If you were a child of the eighties, you might well remember the prime time soap opera glory that was Falcon Crest.  For some strange reason, I, a young lad, remember watching this show, even though I didn’t understand a lot of it.  This isn’t such an outlandish memory, as the show lasted fully nine seasons.

Thus, when the crew out at Warner Brothers offered to send me a copy of the complete first season of Falcon Crest, I fairly leapt at the opportunity.

Falcon Crest revolves around the Gioberti / Channings, a powerful family of vintners who have lots of infighting over the direction the Falcon Crest Winery should take.  Led by the family matriarch, Angela Channing, the Falcon Crest experience begins when Jason Gioberti dies in an unfortunate “accident”, thus prompting the return of Jason’s son Lance, who takes over a tiny piece of Falcon Crest, much to Angela’s dismay.  Apparently, the grapes on Lance’s chunk are all that stands between a merely average wine and a truly great one, and Angela can’t stand being at anyone’s mercy for choice product.

Falcon Crest was, as eighties dramas went, commonly regarded as “middle of the road”, being somewhat more extravagant and genteel than Dallas, but more subdued and conservative than Dynasty.   And indeed, it does fit into this sort of description fairly well.  It does have that “depiction of the rich” edge to it, but they’re all, in their way, craftsmen, so it’s not quite just the idle rich enjoying their playtime for an hour a week.

Being as the show went on for nearly a decade, it does have a tendency to move a little slowly.  But there is a LOT going on here, even if you’ll only get it in tiny little increments a very, very little at a time.  Suspense is the order of the day here as you discover, little by little, what all’s going on in the deep and twisted world of Falcon Crest.

So if you’re into soap operas or suspense dramas, but hate that they never seem to end, you might want to give Falcon Crest a try with its very definite ending point, and the complete first season is a great place to start.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this fairly immersive if somewhat slow massive drama a seven out of ten–it may be glacial, but man, does it know how to tell a story.