Film & TV

‘Dynasty’ Episode 1 review: So hair-pulling is still a thing, huh?

When I heard CW is remaking Dynasty, I have to admit, I got excited. I was born in the age of Dynasty, and now that’s the world we live in, at least according to the show. It was dubbed as “the next Gossip Girl,” a lofty promise. And although I watched Gossip Girl, I don’t remember absorbing any Dynasty moments (I was an infant) save for those where they slapped each other around and someone having shiny, big, golden hair.

Nathalie Kelley as Cristal, Grant Show as Blake and Nick Wechsler as Matthew (Photo: Jace Downs/The CW © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

Fast forward to 2017, the new Dynasty is as catty as the first one and it looks like watching the rest of it is going to be stressful. For starters, Fallon Carrington, the ambitious daughter of power mogul Blake Carrington, has a permanent scowl on her face that’s beyond your run of the mill RBF. It’s an overachiever, that scowl. Her father, Blake Carrington, is a manupulative sleazeball. Her openly and proudly gay brother, Steven, I like. He doesn’t care for the catfights, but he has his own issues — issues that seem way more interesting than Fallon fighting with her father’s new wife, which is what the new Dynasty is supposedly about.

Enter Cristal Flores, who, in her first scene, schools an entire boardroom of powerful, old men, with her brilliant ideas. I had such high hopes for her character, until the next scene, where the Carrington siblings find her rolling around on a desk with their dad. Way to get points with the kids, huh? Fallon immediately despises her, and then the dad drops another bombshell: Cristal — not Fallon — will be running the company. So it begins.

Robert Christopher Riley as Culhane and Elizabeth Gillies as Fallon (Photo: Bob Mahoney/The CW © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

Given that, in the old Dynasty, women were fighting over men, let’s give CW a point for making them fight over a company this time around. But they get no points in my book for that full-on catfight they got into, where they pulled each other’s hair and dresses off. They are still after a man’s approval though. At some point, I would love to see them work together to take down Blake, who really comes off as a world-class douchebag. If the first episode sets the tone for the entire series, this is how it’s gonna be. Catfights, side-eyes, and two women trying to one-up each other all the time. That should get exhausting. If I wanted a wrestling match, I’d watch GLOW. At least those women are witty.

Having said that, these characters are not without redeeming qualities — and by redeeming qualities, I mean weaknesses. Fallon is screwing the chauffeur and seems to like him a lot. Cristal has a weird family life (we were promised a complicated back story in the coming episodes) that’s pushed to the surface by her nephew Sam “Sammy Joe” Flores, originally played by Heather Locklear, now portrayed by Rafael de la Fuente (who is also Steven’s boytoy of the moment).

As these complications unfold, the butler Joseph Adler (played by Alan Dale), glides about the Carrington mansion. It looks like he’s going to be my favorite character. As we all know, butlers know everything and, in the first episode, Joseph proves that he is not afraid use what he knows to his advantage — but at least he’s elegant about it, unlike Fallon and Cristal, who both need to keep their wigs on. It’s only episode one! Y’all need to chill.

Elizabeth Gillies as Fallon and Nathalie Kelley as Cristal (Photo: Mark Hill/The CW © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

This may be a new Dynasty, but it is still a soap opera. My wild guess? Someone’s going to fall into a coma, another’s gonna get amnesia, another person is going to die in a fire but not really, and another one of them is going to have a secret twin. So yeah, I predict that Dynasty‘s gonna be a hit.

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Dynasty airs every Thursday on Netflix starting Oct. 12.

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