I’ve been having a surprisingly good time in a talking-back-to-the-screen sort of way with the season 1 DVD of Hotel, due out July 21. The show is really terrible in a lovable kind of way, perhaps the worst-written of Aaron Spelling’s successful series (and anyone who has ever watched a Spelling show knows that this is saying something). It was Dynasty meets The Love Boat: after Love Boat was canceled past its prime, Spelling bought Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel and used it to carry on his favourite format, the guest-star vehicle. As on the Pacific Princess, a mix of old, young, famous and semi-famous guest stars would have various romantic problems, one of which would involve one of the members of the permanent cast. But because Spelling’s most successful show at the time was Dynasty, the problems were mostly soapy and sensationalistic.

People vaguely remember the show for the better-than-average cast — James Brolin, Connie Sellecca (who spends large sections of Episode # 2 in her underwear being stalked by a mysterious killer who magically makes her record player play Ravel’s “Pavane Pour Une Infante Defunte”) and Anne Baxter (brought in in a weird All About Eve maneuver to replace an ailing Bette Davis). But I wasn’t prepared for the sheer level of badness on display here, not from the actors, who do what they’re told, but from the writers, who appeared to have been on several substances that hadn’t even been discovered yet in 1983.

I’ll list some memorable moments later in the post, but watching a show like this reminds me of a principle I formulated a few years ago: no major-network show today would be allowed to be as bad as the worst shows of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Not that there aren’t bad, unwatchable shows. There always are plenty of those. But while today’s flood of network notes and multi-executive tampering may hamper many shows, it also keeps the bad shows relatively sane: a totally ridiculous, moronic plot or line of dialogue will at some point be objected to by somebody, because a script has to be approved of by so many people. The worst shows of 25 years ago didn’t get as many notes, there was less competition (only three networks, remember) scripts weren’t always as extensively rewritten as they are now, and the wishes of a powerful producer like Aaron Spelling were pretty much law, no matter how bizarre.

And that is how you get scenes like this — bits of two real, un-dubbed scenes, plus the actual voice-over at the end of the episode — being broadcast in prime time on a major network: the producer’s daughter Tori strikes up a friendship with a robot. A robot who talks in funny robot-talk like the robot from the Robin Sparkles video. Except this isn’t a parody. And ABC really did air it in a Christmas episode in 1983. No show today could possibly be anywhere near as bad as this.

Like I said, there are bad shows today, but this is a kind of over-the-top, demented badness that you don’t often see today; a bad show on ABC today tends to be dull and predictable, not insanely stupid. In a way, the bad shows of yesteryear are a bit like some of the weirder HBO shows of recent years, like Carnivale, in that the network doesn’t really care if they make Continue…