FOCUS ON: Growing pains over for Santa Barbara

- by Connie Passalacqua, 1986 -

It may be cause to believe in miracles. After 18 months of agonizing public growing pains, NBC’s Santa Barbarais finally beginning to shape up into a fine soap. Amazingly, it has all happened in just the fashion the show’s creators/co-executive producers/headwriters, Jerome and Bridget Dobson, predicted it would just prior to its debut in July 1984. The Dobsons had said that their show would take time to gel. They said that the key to a good show would not be found in bikinied young bodies or exotic location shootings, but in finding the right performers to play original, distinctive characters. After dozens of hits and misses (at its first anniversary, the show had hired and fired 74 actors), that’s what has happened. The actors Santa Barbara found to best create the characters the Dobsons had in mind are all soap veterans. Four inept CC Capwells came and went before the show finally found its actor Jed Allan (who had spent a decade on Days of Our Lives as Don Craig). He’s just what the Dobsons had in mind from the start – Blake Carrington, with sex appeal to spare.

After many preposterous actress choices (including one blonde), the show finally found its fiery Mexican heroine, Santana Andrade, by hiring Mexican – American Gina Gallego, formerly of Rituals. Now Santana’s scenes with Cruz Castillo (A Martinez, one of daytime’s best leading men) in which they discuss their heritage finally make sense. Even Robin Mattson, who was grating as villainesses Heather Webber on General Hospital and Delia Coleridge on Ryan’s Hope has been made bearable on Santa Barbara as another bad girl, Gina DeMott. The Dobsons have made Gina both humorous and stupid – the latter trait surprisingly refreshing as a motivation for a soap villainess.
 

Perhaps the most interesting and typically eccentric Dobson character on Santa Barbara is Mason Capwell, superbly played by Lane Davies. Abhorrent as CC Capwell’s stuffed-shirt son for the first few months of the show, Davies has since made acerbic Mason sympathetic and compelling. Yet, Mason still has a sophisticated Noel Cowardesque wit, and he is perhaps the only daytime character who slyly gives asides to the soap audience.

Written and finally played with wit and sophistication, Santa Barbara is coming into its own. It’s ready to take on its two time-slot competitors, Guiding Light and General Hospital, both of which have been in a creative slump. It’s going to be quite an interesting soap summer.