NEED TO KNOW
Knots Landing had some special distinctions from the other shows of its time.
The ladies of the beloved primetime soap opera — Joan Van Ark, Michele Lee and Donna Mills — kicked off the latest episode of their We’re Knot Done Yet podcast by taking fan questions. When one asked what they thought of Dallas and Dynasty, Mills shared that she never got to watch much of either one.
“It seems to me that most of the time we were working,” the 84-year-old said. “We had longer hours than most of the shows. I mean, we shot on the same lot as Dallas. The people from Dallas would go home at 5:00, and we’d be there till 10:00 at night.”
Star Patrick Duffy previously said the Dallas cast would start their days with champagne and end with tequila. “That was the ’80s,” he joked.
Lee, 82, said she would “peek once in a while” at the Dallas set, noting, “I wanted to see what they were doing and how everybody looked — usually stunning.”
Lee continued, “I thought they were relatable in some way. People want total escapism, and there was no identifiable things that I could say, to me in terms of my life — it was what it was, and it was good for everybody at that time.” However, she added, “I didn’t think they were particularly great.”
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Knots Landing — a Dallas spinoff that ran on CBS from 1979 to 1993 — followed Ted Shackelford’s Gary Ewing and Van Ark’s Valene Clements as they moved to Los Angeles for a fresh start, settling in a suburb alongside characters played by Lee, Don Murray, John Pleshette, William Devane, Constance McCashin, James Houghton, Kim Lankford and later, Mills, Kathleen Noone, Nicollette Sheridan and Alec Baldwin.
Mills noted, “David Jacobs himself, created both Dallas and Knots Landing, said that Dallas is about them — the wealthy and the flashy, whatever — and Knots Landing is about us. That’s the feet on the ground. More basic, more real maybe, but very special.”
While none of the ladies were asked to be on Dallas during their time on Knots Landing, Bobby Ewing (Duffy) and J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) each appeared on their show.
“It was really fun for me because I had done another show with Larry Hagman. I did a show called The Good Life that was a half-hour situation comedy. When I first got here to California, we played a butler and a maid that decided to take those jobs and didn’t know how to do them and that’s where the comedy was,” Mills recalled.
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“It was a very cute show. And I knew him really well and he and his wife, Maj, had taken me under their wing because I was brand new, green as anything here in California, and they really looked out for me and they were great. So I knew him well and I loved him and I used to walk by — there was a passageway that I would go down often. It was right past Larry’s trailer and and he had a curtain, you could only see the kind of the bottom. And I would walk by and he said, ‘Ah, there’s legs,’ ” she said with a laugh.
Van Ark, 82, agreed, “He’s the best. He loved so much what he was doing. And he just he made it a game and fun and games wherever he was.”
