PRE-United: Dynasty's Blake & Cecil

Check out this very early scene from the prime-time super soap Dynasty. A typical corporate showdown with John Forsythe's Blake Carrington taking on frenemy Cecil Colby (played by Lloyd Bochner) in his spacious, well-appointed office. Only... surprise! This isn't a scene from Dynasty at all!

While watching the first season of (the truly exemplary) anthology series Police Story, I came upon this episode which features Forsythe as the chief of police butting heads with Bochner as the mayor. It's fascinating to see these actors in 1974 interacting in ways that would later be similar to the rival oil barons they would portray in 1981.

On Police Story, Forsythe played a heavily put-upon police chief, juggling all his regular duties while also contending with a married police detective (Pernell Roberts) whose girlfriend has just shot herself, a politician (Michael Ansara) who is antagonistic towards the force and a concerned wife at home (played by Barbara Rush.) All this and an assassination attempt!

Bochner is a mayor with an eye on the governor's seat who will stop at almost nothing to get there. He basically blackmails Forsythe into helping him, though Forsythe is highly reluctant to alter his principles. It's quite a foreshadowing of the dynamic that the two men would play out in their later parts on Dynasty.

Of course, Forsythe was never meant to be Blake Carrington. The three-hour pilot was already in the can with George Peppard playing the lead until he and the producers clashed to the point where he was let go and all the scenes with Blake were re-shot with new hire Forsythe (who already had a solid working relationship with Aaron Spelling from a string of TV-movies and his participation on Charlie's Angels as the voice of Charlie.)

What passed for glitz in 1981... Blake's contemporary office at Denver Carrington.

The series limped along moderately that first abbreviated season and then swiftly became a hit (with no small thanks to the addition of Joan Collins to the cast as Forsythe's vengeful ex-wife Alexis.) As one can already see in this photo of the ever-expanding cast, original member Bochner was being edged into the shadows, despite having a considerable story line. Soon, he'd be killed off (despite being told point blank by producers that he was not going to be!) with his character's wealth and power going to Alexis. Cecil's name would be mentioned for years after, though that hardly did Bochner any good. Take a good look at this picture in which everyone really looks terrific!

Initially playing friends who occasionally did business favors for one another, things began to get sticky when Cecil wanted his nephew Jeff (John James) to marry Blake's daughter Fallon (Pamela Sue Martin), even though she - as a dyed-in-the-wool Daddy's girl - actually preferred the uncle more.

Then when Alexis suggested that Cecil might actually be Fallon's father, requiring dual blood tests amongst the men in question, the friendship was over. This scene ends with Blake punching Cecil in the mouth, bloodying it.

The wheels really came off the friendship when Cecil created a false entity known as "Logan Rhinewood" who was supposedly helping Blake out of a financial crisis, but in reality was draining him of any hope for recovery. The final nail was, of course, Cecil dying of a heart attack moments after marrying Alexis and leaving her his empire with which to destroy Blake (which she tried to do up until the series conclusion in 1989!)

For the next minute or two... til death do us part!

Bochner did continue to act with regularity after being written out of the show and was even pegged to headline his own daytime soap Santa Barbara in the role of C.C. Capwell, but he had a real life heart attack and had to be replaced before the show debuted. He figured in two episodes of The Golden Girls, memorably as ham actor Patrick Vaughn who is sleeping with practically the whole cast (and crew!) of a production of Picnic and later as a fey hairdresser. He died of cancer in 2005 at the age of eighty-one.

Forsythe, who was already over seventy by the time Dynasty ended, surely didn't need the work, but proceeded to star in a barely-remembered 1992 sitcom called The Powers That Be, as a harried senator. The show actually has more than a few deeply appreciative fans who bemoaned its cancellation after 21 episodes, but I doubt that one of the cast members fretted over it too much. When Powers was cancelled, David Hyde Piece was free to do Frasier, on which he appeared 263 times and became a household name! And the show's creators proceeded to come up with a little something called Friends! Forsythe was called upon the provide the familiar voice of Charlie for the first two movie reboots of that franchise, but passed away in 2010 at age ninety-two.