For most of television history, the people who actually shaped what America watched were invisible. We knew the faces and we knew the theme songs, but the names on the producer credit slid past in a half-second of small type, unread and unremembered. Aaron Spelling is the great exception. For four decades he was a brand unto himself, a one-man genre, a man whose name in the opening titles told you almost everything you needed to know about the next hour of your life. It would be glamorous. It would be easy. It would feature attractive people in expensive clothes solving glossy problems against postcard backdrops. And tens of millions of people would tune in, week after week, for years.
A factory built on feeling, not prestige
Spelling came up the hard way, a sickly kid from Dallas who reinvented himself first as a bit-part actor and then, decisively, as a producer who understood one thing better than almost anyone in the business: the audience did not want to be challenged on a Wednesday night. It wanted to be transported. Across the 1970s and into the 1980s he turned that insight into a production line. The Love Boat sent a rotating cast of yesterday's stars on a Pacific cruise where every romantic misunderstanding resolved by the final port of call. Fantasy Island handed visitors their literal heart's desire on a tropical platter, Ricardo Montalban's white suit and Herve Villechaize's cry of the plane standing in for a kind of secular wish-fulfillment. Charlie's Angels armed three glamorous detectives with feathered hair and a disembodied boss. Hart to Hart made marriage itself look like a permanent vacation.
What unified these shows was not a subject but a feeling, and the feeling was comfort. Spelling productions were warm baths. The lighting was flattering, the wardrobe was aspirational, the plots moved briskly enough that you never had to work and never got bored. Critics sneered at the formula as if it were an accident, a failure of taste, when in fact it was an enormously difficult thing to manufacture on schedule. Easy television is hard to make. Spelling made it look effortless because he had reverse-engineered exactly what relaxation felt like and then mass-produced it.
The auteur of escapism
We are comfortable calling a director an auteur, less comfortable extending the word to a producer, and downright suspicious of applying it to a man whose shows were synonymous with disposable fluff. But the case for Spelling as an authentic authorial voice is strong precisely because his sensibility is so legible across wildly different premises. A detective show, a cruise-ship anthology, a nighttime oil-baron soap and a Beverly Hills teen drama should have nothing in common. In his hands they share a grammar: the glossy surfaces, the swelling emotion, the refusal of irony, the deep faith that beauty and melodrama are their own reward. You can identify a Spelling show the way you can identify a Sirk film or a Bond movie, by its texture before its plot.
Easy television is hard to make. Spelling reverse-engineered what relaxation felt like and then mass-produced it.
Nowhere was that texture richer than on Dynasty, which arrived in 1981 as ABC's answer to Dallas and quickly became the more outrageous of the two. Joan Collins swept in as Alexis Carrington and turned shoulder pads into a weapon of class warfare; the catfights, the gowns, the boardroom betrayals and the infamous wedding massacre were pure Spelling, melodrama cranked past plausibility into something closer to opera. Then, a decade later, he proved the formula could be reborn for a new generation. Beverly Hills 90210 took the same DNA, the beautiful people and breezy crises and glossy zip code, and aimed it at teenagers, minting stars and a Fox network in the process. Its spin-off, Melrose Place, simply moved the beautiful people into an apartment courtyard and let Heather Locklear weaponize the whole thing into deliciously nasty soap. The man was still setting the temperature of prime time fifteen years after his peak.
The footprint the snobbery missed
The condescension Spelling absorbed was relentless and, in its way, a backhanded compliment. To be that popular was to be presumed empty; the prestige conversation simply did not include him, even as his shows defined the shape of the schedule everyone else was reacting against. But snobbery has a short memory and ratings have a long one. T.J. Hooker put William Shatner back on television; 7th Heaven became a quietly enormous family hit that ran for more than a decade; Charmed turned three witches into a fandom that has outlived most of its prestige contemporaries. The footprint stretched from the Nixon era to the Bush era, an almost unimaginable run of continuous relevance in a business that chews up its talent in a few seasons.
When Spelling died in 2006, the obituaries reached for the same word over and over: prolific. It is accurate but slightly insulting, the way calling a novelist prolific can imply he wrote too fast to be good. The truer measure is that he understood his audience with a precision the prestige establishment never matched, and that he respected the simple human appetite for glamour and resolution instead of apologizing for it. The serious dramas that now dominate the cultural conversation owe him a strange debt, because the soapy, serialized, character-juggling machinery they refined was running at full tilt on his lots while the critics were looking elsewhere. He was never trying to make art that lasted. He was trying to make Friday night feel good, on a continental scale, and at that he was very nearly the best who ever lived.