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NBC is hopefully plugging Titans as a "guilty pleasure." That is, "It's crap--but great crap!" Alas, it's not. Spelling's classics worked because they were in touch with their times. The Love Boat put a prime-time-friendly face on the swinging '70s; Dynasty was the very shorthand for '80s crassness. Titans is a retread, clogged with louche lushes in tuxes and gowns, its old-money family saga as tired as the Williams bloodline. Even casting Victoria Principal as Williams' ex-wife, apparently meant to recall what fun Dallas was, simply reminds us that Principal can't read a line.
But there's an inadvertently meaningful moment--a showdown between Bleeth and Principal disguised as a conversation about home decor. Bleeth: "Let me guess. You subscribe to the old-is-better theory." Principal: "No. More like the good-taste-never-goes-out-of-style theory." It's tempting to see it as a proxy catfight between Star and Spelling. For a master of camp, Spelling has no sense of camp about his own work; at Titans' unveiling for TV writers in July, he took haughty umbrage at a suggestion that audiences laugh at, not with, his shows.
Of course, Spelling has been laughed at all the way to the bank before, and there's something admirable about his sticking earnestly to his pearl-handled guns. Star is the more innovative producer, who mines glitter gulches for gems, but also one for whom every sincere emotion is likely to set up a knowing punch line. That's not to say he indulges in easy sarcasm; the Pointe flap shows sarcasm is anything but easy in Hollywood. At least the WB let stand a swipe at a network exec as "the genius who told Felicity to cut her hair." But if the WB's brass can't stomach satire that's bound to hit close to home, they'll end up as the geniuses who sabotaged its best new sitcom.