Long before Wisteria Lane became a TV destination, a New England hamlet was the place viewers turned to see desperate housewives and their high-drama kin.
“Peyton Place,” the first prime-time TV soap opera, shattered conventions and made household names of Mia Farrow (as Allison MacKenzie) and Ryan O’Neal (as Rodney Harrington), in the serial swirl of adultery, unwanted pregnancies, hidden pasts and unrequited lust.
Since the show bowed on ABC in September 1964, the term “Peyton Place” remains shorthand for any town seething with secrets — particularly concerning sex, lies and lineage. The book it was based on was scandalous; the TV series, on the youngest TV network, was a sensation.
I always wondered what my grandmother saw in this show. Now, churning through the DVDs, I’m hooked, too.
Teen angst and forbidden love made for some great 1960s screen heartache — Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in “West Side Story,” Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in “Splendor in the Grass,” and Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal in “Peyton Place” all served to illustrate the pain of lovers unhinged by the judgments of others.
This month, “Peyton Place: Part One” (31 half-hour episodes on five DVDs) will be released for the first time. The Emmy-nominated series, a black-and-white curiosity, claims several firsts.
First network series to be scheduled with multiple fresh airings within a week (long before “American Idol”). First to succeed with two airings a week before being overexposed when ABC tried three a week. First prime-time series to replace one actor with another and keep the character going. And first to go from prime time to daytime (after the nighttime ratings sank in 1968, it was revived in 1972 in the afternoon).
Among those passing through as guest stars: Dan Duryea, Leslie Nielsen, Gena Rowlands and Lee Grant (who won an Emmy for her stint).
“This is the continuing story of Peyton Place,” each episode begins, in the authoritative voice-over by the editor of the town newspaper, Matthew Swain (Warner Anderson). Naturally, the sage editor saw the big picture. He knew who was sleeping with whom and who was secretly related to whom — before the introduction of DNA evidence. Before the Internet, the elderly newspaperman was a living archive of the town. His institutional knowledge was indispensable.
“Peace. It’s V-J Day!” screams the headline on the broadsheet framed on his office wall.
Allison, Farrow’s character, is an aspiring writer who contributes a teen column for the Peyton Place Clarion. The paper is the lifeblood of the place, the editor is a fine observer of humanity. It’s great to hear him command the printer, “Four sticks on Page One,” from the days of hand-set type. He stands firmly against censorship. No institution could be more central to the function of the town and its citizens.
I’m guessing the depiction of the newspaper wasn’t what hooked most of the audience.
Until “Peyton Place” bowed in prime time, sex, sin and scandal had been daytime obsessions: Since it started spinning in 1956, “As the World Turns” was television’s top-rated daytime soap opera. (It’s still turning, on CBS, locally at 1 p.m. on KCNC, even as “The Guiding Light” is canceled.) Over four decades, “World” set the daytime standard for convoluted family sagas, famously giving Carol Burnett the raw material for her classic soap parody, “As the Stomach Turns.” “Peyton Place” was more cutting-edge for the time.
My grandma was no doubt less interested in the Clarion than in the white-bread all-American town populated by genteel Harringtons, Andersons and MacKenzies, juggling love relationships and infidelities while maintaining the veneer of civility. She saw sexy characters challenging social mores in a time of radical change.
The flawed humans and difficult choices compensated for the stilted dialogue, melodramatic music and stiff acting.
On the verge of a social revolution, the saga dared to expose the messy conflicts beneath the neatly manicured surface. The New England town’s pillory, an 18th-century device for public humiliation, was the richly symbolic centerpiece on the public square. The show’s modern impulse must have been shocking to a woman born in Europe, reared in the America of streetcars, a grandmother at a time when women still wore hats and gloves, well before the Pill.
For all its talk of “going steady” and “necking,” the series holds up rather well. Farrow is luminescent (her husband, Frank Sinatra, later made her quit the show). While young Allison writes about relationships between men and women, she tells her mother she feels unqualified, she craves experience.
Experience awaits, in the continuing story of “Peyton Place.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
