In the 1980s, Dynasty was a premier guilty pleasure on the TV landscape. The adventures of the Carringtons and the Colbys were a must-watch, with twists, turns, and some of the best cliffhangers on television.
A generation later, Dynasty has been revived on The CW network (now airing Fridays at 8PM, with the second season premiering tonight), and as the series evolved in Season 1, it led to a fantastic cliffhanger that would put the “Moldavian Massacre” to shame. If you haven’t seen Season 1 yet, give it a watch: It gets better and better as it goes along, and Season 2 seems to offer a lot of promise with the coming of the real Cristal Flores, played by Ana Brenda Contreras. Season 2 will also surely explore some stories set up in the later episodes of Season 1 and the cliffhanger.
Now, the preview images for the season premiere do give away at least some of the characters who survived Season 1’s literal barn-burner… but there are still many, many questions. Earlier this month we spoke to Executive Producer Sallie Patrick about what is to come — starting with the arrival of Kirby Anders (Maddison Brown) who Patrick tells us is every bit the trouble that was promised.
“She is modeled after Linda Evans’ Krystle [from the original series],” Sallie Patrick told us. “While she has secrets, she is an inherently good person, and as things progress with her involvement with the family and her place on the canvas, we’ll see how her inherent goodness really becomes a complication for the rest of the family, because she will become almost like a mob wife to Blake who is going down a dark spiral. It’s very dangerous when you have a good person telling a terrifying person that they don’t have to worry about their actions,” she teased.
Having a Cristal Flores imposter isn’t the first time the new Dynasty has dealt with this kind of story — last season, there was a phony “Adam Carrington” lurking around, so obviously, we had to ask Patrick if there is indeed a real Adam out there.
“We can assume there’s a real Adam out there,” Sallie said. “I don’t want to confirm or deny that at this point in time, but yes. He could be dead, but this is Dynasty. He could still be out there somewhere.”
The other “this is Dynasty, after all” type response came when Patrick was asked if Jeff and Fallon are now totally off the table as a couple now that they know that they’re cousins — a revelation that came later in the first season.
“I look forward to doing that later this season, I hope. She’s fantastic. She’s a great character and she’s a great foe for Alexis, but it’s also interesting to me to bring in Monica and Jeff’s mother. We’ve seen the Carringtons and while they’re completely screwed up, they do have each other, more or less, and to see what’s been missing from the Colbys and who that woman is, and how her arrival changes their characters will be really interesting,” Patrick said.
“We really enjoy looking back through the old series and finding dramatic character-driven moments that they featured, but then making them our own and modernizing them,” Sallie Patrick said about updating the series while still having a reverence for the original show. “But at the same time, you can’t do a reboot without making it your own, and I think over the course of the season, especially towards the end of the year, we started letting go a little bit more, and while there are a lot of Easter eggs for original viewers — the [episode] titles are all quotes from the original series, and there are plot points that we’ve kind of rebranded — but we try not to tie ourselves too much to the old show, because sometimes that anchor can tie the show down. For example, the Matthew and Claudia moment where she shoots ‘him’ in the finale was kind of a twist on a moment where Krystle shoots another character. So we try to apply those kind of really cool soapy things they did into our characters and our show,” she said.
All in all, Dynasty Season 2 offers a lot of questions, many of which will start to be answered in the season finale. Recently married (and gay!) Steven may have fathered a child, Alexis (Nicollette Sheridan) is more and more a growing force in the series, and, of course, the real Cristal is a thing. Season 2 premieres Friday, October 12 at 8PM ET/PT and will air every Friday on The CW.
