MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)
By:
January 12, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
SANTA BARBARA | 1984–1993
The school bus lets you off at 2:50, most days. You have ten minutes to make it home, run through the kitchen door, drop your backpack, go to the bathroom & grab a snack. If you time it right, you catch the recap of previous storylines, a hint at who will feature in today’s episode. If not, it’s the theme song and title sequence, the beautiful California sky. It’s time for Santa Barbara.
When you think soap opera, you think stupid. You think housewives, and you are not a housewife and never want to be. But it’s 1984 and you’ve been watching the Olympics all summer long and the commercials hinted at intrigue and romance and there’s nothing else on at 3pm and someone has murdered Channing Capwell, apparently, so you might as well find out who it was.
The show is better than it has any right to be. Kelly Capwell is played by the young Robin Wright, before The Princess Bride. Her half-brother, in flashbacks, is a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio. There’s an arch campiness that you relish, a cleverness you’ll later recognize in things like Mel Chin’s conceptual art on Melrose Place but don’t yet have the words to articulate.
You’ll watch every day for four years, until you go to college. When you catch the show on occasion after that, the characters are mostly played by new actors. The story lines are more soapy, more recycled, somehow both more preposterous and less surreal. But still, there’s that beautiful California sky, the light that promises something shimmering in the distance, if only you can get there.
It turns out that you’re not the only one who feels this pull. The land of your ancestors, Russia, is wholly smitten with the Capwells and the Lockridges, the absurd storylines and luxe detail. New “Santa Barbara” neighborhoods spring up in Crimea and Kaliningrad, in Lviv and St Petersburg, Spanish arches framing white nights. “Santa Barbara” becomes a shorthand phrase people use to mean useless drama, a shiny circus.
In 2021, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson staged a recreation of 98 episodes of the show as a living sculpture at a gallery in Moscow, a rich text of geopolitics, ’80s nostalgia, and commodity fetishism in the midst of a global pandemic. It feels almost like something out of SPY magazine, where Russia’s favorite short-fingered vulgarian might walk through the shot at any moment. Everything is beautiful and terrible, now and always, Santa Barbara forever.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!