Cultural Productions VI: A Photo Essay on 'Dallas' (2012-) and the Texas Race War

1. Introduction

I love Dallas (1978-1991), which, in my opinion, is one of the greatest American TV shows of the 1980s, if not all time. I've watched six seasons of it, and my interest was piqued by the news that a continuation of the series would be shown in 2012. I bought season one and two of the original series, just to see if I liked it, and liked it I did. I zipped through all the episodes which have been released on DVD in Australia very quickly (the show is easy to watch - always the mark of a good series) and became a Dallas fanatic. This article will be about the new series and the old one.


2. The original series

Before I go any further, I should explain - given that Dallas ended a long time ago - what the original show was about.

It concerns a family-owned oil company, Ewing Oil, which is run by two brothers - one impossibly good, the other one evil - Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) and J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) respectively. Bobby is handsome, virtuous, incorruptible, brave, but often hot-tempered and physically violent; he's also blustering and sanctimonious. His brother, J.R., is obsessed by making Ewing Oil 'the biggest of the Texas independents' (i.e., the biggest of the non-conglomerates) and uses that, like a mantra, to justify all of his bad behavior. He thinks that business can be carried out by pimping, thuggery, blackmail, bribery and fraud. He is, of course, widely disliked, and, unlike Bobby, physically cowardly.

In a way, he is an ascetic: it becomes clear that money, women, reputation, mean very little to him in comparison to his grand goal of making Ewing Oil big. This is his obsession, and he lets nothing stand in his way. He frequently comes up with grand schemes, often based on swindles, which always come unstuck in the end.

One of his endearing habits is his loose tongue. He tends to be very blunt and say outright what people don't have the courage to say (mainly because they're too polite, or afraid to hurt another person's feelings). 'So your wife has left you, Bobby? Can't say I'm unhappy - she was a loon' (which merits a punch in the jaw from Bobby).

There is a third brother, Gary (Ted Shackelford), weak-willed, unstable, itinerant, a family outcast who drifts (appropriately enough) in and out of Texas, to make guest appearances on the show: because he dislikes his own family, he never stays for long. He has fathered a child, Lucy (Charlene Tilton) by a waitress, and has left her to be raised by the Ewings. Lucy is a vertically-challenged, intellectually-challenged, over-sexed teenager:

 The Ewing family lives on a ranch, Southfork (which is guarded by thuggish ranch hands wielding rifles) and is really a patriarchal family. The head of the family, Jock Ewing, is a villainous old man, who follows the same methods as J.R. ('I taught that boy everything I know about oil'), is the owner of Ewing Oil and is a bully; he is married to the steely Miss Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes), who is somewhat naïve about Jock's character. Jock is, on the flip side, generous to those who are loyal to him, and an entrepreneurial man with great vigour. One of the distinctive traits of the series is that the characters often are two-sided: they have good and bad sides.

Every soap opera family needs enemies: in Dallas, the enemy of the Ewing family is the Barnes family, who have been at war with the Ewings for decades. However, just like the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, there is a romance between the two feuding families. Bobby, in the first episode, marries the beautifully voluptuous Pamela Barnes (Victoria Principal):

Her father and her brother, both losers, are out to destroy the Ewings, and won't take Pamela's marriage to Bobby lying down! Pamela's brother, Cliff Barnes (played brilliantly by Ken Kercheval), is a mentally unstable, snide, self-pitying and arrogant lawyer, and becomes J.R.'s principal nemesis in the show. He is easily the most dislikeable character.

Mental pathology is, in actual fact, a recurring theme in Dallas. J.R. is a sociopath who occasionally is prone to morbid, incapacitating depression; both Pamela and her brother are bipolar manic depressives and attempt suicide on more than one occasion; J.R.'s unfortunate, long-suffering wife, Sue-Ellen, is an alcoholic with (what I diagnose as) borderline personality disorder.

Both Sue Ellen and Pamela receive psychiatric treatment a few times in the series.

Another important character is the ranch foreman, Ray Krebbs (Steve Kanaly), an uneducated country bumpkin who has the most insincere grin ever seen on television (something which immediately marks him out as untrustworthy) and has a strange resemblance to the young George W. Bush. Ray is simple, loyal, unpretentious, honest, hard-working, dependable - probably how most rural Texans see themselves.

Something I've noticed in Dallas is that all the characters drink heavily throughout the day: drinking seems to start at ten o'clock in the morning - anyone visiting the offices of Ewing Oil is immediately offered a whiskey. There are drinks for lunch (at the Cattleman's Club), and finally, the entire family gathers around the whiskey trolley in the living room for more drinking before bed. Alcoholism, though, is always lurking around the corner, and not only for Sue Ellen: Bobby, J.R., Ray and Cliff go through alcoholic episodes.

Why was Dallas such a success? The answer is: it was a good show. The casting was excellent - every actor is right for the part - and so was the production, the writing, and the rest. The scenes shot around the ranch and in the city of Dallas itself lent the show an air of verisimilitude. The back story of Dallas was quite extensive, and well-worked out (as can be seen from the first episode). One could believe that this a real, if larger than life, family.

I think that the show really did humanise the South, and Texans, as well. There wasn't any apologizing for what Texans were. In that regard, with its themes - of capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, of the self-made man, of patriarchy and loyalty - the show was right-wing and conservative, on an unconscious level. In fact, it was probably the most pro-business show in the history of television. The businessmen in this show are the go-getters, the drivers of the engine of American capitalism, and are good - despite the fact that a few of their number (such as J.R.) are bad.


3.  Multiple generations in 'Dallas' and 'Bold and the Beautiful'


I've just finished watching the new series, which started in 2012, which includes some of the old actors, but also the new, younger generation of characters, and I enjoyed it a lot. Some interesting themes: the abandonment of Generation Y children by their parents; conflict between white Americans and Hispanic immigrants; but most of all ageing.

The last - ageing - is really noticeable. It sticks out like a sore thumb, unfortunately, and throws things some off-kilter. Members of the original cast who appear on the show, who weren't spring chickens when their fictional children were born, look pretty old now, and in fact look like the grandparents, not parents, of characters in their thirties.
  
As an example of aged members of the original Dallas: here's Sue-Ellen (Linda Gray, born 1940):

 

And here's Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval, born 1935):

And here's J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman, 1931-2012), with his on-screen son with Sue-Ellen, John Ross Ewing (Josh Henderson, born 1981): J.R. here looks old enough to be John Ross' grandfather:

And Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy, born 1949) with his on-screen son Christopher Ewing (Jesse Metcalfe, born 1978). Bobby, here played by a 63-year-old, doesn't look too bad, but then, he was always one of the youngest people on the original show:

In actual fact, the dates all match up: John Ross Ewing first appeared, as a baby, on the original TV show in 1978, while Christopher in 1981. John Ross' parents J.R. and Sue Ellen were 47 and 38 at the time of his birth - so were old parents. Still, it just seems incongruous having such old people on the show (both J.R. and Cliff are roughly the same age as Warren Buffett, and have the same vitality - they are aged billionaires who zip around the world on jet planes, still making deals and still buying people with their money) without an intervening generation.

The American soap The Bold and the Beautiful (1987-), which is not of the same quality as Dallas, does multi-generations far better, far more realistically. Here are the 'old' members of the show, Eric and Stephanie Forrester (John McCook and Susan Flannery). They were born in 1944 and 1939 respectively, and so are roughly the same age as most of the original Dallas cast:

And here is the (now somewhat aged) 'middle' generation: Taylor Forrester, Ridge Forrester and Brooke Logan (Hunter Tylo, Ronn Moss, Kelly Hunter Lang):

And here is Ridge with his son, Thomas Forrester (Adam Gregory):

Ridge and Taylor's daughter, Steffi Forrester (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), with her grandmother:

Hope Logan (Kim Matula) with her mother, Brooke:

And finally, Liam Spencer (Scott Clifton) with his father, Bill Spencer (Don Diamont):

Both the above characters are William Spencer III and II respectively. The evil magazine publishing tycoon, William Spencer I, was this guy (Jim Storm) and was on the show about ten years ago. He had an unrequited love for grandmother Stephanie:

I think that, from looking at all the above photographs, Bold- appears to be a fresher, 'younger' show, somehow, than Dallas. Bold-, unlike the new Dallas, is not a case of old codgers and very young folks; rather, the generations are skillfully blended in. Really, this couldn't be helped, because Dallas started in 1978 - when Bobby and his wife Pamela (Victoria Principal, born 1950) were considered the 'young' couple; Bold-, on the other hand, started in 1987.

As to how important this age is: in the case of Dallas, I say, very. Larry Hagman died suddenly in 2012, midway through shooting season two. Hagman had already been sick with cancer before the new series, and although he delivers a fine performance in the new series, he is quite peripheral, perhaps owing to his age and illness (we see that J.R. starts the show in a nursing home, suffering from depression).

Despite all that, the new Dallas is a marvelously up to date show: mobile phones, the Internet, lap tops, USBs, hidden miniature cameras, DVDs and online gambling are featured prominently. J.R. struggles to adapt to the new technology at first (after coming out of the nursing home), but ends up doing wonderfully. I think the producers made a conscious choice to emphasise 21st century technology as much as possible, given how antiquated the 1980s TV series was.


4.  Clean energy, Mexicans

The original cast members tend to take a back seat in the new series, which focuses on the younger generation of the Ewing family: Christopher (Bobby's adopted son) and J.R.'s son, John Ross. Both the cousins are gullible, if not downright stupid, easily manipulated, hot-headed and impulsive. The main difference is that Christopher, being Bobby's son, is pretty, while John Ross is weaselly-looking.

In the original series, development of natural resources versus conservation and 'the ecology' (it was called 'the ecology' back then, not 'the environment') was a recurring theme. Here it comes back: but it's more a case of alternative energy versus oil. Christopher Ewing is a champion of methane gas energy extraction, whereas his cousin John Ross wants to drill the substantial oil reserves on the family ranch, Southfork. I think that the question of 'alternative energy' makes the show a little dated. America, in particular the South and the Mid-West, has gone through a big commodity boom, with the exploitation of natural gas and oil, in the 2000s, which is almost comparable to the boom of the 1970s (both had the same cause: an abnormally weak US dollar, which drove up the price of gold, oil, land and other commodities). With the recent strengthening of the US dollar, the boom might tail off (just as it has in Australia), but for the time being, oil is relevant. Alternative energy, on the other hand, is not, because it has been shown, I think, that it isn't up to the task of replacing fossil fuels. Because alternative energy hasn't been able to pay its way, the government has had to subsidise it, and as a result, levy taxes to pay for those subsidies. That, along with the fact that the interest in combatting "global warming" has waned, has taken the sheen off "clean energy". (The show does reflect this somewhat: the shortcomings of Christopher's methane energy become evident early on).

The thing is, the show needs to make the two cousins - Christopher and John Ross (who are, really, more brothers than cousins) - enemies, and so this conflict (between capitalism and environmentalism) must come into play. The producers and writers, however, needed to include another source of conflict. Both of them are competitors for the same hand - Elena Ramos (the Panamanian actress Jordana Brewster). Which is totally irrational, given that the gaunt, skeletal Mestizo actress (who probably, in my opinion, suffers from an eating disorder), is rather plain:

It's a sign of politically-correct casting that the TV producers had to include a prominent Mexican character who is, in the series, the daughter of a Mexican housemaid at the Southfork ranch. (In the old series, there were two Mexican servants working at the ranch, but these were seen and not heard - they weren't given speaking parts).

It's a shame that the producers couldn't have found a prettier Mestizo actress to play Elena, like these two, who appear in the show (Leonor Varela, a Chilean, and Leanna Pareja, a Colombian):

Then the fierce rivalry between the two cousins would have made much more sense. (On that note, the actress who plays Rebecca Sutter, Christopher's other love interest, is really lovely. She is a tall, blue-eyed Argentinean, Julie Gonzalo, who, ironically, is Latin American like the three cast members above, but not a Mestizo. I was in love with her soft, gentle, vulnerable character after a few episodes):

In the original series, most of the action took place within the state of Texas. We only saw Latin Americans a few times - e.g., in the episode when J.R. concocts a bizarre scheme to sell oil to the Castro regime in Cuba - and overall, the casting for the show was 99% white. Just about every character, no matter how minor, was played by a white American. Here, though, politically-correct casting (as I mentioned before) has caught up with Dallas, and non-white actors (Afro-Americans, Mestizos, and other unidentifiable ethnic types, are inserted at every opportunity: there are black doctors, black sheriffs, even black ranch owners, which seems somewhat incongruous even by television standards). One has to ask if there's some affirmative-action law in place for US films and TV shows, which specifies that such-and-such a quota of unemployed Afro-American and Mestizo actors have to be given jobs.

Most interestingly, it's the Mestizo and Latin American characters in the new Dallas who are the bad guys. This reflects how much the politics, culture and racial demography has changed in Texas since the original. While the show isn't anywhere near the level of Breaking Bad (2008-), which is (almost to a pathological degree) anti-Mexican and anti-Mestizo, it's up there. John Ross gets beaten up by what Sue Ellen calls a 'Latino gang' (bite your tongue, Sue Ellen - you racist!). The chief bad guy, Vicente Cano, is a Venezuelan oil baron, who is played by the rather suave, Castilian-looking (i.e., white) Carlos Bernard:

Too bad they couldn't have gotten a really horrible, Mestizo actor to play him, like Raymond Cruz, who plays the despicable Tuco Salamanca in Breaking Bad:

But then, you can't have everything.

This is a big issue in Texas, as we know that the whites there are presently undergoing demographic replacement by Mestizos from across the border. Prominent Texan "conservatives" such as Rick Perry and the Bush siblings - George Jr. and Jeb - back this, as do the liberal media. Dire predictions are made by demographers to the effect that whites will be a minority in Texas within a few decades, but the media treats this as a cause for celebration, not concern.

Because of this demographic avalanche, and because it is part of the South, Texans are right-wing, anti-Obama and anti-amnesty. The idea of secession from the Union - promulgated by Southern nationalists such as Hunter Wallace - is popular in Texas.

In an interesting plot twist, Sue Ellen, in the new series, runs for office as governor - and is modeled, to my mind, on the formidable governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer. It would be interesting to see if Sue Ellen, as a politician, becomes anti-inmigración. Probably not: my guess is that the show will keep up an anti-Mestizo racialism on an entirely subliminal level.

5.   In conclusion

Will the new Dallas turn out to be as good as the new one? There are a number of differences between the old and new, the chief one being the pace. The old series was - being a 1970s-1980s era show - tightly written, edited, directed: not one shot, and not one line, was wasted. The stories were very much bang-bang-bang. The entire plot of season one of the new series would have taken up, tops, around three to four episodes of the old one. I think that this is because, decades ago, writers, directors and producers were used to working in theatre more than television: we see this in, for example, the use of sets in those times. Acting, directing, was very structured and compressed. In comparison, today's TV shows are rather loose.

I'm not sure that the Christopher versus John Ross conflict can be made the basis of an entire series. The original show wasn't just about Bobby versus J.R., but a whole range of sub-plots (which were interwoven with the arc of that week's particular episode). On the other hand, Dallas has such a rich backstory - thirteen seasons worth! - which should really give the writers of the new series some inspiration.

The antics of this white American, Texan family are fascinating to watch.

Cultural Productions V: 'The Vampire Diaries'

How do some shows get a bad reputation (as opposed to a good one)? Sometimes it's just the cover: when I saw The Vampire Diaries (2009-) in the shop, I thought it would just be a cheap Twilight or True Blood knockoff. It didn't help that it was set in a high school. I don't like American teenage / high school films very much: maybe it's because I don't like teenagers, or, more likely, I can't suspend my belief when I watch the American high school dramas - I think all the "teenagers" look about 25 or thereabouts. But I read that Vampire- was based on a series of novels by a Lisa Jane Smith, and so decided that maybe the show wouldn't be all that bad. Films and TV shows tend to be a little more substantial when they're based on a series of novels; by substantial, I mean with more developed characters, a bigger story and more thought-out imagined universe. Just think of Game of Thrones, True Blood, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Beautiful Creatures... I don't think these would be as successful, artistically and commercial, if they hadn't been adaptations of novels. The Twilight films are, objectively, terrible, and I can understand the opprobrium which has been heaped upon them. But, all the same, they are oddly enjoyable and watchable simply because the underlying material is so strong.

What of Vampire-? Is it is badly acted as Twilight? I think much of it is badly acted, directed, misconceived. There's a lack of underlying realism there which is quite disconcerting. You know, from watching the Twilight series that the story really is set in the rain-soaked, cloudy town of Forks, Callam County in Washington state: that is, the town, and the people, seem real enough. The same thing with True Blood's town (way on the other side of America) of Bon Temps in Renard Parish, Louisiana. But Vampire- is set in Mystic Falls in the state of Virginia, and this town doesn't ring true at all. Virginia is the birthplace of the confederacy: shouldn't everyone have a southern accent? But no-one in the show does.

The other thing too is that everyone seems to live in beautifully furnished, expensive mini-mansions or designer apartments. In nearly every character's house and there's a baby grand piano in the corner, some wonderfully arranged flowers in a vase, an expensive rug... Whereas everyone in True Blood either lives in a trailer home or a dilapidated Southern mansion and even the homes in Twilight (e.g., the shack the Native American Indian character Jacob lives in) seem realistic. Mystic Falls, however, must be the richest town in the USA, if not the world. The school frequently puts on social events like Civil War re-enactment parades, 1960s-themed dances, a special Gone With the Wind themed school day, in which all the pupils wear extravagant, beautiful costumes. (The sound stages, floats, etc., are incredibly elaborate and expensive as well). Some high school! It's a level of extravagance and display of wealth which is more befitting some Arab or Central Asian oil-rich country.

On top of that, there's the racial angle. The heroine of the show, Elena Gilbert, is played by a Bulgarian actress, Nina Dobrev. She's a small, mousy, dusky woman, who doesn't look like a Southerner: there's an explanation for this - she is somehow the astral twin of a Bulgarian vampire woman, Katerina Petrovka - but her un-Southernness really sticks out. On top of that, there are frequent flashbacks to the Civil War and antebellum period, and we get to meet a band of vampires from that time - including a character called Pearl, a Chinese immigrant, whose Chinese-ness isn't noticed by the white characters, and a Mestizo or two. I don't know if these "diverse" vampires were in the book or not: perhaps the producers added them to give the show a little of spice, or to fill some affirmative action quota. (I know that the character of Laurent in the Twilight novels was a white, but was then changed into an Afro-American for the film: the characters in Twilight are mostly white (except for the Native Americans) and so the producers, presumably, changed Laurent's race in the interests of "diversity", and to hell with staying true to the novel).

A writer at the American Renaissance site commented, on returning to his home town in Florida, how all the TV advertisements showed skinny, coffee-coloured black women with kinky Afro hair (usually dyed brown); whereas, out in the shopping mall, the black women in reality tended to be obese, dark-skinned and had artificially straightened hair. From this account, and others, I suspect that the black people depicted in True Blood were quite true to life: whereas, in Vampire-, the black people are what I call designer Afro-Americans, like those who appear in the TV advertisements shown in Florida: e.g., the witch-girl Bonnie and her grandmother (who are descended from a long line of African-American witches coming from Salem, Massachusetts! Why aren't they white? Or, if they are black witches, why don't they come from the Caribbean?)

These are gaffes in casting. The biggest of all, however, is the casting of Damon Salvatore. The plot of Vampire- revolves around two brothers - the improbably named Damon and Stefan Salvatore - one good, one evil, and both competing for the hand of the one woman. Stefan (Paul Wesley) is the good one, and is appropriately cast. He's a skinny young man with a James Dean hairdo, and looks like a young Boris Karloff. But the actor playing the evil Damon - Ian Somerhalder - is one of the flamingest homosexuals in the history of TV. He flounces, pouts, flips his wrist, in just about every shot. Which isn't to say that he can't be menacing - far from it; only that it's hard to take his heterosexual passion for Elena seriously. It's a lot like Bold and the Beautiful, which has at least three heterosexual characters - Rick Forrester, Thomas Forrester and Bill Spencer - played by actors who are obviously gay (Jacob Young, Adam Gregory and Don Diamont respectively). But then, Bold- can't be taken seriously: it's high camp, high comedy. Vampire-, on the other hand, sets out to be a drama. (I think, had they made Damon a gay character, it would be quite interesting: gay vampires do work in shows like True Blood, and can be quite menacing and scary, despite their comic gay mincing and so forth. But had they made Damon gay, that would have taken the show too far away from its theme, which is sibling rivalry, in this case, over a woman).

Vampire- is quite a bloody show: it has the highest body count of any show I've seen. This is quite a bad thing, I think, from a dramatic point of view. You can't keep on introducing key characters, major characters, in one episode and then kill them off two episodes later! But that's how Vampire- works. In fact, it's like WWI: one character is sent to the front, perishes, and another is sent, and another, in a big human wave... Something that bothered me was the affectlessness of all that killing, especially in the first season. The evil Damon would slaughter a few people, and his good brother, and Elena, instead of condemning him, would worry themselves over his feelings - they would feel sorry for the "sensitive" Damon because of some slight (usually romantic) that he had suffered. After all this has gone on for a few episodes, you end up asking: if Damon is such a bad guy, a killer, on top of being a pestilential nuisance with annoying homosexual mannerisms - why doesn't the good Stefan just find a way to kill him off? Usually the bad guy - and Damon is set up as the bad guy at the start - is finished off by the end. The show gets out of this quandary by introducing bad guys who are even worse than Damon. And there's a succession of them: super-bad guys who are even more powerful, and more homicidal and ruthless, than Damon is.

It sounds as though I don't enjoy the show very much, but that's not true. I find it more watchable and compelling than a respectable drama like, say, Lost (2004-2010), which is an example of great, well-written drama but not compelling drama (there's a big difference). Vampire-, in fact, is a triumph of screenwriting. It is spectacular in that regard: I don't think I've seen anything like it. The twists and turns, the transformation of good guys into bad guys and vice versa, of enemies into friends, and so forth, will leave you reeling. You can't predict what will happen next and every episode ends on a real cliffhanger that leaves you wanting more. As a result, the show is addictive. As I said, a triumph.

People ask, 'Why are vampires so popular?'. The answer is that they are superheroes. In Twilight, True Blood, Vampire-, they have super-strength, can run at super-speed, can fly or leap tall buildings in a single bound, are invulnerable - just like Superman. What's more, like Superman, they have their fatal weaknesses: in their case, it is sunlight. (A few of the vampires in the show walk in the sunlight, because they wear magic rings which were made for them by a witch). In these TV shows, we have, not only vampires, but werewolves, witches, shape-shifters, faeries, maenads and all manner of supernatural beings and creatures, who have super-powers as well. Such supernatural beings have their roots in our collective unconscious, and it's perhaps for this reason that they are so convincing, so much more acceptable to us, than it is for conventional superheroes who more often than not are the product of science (e.g., Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Spiderman, the X-Men).

So expect a show which is a cross between Twilight and Smallville (Damon even looks a little like Tom Welling, who plays the young Clark Kent in that show), with a lot of unnecessary killing, but also a lot of incredible plot twists which make for a compelling narrative. I've seen two seasons so far and it will be interesting to see, in the next three, if the writers and producers are capable of maintaining the (literally) breakneck pace.

Cultural Productions III: Why I love 'Bold and the Beautiful'

For two years, I worked at a job where my lunch break was scheduled around 4.30 in the afternoon. I'd wander into the cafeteria room, while the TV was playing on the large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, and overhear - overwatch? - the daytime soaps and cooking shows.

I'd scorned, like any decent, cultured, intelligent human being, the daytime soaps for years - Bold, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless - since the time of my childhood. (Back in the eighties, the soaps were filmed, as today, in that really weird, gauzy lighting, which makes all the actors seem as if they were filmed through a silk veil - the famous 'Loretta Young' silks of the silver age of Hollywood. This technique doesn't make the actors look better: I suppose, by using it, the studios save money (also, by not filming outdoors most of the time)). Bold, as viewers know (and how many people admit, to me, that they never watch the soap, but, when pressed, can give an instant rundown of all the recent plot developments) is filmed in an economical half-hour format. Stories proceed at a glacial pace, and one can drop it for a few weeks, a few months even, and pick up it again without missing a beat. What's more, it has the advantage (over Days) of being only half an hour. When you add that up - half an hour, five days a week, at the same time slot, almost nothing ever happening - Bold is very easy to assimilate. Which is what happened with me. I'd look at one episode with scorn, the first time I saw it on at the cafeteria, and, after a few days exposure, began to tell one character apart from another, and then pick up on what actually what was happening. At the time I was watching it, Ridge (Ron Moss), the 'hero' and 'alpha male' of the show (who has a horribly sculpted face (sculpted by plastic surgery) and looks, in the words of a female colleague, like a 'plastic Ken doll', and is one of the worst actors in the world) was trying to prevent his daughter, Steffi (the sublimely beautiful Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), from marrying the slimy Rick (the repulsive Kyle Lowder), who is the son of Ridge's father and Ridge's current wife. Rick had previously killed Ridge's other daughter, Phoebe, in a car crash. There was one episode of mourning - in which the entire cast wore designer black outfits - and, in no time, Rick was engaged to Ridge's other daughter. So, after seeing this endless plotline play itself out, every day, on TV, I began to wonder how it'd pan out.

Scriptwriters are (meant to) always ask themselves the question, 'Why should I care?' when it comes to their characters: that is, how to make the audience care about the fate of their characters. This is one of the hardest things a writer can do. Bold succeeds in this spectacularly.

Bold has certain conventions it adheres to: rules which it never, ever breaks.

The first rule is that, in the best daytime soap tradition, the acting must be rubbish. There is what another work colleague called 'back-acting': a character will turn his back on another, walk up to the camera, and pour himself (if he is a male) a scotch. (I also call this 'scotch acting'). Then torrid expressions (only visible, at this angle, to the viewer) will play across the actor's face.

The other convention is the 'stare of death'. Two characters will exchange words, and then lapse into silence. The camera will then close up on to one character's face, who always has a ferocious frown, or a cocked eyebrow. Dramatic music - usually a menacing guitar chord - will play, and the show will cut to the ad break. (Ridge is the master of the cocked eyebrow, while his wife Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) is the mistress of the frown. Indeed, she frowns in every episode). Sure enough, the staring match between two female characters, and hair-flicking, huffing and sneering will resume straight after the ad-break. Usually, they start weeping, and actresses in Bold have wept buckets over the years.

Another convention, unique perhaps to Bold is that none of the characters do any work. They are meant to be working in the fashion industry (and, crazily enough, all the male designers are heterosexual - each and every one of them) and running multi-million dollar business empires, but they never do anything. They stand around and gossip about each other's private lives. X male character will develop a romantic relationship with y female; then each of them will be confronted, separately, by a relative, or former (or current) spouse or love interest, warning them off, begging them, even. Before or after these "interventions", characters will meet up and discuss the relationship with characters other than x or y. These endless discussions take place in the office, or in a restaurant, or in the bedroom, and just go on forever. (The way parents in the show meddle, scrutinise and constantly interfere in the sex lives of their children is mind-boggling). Now and then something really dramatic and 'soap-ish' will happen: there will be a kidnapping, or an attempted murder, or attempted rape, or maybe a corporate hostile takeover. But high drama, as such, is few and far between in Bold (compared to it, Days is an all-out action drama).

A good life, one would think. All the characters - including the old ones, the grandparents Stephanie Forrester (Susan Flannery) and Eric (John McCook) - are dressed in the most up-to-the-moment designer fashion, and all have the most cutting edge mobile phones (and sending compromising texts plays a big part in the show). They are all rich, they have the use of private jets, they all live in nice houses and apartments, and, although they don't do much with their wealth, they live dream lives. Their main problems are romantic ones - and how to find happiness in life. In that respect, they are like most Westerners: they live in an opulent, safe society, and don't experience that much in the way of poverty or danger. Possibly, it is this fact that is one reason why the show is such a success. 'Kitchen-sink' dramas, like the British Skins or Shameless, set on council estates, portray grimy, dishevelled people living in welfare housing and living off welfare benefits, in an attempt at "realism" and "holding up a mirror" to the audience: ignoring the fact that the denizens of these council estates are tremendously more wealthy and secure than, say, the average Nigerian or Syrian.

One of the peculiar themes of Bold is incest. As mentioned above, Rick is the son of Ridge's wife, Brooke, by Ridge's father (actually, his stepfather). Brooke has been married to Ridge's stepfather, also, has been married to, or had relationships, with his two half-brothers, Thorne (Winsor Harmon) and Nick (Jack Wagner, who most people know as Dr Peter Burns from the infinitely more classy Melrose Place and who is, at the time of writing, married to Melrose's Heather Locklear). Ridge's other wife - like a Mormon who practices polygamy, he goes back and forth between two wives - Taylor (played by Hunter Tylo, who is notorious for her botoxed lips, which make her one of the instantly recognisable American actresses in the world) - also has had relationships with Ridge's two half-brothers, and also, a one-night stand with Ridge's father. Around ten years ago, there was a subplot where Ridge had an affair with his wife Brooke's daughter (also the offspring of his stepfather), but the fan base - long accustomed to Bold incest - felt that that was going to far. The uproar was such that the story was stopped fairly quickly, and the relationship went down the memory-hole, Stalinist-style: it never happened.

Nevertheless, the theme persists. The villainous magazine publisher, 'Dollar' Bill Spencer (Don Diamont, who strikes many viewer as being a somewhat gay actor, with his open-necked shirts, waxed chest, bangles, rings, medallions, ostentatious belt buckles, tight designer jeans and exquisitely coiffured goatee) has an extra-marital affair with the lovely young Steffi, and then promptly hands her over to his gullible, easily-swayed son Liam, who marries her. The son doesn't mind having his father's ex - such matches are normal on Bold. (Amusingly, when Bill's wife Katie (Heather Tom) discovers Bill's infidelity, with Steffi, she collapses and goes into a coma - nearly dying of nothing more than a broken heart. The three people in this unhappy triangle - Steffi, Katie and quasi-gay Bill - are pictured in the photograph above). Besides which, the sons on Bold have unusually good relations with their fathers - they don't hate each other, like fathers and sons do in other dramas.

All of this sounds comedic, and it is. But the thing about soaps is that they can't be parodied: they already are their own parody, and, what's more, they work, despite the lack of 'realism' and 'believability'. It reminds me of what the American comic book writer, Larry Hama (most famous for his work on Marvel's GI Joe back in the eighties) once said: the most important thing about comics is the fantasy of super-seriousness, the great drama. Which makes sense: superhero comic books are about grown men, wearing capes and underpants on the outside of their (spandex) trousers. Unless the characters aren't portrayed as being ultra-serious, and engaged in matters of life and death, as being part of a great drama - the book won't work. If a character stops at some point, and says, 'Oh my god, this is stupid - Superman is wearing underpants on the outside of his trousers! This is so funny, ha-ha', well, the whole thing falls apart. Comic books - and soaps - are anti-postmodern, which is to say, anti-ironic.

It's for this reason that viewers 'abstract out' the sheer unreality and unbelievability of the soap opera storylines. But art is like that anyway.

In Bold, the children in the show grow up and become young adults in a short amount of time (despite having been born in the 1990s or so - the show has been running since 1987) while the adults stay the same age. What's more, Ridge and Brooke have a young son - less than ten years of age - who is never present, in their house or anywhere else. (Likewise, Brooke's young child with Nick is almost never seen). Bold is not a child-friendly show. So, in short, things take place at an abstract level: the (unwanted) child characters are abstracted out.

But that's the same with other genres - Westerns, detective shows, and the older, more respectable versions of narrative (the opera, the Elizabethan play, the Japanese Noh play, the ancient Greek plays). Audiences understand, intuitively, that one can't include everything in a drama. They also know that a real Ridge or Brooke, or a real fashion house, or a real household, wouldn't be like the one in the show.

Great art succeeds when it strikes an emotional chord with the audience. And, oddly enough, Bold does this. In a recent subplot, Bold treaded where few dramas have gone before: the sexual feelings of married old men. The weak Eric, patriarch of the Forrester clan, the founder of the fashion house Forrester Creations, and the show's resident grandfather, confesses to his wife Stephanie - who, after a bout of chemotherapy and operations, no longer interested in sex - that he still feels passion: 'I need affection. Is it wrong to want to be touched by someone? That's why I got into fashion. I wanted to touch women, to be near them, and one of doing that was to design beautiful clothes for them'. It's an oddly poignant moment, seeing as how old (and overweight and unattractive) Eric is, and these lines are delivered with great authority by the actor (who has been playing Eric for decades). Another striking scene occurs when Thorne, Ridge's half-brother, heads to the bar after his attempt to take control of Forrester Creations fails, and is dumped by his girlfriend. He knocks back scotch after scotch (all men in soaps are heavy scotch drinkers) while a Halloween party takes place in the background, and broods, with the help of flashback to prior episodes, over all his past humiliations and defeats, heaped upon him by his brother Ridge, and recounts his sorrows and setbacks to the bartender. Thorne is played by an ugly middle-aged actor (ugly compared to Ridge) with a bad haircut, and you can understand perfectly - at that moment - why he feels the way he does. Likewise, the interaction between the aged Stephanie, and her deranged spinster younger sister, the put-down upon Pam (Alley Mills) is just right - they behave exactly the way that two women who are sisters, and of that age, behave. Stephanie slaps her brow in frustration at trying to get through to her sister, and placate her, and you realise the truth of what Stephanie says - that they've been in the same mutally-destructive rut for years, ever since they were girls.

In a recent zany storyline, the chipmunk-faced, virginal young blonde, Hope (Kim Matula), who is another of Brooke's children (by an off-screen character, Deacon Sharpe, who now appears in The Young and the Restless, in an unusual inter-show crossover) embarks on a morals campaign, designed to persuade young women to 'save themselves' for marriage. She is engaged to Liam, who, naturally enough, balks at the idea, even if he agrees with it in principle. He quickly becomes (although this isn't shown explicitly) a masturbatory wreck, while the moral fanatic Hope is portrayed, rather unsympathetically, as a scared young woman who is afraid of sex and of losing control. It's this unusually frank portrayal of male and female sexuality, and sexual problems, which makes Bold, a major US soap, stand out, seeing as North Americans have the reputation for being a prudish people.

On a deep, subconscious level, I think, so many films and TV shows appeal, to Western audience, because they tap into the audience's racial instincts. Would the Star Wars series have been as successful with an all-black, or all-Hispanic, cast? As it is, Bold has token black actors, and because of the limited pool of sexual partners on the show, inevitably, the two male blacks have been paired off, at one stage, with white women. But the black actors get shuffled to the sidelines - they don't have any real emotional resonance. (As a friend of mine shrewdly observed, the producers intuited that the 'race-mixing angle' didn't work, and so paired Marcus (Texas Battle) up with an Afro-American female). Marcus is a nice enough character, but the actor who plays him is stupid and annoying, without depth. In comparison, the Ridges, Nicks and Owens are full of depth - which is saying a lot. It's not the Marcus character isn't likeable; it's just that he isn't liked. The show's only bad guy, 'Dollar' Bill is a cad, and is a bad actor, but he's oddly likeable.

No, the real focus is on the white characters. And what a nordic, American bunch they are! After the departure of Kyle Lowder, Rick is played by Jacob Young - a blonde, blue-eyed, square-jawed, sweater-wearing character, who looks like a young Robert Redford, and who seems almost like he's stepped out of a 1950s-timewarp. He is a decent, WASP, American college boy character. The lovely Steffi has one of those androgynous, tomboyish, nordic-American faces - like Hilary Swank or Mireille Enos (an actress of Mormon background, who appears in Big Love and the American adaptation of the Danish TV series, The Killing). When she is angry, blood rises to her face, and she appears to choke on rage, like Swank or Enos; when she is around a man she likes (e.g., Liam, usually, I think, because she is responding to the actor, not the character) she 'breaks character' and giggles in a flirty, moronic way, which is really redolent of 'American womanhood', chronicled by Henry James and so many other male American authors. Likewise, Brooke will, at odd moments, break into lilting laughter - and it's her laughter, and her accent, that seems almost Germanic-American in these moments, or perhaps Norwegian-American; the same goes for the accents of some of the other female actresses as well. Is this because of a Mid-Western, Scandinavian heritage?

The audience responds, I think, because they see part of themselves, or people they know (including family) in the characters, or people they would like to know. The caustic, sharp-tongued and yet vulnerable Stephanie, the grandmother of the show, reminds me of my own late grandmother. Liam, Oliver, Owen, remind me of the good-tempered, well-mannered, easy going young American international student men I've met at my time at university. This is what people want to see: a reflection of their own families, communities and racial kinship groups. Which is why, as Kevin MacDonald notes in one of his articles, all-black TV shows don't rate so well. The vast majority of TV audiences are still white, and they want to see white actors and white characters who relate to them in a deeply personal, emotional way.

(In that connection, another of the strengths of Bold is that its cast is multi-generational: in contrast to other shows - in which all the main characters are from the one age group - Bold has three generations, grandparents, parents and children. This is also 'true to life', because, in our lives, the older and younger generations just don't disappear; they remain with us and are part of their lives. And, given the deep hatred that the two young women of the show - Steffi and Hope - share for each other (a mutual hatred they have inherited from their mothers, Brooke and Taylor, and which is derived, like theirs, from their competition for the same man), it's possible that the show will continue long after the grandparents have died, and Ridge, Brooke and the others will become the new grandparents).

The show is a real triumph of casting: the Joan Collins wannabe, Jackie (played by Lesley-Anne Down, who seems, incongruously, about the same age as her son Nick), who, with her quavering voice, seems always on the verge of a nervous breakdown; the obsessive Thomas, Ridge and Taylor's son, who is played by the creepy actor Adam Gregory (this actor, unintentionally, really will make your skin crawl, and should have been cast, instead of Matt Damon, in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)); the sad-eyed, doe-eyed, perpetually crying Bridget; also, the doormat Taylor, who is still in love with her ex-husband Ridge, who constantly leads her on, dangling the possibility of a resumption of their relationship (she did resume things with Ridge for a while, but only by offering some very heavy anti-depressant pills in exchange for sex). (I am something of a Taylor fan (despite her botox lips, which are mocked by all who have seen the show), but others are Brooke fans: men are either Brooke or Taylor men).

Sometimes a trashy exterior can hide a real gem: you decide.