Spelling, Aaron (1928—)

views updated

Spelling, Aaron (1928—)

The most successful producer in the history of television, Aaron Spelling began his career with writer/producer credits on such classic early television fare as Zane Grey Theater and Playhouse 90 in the 1950s, and 40 years later has more than 3,000 productions to his credit, including such audience favorites as The Mod Squad (1960s); Charlie's Angels, Love Boat, and Fantasy Island (1970s); Dynasty and Family (1980s); Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Dawson's Creek, 7th Heaven, and Charmed (1990s). Interspersed with these series were critically acclaimed television series such as Day One and And the Band Played On.

Despite his success, Spelling has never been a favorite of the critics. "There is good and there is bad Spelling," a Washington Post TV critic stated in a 1996 Los Angeles Times Magazine article, "but there is never great Spelling, only degrees of terribleness." Yet, even his severest detractors agree that the producer has an uncanny knack for knowing what the public wants to see. During the 1980s, it was his Dynasty, a clone of the popular CBS hit Dallas, that propelled ABC to the top of the ratings charts; and during the 1990s his Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place helped transform the FOX network from an also-ran in the ratings into a major player. With Felicity, in the late 1990s, he is performing the same feat with the fledgling Warner Brothers network.

Spelling's background is remarkably similar to those of many of the legendary pioneers of both television and motion pictures. He began life as the youngest of five children born to struggling immigrant parents in Dallas during the 1930s. Two decades later, after an acting stint in Gunsmoke, he approached the producers of the Western anthology Zane Grey Theater with an idea of how to write the host's segments on the show and was given an assignment to write it on a continuing basis for $100 per week. The spots were so successful that he was approached by producer Martin Manulus who wanted to do a Western story on his Playhouse 90 and offered Spelling the task of writing it. The resulting program, The Last Man, proved so popular that Twentieth Century-Fox optioned it as a feature film project within 48 hours of its airing.

The experience of writing the film version convinced Spelling that his rightful place was on television. Chided by his superiors for writing too fast, he completed the screenplay, which was finally released as One Foot in Hell, starring Alan Ladd, and returned to television where he went to work with Four Star productions where his creative speed paid dividends. At one point during the late 1950s, he was producing eight shows at once including Johnny Ringo, Alcoa Presents, The June Allyson Show, Kaiser Presents Lloyd Bridges, The Dick Powell Theater, and Honey West.

As Spelling's TV career began to take off during the 1960s, his forte became his ability to capture the mood of the American public at just the right time: his 1960s series Burke's Law coincided with the detective and spy craze incited by the emergence of the James Bond films on the big screen; Mod Squad, which premiered at the end of the decade, combined the always popular police genre with a teenage-rebels-seeking-social-justice motif that captured the unrest of a turbulent decade and managed to be entertaining at the same time. Although some shows, particularly Amos Burke Secret Agent, the spy-spoof sequel to Burke's Law, and, later, Dynasty were open to accusations of being less on the cutting edge of public taste and more derivative of existing films and shows such as the James Bond series and Dallas, Spelling always managed to imbue his shows with qualities that differentiated them from their predecessors through unpredictable plot devices and eccentric characters (notably Joan Collins's Alexis in Dynasty).

It was during the 1960s that Spelling produced his defining vision—one that would be evident in every one of his subsequent shows in one form or another. It was his role, he decided, to present the audience with the vision of itself it most wanted to see. In most cases, this meant putting together a glossy, idealized version of Southern California. The public was fascinated, he reasoned, with the trials and tribulations of the wealthy, particularly problems that could not be solved by money (unrequited love, legal entanglements, and incurable diseases). During the next three decades, he packaged and exported the Southern California lifestyle.

During the 1970s, he caught the viewers' interest in sex and titillation with Charlie's Angels, which combined crime fighting action with glamorous women and lots of skin. Although it was based in Los Angeles, the show's action routinely roamed to Palm Springs and Las Vegas—anywhere sex could be combined with wealth and glamour. During the 1980s, Spelling took it even farther with Dynasty and its spin-off, The Colbys, which presented life among the wealthy in less "black-and-white" terms. Unlike Charlie's Angels, there were no clear-cut heroes; it all depended on where individual viewer's sympathies lay. For those who hated the rich and famous, it was simply fun to watch all of the characters strive to do the others in.

By the end of the 1980s, Spelling's star began to dim. The emergence of the sitcom (Cosby and Cheers) and the public's growing fascination with the gritty realism of Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues signaled trends that Spelling was slow to pick up on. In 1989, to headlines announcing "Spelling Dynasty Over," ABC canceled the show that had led them to the top of the ratings charts. Two of Spelling's medical dramas, ABC's Heart Beat and NBC's Nightengales, were also canceled. Suddenly, Spelling was unable to sell any of his one-hour programs, prompting him to admit to the Los Angeles Times, "I can honestly say that I don't know what the networks want anymore."

Within a year, however, he was back on top with Beverly Hills 90210 suddenly putting the fledgling Fox network on the map. He followed it with the successful spin-off Melrose Place, which proved once and for all that if there was one thing that Spelling knew, it was how to combine money, glamour, and the Southern California lifestyle into an unforgettable package. His knowledge of the youth market paid big dividends in the mid-1990s with such successful shows as 7th Heaven, Dawson's Creek, and Felicity reworking his traditional formula to incorporate more real-to-life people and their problems in other areas of the country besides California.

—Sandra Garcia-Myers