It's easy to see why this reboot of "Fantasy Island" didn't last long.
It wasn't as bad as I feared. Though in high school when the classic "FI" started, I actually never watched it until it was off the air 20 years, so it's not nostalgia that made me enjoy it. I liked its amiable ambiance, I liked the gravitas and comforting presence of Ricardo Montalban's Roarke and the feeling that, though he often issued dire warnings and advised against certain dangerous fantasies, he'd appear in truly dire situations to help. And I liked seeing the celebrity faces of the day, though some of them made too many repeat trips. How many times can we stand watching Dennis Cole or John Saxon playing different characters who look and act exactly like their previous manifestations? I not only enjoyed Montalban but the characters Tattoo and the short-lived Julie.
In the 1998 reboot Malcolm McDowell plays a different sort of Roarke. Montalban was an old MGM Latin lover type. Still handsome, his hair and eyes were dark and he wore white suits. Eschewing white, McDowell (who came with lots of baggage as an actor who appeared in weird stuff) wore black to contrast with white hair. He's more like a negative of the old Roarke, inside and out. Montalban, long after his series ended, claimed he saw Mr. Roarke as a sort of fallen angel. This is almost tangible in McDowell's portrayal.
McDowell's manner is off-putting. He acts like a danger himself and rather than providing a comforting presence he's more typically sarcastic. But his humor, bizarre as it can be (unlike Montalban's gravitas), makes him likeable in a totally different way.
Tattoo and Julie have been replaced by two bumbling assistants, Harry and Cal. And by Ariel, played by lovely Madchen Amick ("Twin Peaks"). Ariel is some sort of magical creature while the others can be irritatingly stupid and inept for comic effect.
The old series rarely left the island. One clever change is the opening, when two elderly people lure clients into a rattletrap old travel agency connected to the island by pneumatic tube.
And this is a major change. The old show seems to be based on free market forces and clients came to Roarke. And while the price of Roarke's fantasies started out ad fixed, when the original series got rollong Roarke had a sliding scale of payments. In the reboot, it appears McDowell's Roarke chooses clients by his magic.
In the old show Roarke's clients often learned new lessons about themselves and others. The reboot gets rather preachy and tends to have an intense dislike for people from "flyover country" (the conceit that if you don't dwell in the "sophisticated" big cities like NY or LA you're a lazy, stupid, oafish failure. The reboot also seems to react sneeringly for "middle class values." No wonder the reboot sank with only 13 episodes. Even Madchen Amick couldn't save a show with such a high handed contempt for its target audience. It deserved to fail on that alone).
But the reboot has its plusses. While no one's ideal Roarke, McDowell is a good actor and fills different roles. While unpleasantly dark, the show can be quite funny, especially (as in the old show) as we see how Roarke interprets vague fantasy requests. A lesson for us to learn precise writing. And there's Madchen Amick.
It's subjective (all art is) but I miss the hula-girl, lei-draping opening with the variously colored drinks comic actors played with in the original "FI." McDowell's Roarke meets the planes on an infernally long dock and the distributed drinking cups all look the same. The guests might as wll all be given Slurpees.
As with the old series, the fantasies fall in three acts. The arrival and the start of fantasies. The fantasies begin going wrong. The fantasizers learn (old show) or are preached to (reboot).
Some fantasies follow along the lines of the old series, but some have new twists. In one of the better episodes of the reboot, a horror writer who wants to spend his vacation in a genuinely haunted house gets possessed by the ghost for comic effect. Compare and contrast that to Tanya Roberts in the original series who wanted to spend time in a haunted house and wound up befriending a cowardly ghost (Dack Rambo).
Other fantasies are not so intriguing (or funny) and can get dull. As with the original series, what's important is the nature of the fantasy and whether it can help pad out the hour. If not, any episode of any "Fantasy Island" can get tedious fast.
One note: oh-so-clever reviewers have shown off their superior sophistication by pointing our parallels between the reboot and Shakespeare's play "The Tempest." Well, I'm a Shakespeare and "Tempest" fan and I'll point out that the "parallels" are mostly confined to names, and the fact that the lead character performs magic.
Like I said, it's not as bad a show as I feared. I had low expectations and they were partially justified. But overall the reboot just isn't as fun as the original and I prefer Ricardo Montalban's kinder, gentler Roarke. And there's a world of difference between a character on a learning curve and a show grabbing its audience by the scruff of the neck and shaking it around to demonstrate the superiority of Hollywood types to those of us daring to live in small towns or the countryside where they wonder if we're born with thumbs or wear woad.
Perhaps it's just that hit shows are products of their times and times can't be replicated. A rebooted "Love Boat" with a new cast also failed. Things converged the right way at the right time for the original "Fantasy Island." The 1970s were a psychedelic but also cutesy time when TV people were just beginning to understand that hour-long shows didn't have to be uber-serious. So we got The Rockford Files and Kolchak: the Night Stalker and Charlie's Angel's and The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
The "FI" reboot tried to survive in the decade of "The X-Files" and "Twin Peaks," when all tv shows began to seem like they lacked sufficient lighting.
Once you've shown an FBI agent in a red room with a little boy holding a double-handful of creamed corn ("Twin Peaks") you can't go back to cutesy. I didn't watch much 1970s or 1980s TV but I thought the 1990s were too dark a time both physically and emotionally on TV, and I don't like dark.
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