Peyton Place
1 9 6 4 - 1 9 6 9 (USA)
514 x 30 minute episodes
Based on Grace Metalious's steamy best-selling novel, this
romantic and tempestuous drama was set in the small New England
town of Peyton Place, a community seething with extramarital
affairs and dark secrets of every kind. It was the first major
American soap, and also the first to be screened on British
television.
The saga told of the lives and loves of the Harrington's,
Carson's, Mackenzie's and Andersons, and made complicated love
affairs with breathless sex its main ingredient, and every episode
ended with a corny cliff-hanger. The link between two interweaving
sagas was the town's handsome Dr Michael Rossi (Ed Nelson).
One plotline was the pregnancy, miscarriage and loveless
marriage of Betty Anderson (Barbara Parkins) to rich Rodney
Harrington (Ryan O'Neal) who really loved the chaste Allison. The
other storyline was the love of full-time bookshop-owner and
part-time emotional wreck Constance Mackenzie (Dorothy Malone) for
Rossi, the only man who knew that Elliot Carson, the father of
Constance's illegitimate daughter Allison, was serving 18 years in
prison.
Barbara Parkins made a fine foil to fey Mia Farrow's Allison
with her mane of golden hair. While Allison stood around looking
little-girl-lost and squeaking in a Minnie Mouse voice, Betty set
out to get Rodney Harrington by foul means or fouler and tricked
him into marriage by claiming he was the father of her unborn
child.
Conveniently, most of the seductions and murders had happened
in the past, but the series was still tagged television's first
'sex opera'. Today it seems tame, with Allison Mackenzie remaining
a virgin for 200 episodes.
In the course of her affair with Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow's
hair was suddenly chopped off, leaving the show's writers to
explain why Allison now looked like Joan of Arc.
The fragile Allison eventually 'disappeared' mysteriously in a
fog (when actress Mia Farrow continually upset producers by
skipping recordings to be with Ol' Blue Eyes). Allison was not
forgotten however, and from time to time young girls would appear
with clues to her disappearance.
The show went on. Betty, stunning but certifiable, married
Steven Cord who had defended Rodney on a murder charge, then two
ears later remarried Rodney. Connie married Elliot, who had become
the town's newspaperman, before - in the face of dwindling ratings
- Peyton Place came to an end with Dr Rossi arrested for murder,
and Rodney in a wheelchair.
The town was named after patriarch Martin Peyton who owned
Peyton Mill. Martin was the grandfather of Rodney but was not so
aged that he was not able to marry young Adrienne Van Leyden -
until her untimely killing in a struggle with Betty Anderson (an
early soap-bitch).
Over its five years of production, Peyton Place employed
over 100 actors and 20 writers who each took responsibility for
specific characters. The set grew from a few houses around a
square to include shops, a factory, a hospital, a fire station and
a wharf and the plots grew so complex that new viewers could no
longer follow them and the change to thrice weekly episodes
ultimately proved a mistake.
It sold to fifty countries, with eight million viewers in
Britain alone. And so 8 million Britons became convinced that
through the leafy backwaters of New England strutted a race of
glamorous but guilt-ridden women with cupboards full of skeletons
and with children fathered by the wrong men.
Peyton Place owed its existence to Britain's Coronation
Street. In the early sixties America considered soaps worthy
only of low budgets and daytime slots, but the success of the
Street in a prime-time position led American
gambler-turned-producer Paul Monash to search for a similar
product for the states. (He had originally considered buying Coronation
Street but wisely decided that Americans would not understand
Lancashire life or the accents).
Aiming for the same appeal but with richer more glamorous
characters, he settled on Peyton Place, which had already
seen service as a lavish 1957 feature film starring Lana Turner.
The main characters reappeared in 1972 in Return To Peyton
Place (NBC), a daytime soap opera with an entirely different
cast, but audiences were unimpressed and it ended after only 50
episodes.
Most of the original cast returned once more for a 1985 reunion
movie called Peyton Place: The Next Generation.
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