniformly excellent and included Brittany Snow, Tom Verica, Will Estes, Gail O'Grady, Vanessa Lengies, Jonathan Adams, and many others. The younger members of the cast were surprisingly professional and believable, but everyone performed at a very high level.
It's a shame that "American Dreams" was canceled after only three seasons. I suppose people would rather watch John Ritter fall down and Suzanne Somers jiggle in "Three's Company", because that idiotic show lasted a lot longer. That's unfortunate, but it does indicate why American prime time television is so bad and why our expectations are so low.