Aaron Spelling is dead at 83, after a stroke. You’ve seen his name on television credits and film credits as a producer. Don’t fib. You damn well know you have. Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Beverly Hill 90210, Starsky and Hutch, The Mod Squad. You have so watched at least one of those shows. Don’t lie to me.
There are four people on the planet who haven’t seen a television show by Aaron Spelling. Two of them live in a teepee up past Eganville. One is in an asylum on Guam. The last one is a Gujuara Indian who was chained to a rock in the bay for forty years.
Nothing Aaron Spelling created in television was intellectual. You won’t see a retrospective of his oevre at the American Film Institute. He won’t be nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, or the Museum of Film. Even the French thought Spelling was uncouth and they think Jerry Lewis is talented enough to deserve a Legion d’Honneur.
His shows were translated into hundreds of languages. At this moment someone is watching Krystle call Alexis something unpleasant in Urdu, while another person watches Link and Pete try to find the drugs dubbed into Azerbaijani. Unfortunately, those broadcasts are also going out into the Universe, so Po931X and his family on the Planet Coozebane IV are watching Captain Steubing or Mister Roarke welcome Lenny and Squiggy in their walk-on role. I despair of our planet some days.
Aaron Spelling may not have been highbrow, even by Republican standards, but he did create a lot of popular television and pop culture. Nobody could ever say they were challenged by the plot twists of Fantasy Island or even Starsky and Hutch. It was formulaic, three acts plus prologue and epilogue or cliff hanger.
It was schlock, but it was immensely popular. Sure, it was mindless pap, but it was well done mindless pap. We’ve all slumped on the sofa after a vicious day and lost our minds in the eighth re-run of a Charlie’s Angels.
Some weird stuff got injected into our culture from Aaron Spelling. The Mod Squad was one of the first dramas with an African American (back then they were black) in a full-jam Afro as an equal on the team. Starsky and Hutch popularized pimp-chic with Huggy Bear and made the car (a 1976 Ford Torino) a hero before Knight Rider. Jiggle shows, of which Charlie’s Angels was the first, made nipples acceptable on prime time. Linda Evans as Krystle got the word ‘Bitch” over the banned bar. Beverly Hills 90210 covered it all from incest to sex with fish.
The actors who were made, or remade, by Aaron Spelling are almost too long to list. Paul Michael Glazer, David Soul, Peggy Lipton, Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III, Tige Andrews, Herve Villichaize, Ricardo Montalban, Gavin McLeod, Linda Evans, William Devane, Shannen Doherty, Luke Perry, Farrah Faucett-Majors, David Doyle, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, Shelly Hack, Tanya Roberts, Bernie Kopell, Ted McGinley, Fred Grandy, Ted Lange, Lauren Tewes, Jill Whelan, John Forsyth, Joan Collins, Pamela Sue Martin, Emma Samms, Lloyd Bochner. Stephanie Powers, Robert Wagner and just about every B, C and D-list actor who ever walked up from the seaplane dock on Fantasy Island or across the gangplank on The Love Boat. Hit the IMDB (imdb.com) and search up his name for the filmography. It is huge.
Even scarier, I was able to spit out that list of actors without referring to IMDB. For some demented reason I retained that data. I need a lobotomy, I think.
Culturally, what does this mean to the Greater Good of Mankind? Sweet FA and I don’t mean Football Association. It was recreational, escapist and I make no apologies for having seen any of it.
Spelling did know, somehow, deep in his bones, what would entertain us. He was probably the last of that kind of mogul and storyteller.
RoadDave 