Watch ‘Sunset’ During The Day
After producing more than 3,000 hours of primetime programming over a 40-year television career, Aaron Spelling is plying new waters: daytime TV.
Introducing “Sunset Beach,” presented in the finest Spelling tradition of beautiful people doing nasty things in exotic settings. But don’t call it an afternoon version of “Baywatch.”
Why’s he exploring daytime? “I don’t know why … because it was there?” he replied, facetiously.
Actually, the idea for “Sunset Beach” emerged a couple years ago in a chat with Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC West Coast.
“And then I started thinking about it and you know my daughter (actress Tori Spelling), she’s crazy about daytime. She watches everything,” Spelling said. “So I thought it might be an interesting idea and we came up with ‘Sunset Beach.”’
“Like an idiot, I asked Don if he’d be ordering 13 or 22 episodes,” said Spelling, referring to the standard production contracts for nighttime series.
“And he said, ‘I’m ordering 250 hours,’ so that was my first shock,” Spelling said.
But daytime is not really that much of a stretch for Spelling. After all, this is the man who brings us such salacious nighttime fare as “Melrose Place” and “Savannah.”
And who can forget the wicked and wealthy who reigned in Spelling’s 1980s hit “Dynasty,” which he created along with then-partner Leonard Goldberg?
“Sunset Beach” premieres at 1:30 p.m. Monday on Spokane’s KHQ-TV, Channel 6.
If you’ve watched NBC at all recently, you couldn’t have missed those alluring ads suggesting a format something along these lines: Gorgeous, bare-chested men walking seductively along a beach or embracing shapely women in skimpy bikinis, all against a perpetually golden sunset.
Looks like daytime “Baywatch” to me, Aaron.
“No, gosh. I think I’d slit my throat,” Spelling said - before confessing to having two lifeguards in the cast.
But while “Baywatch” films its scenes along the star-studded shores of Santa Monica and Malibu, “Sunset Beach” shoots its exteriors 30 miles down the coast at less-glamorous Seal Beach.
With its pier and boardwalk, the quaint Orange County town radiates a feeling that “everybody on that beach knows each other,” Spelling said.
That helps the soap achieve one of it’s main objectives, said head writer and co-creator Robert Guza.
“What we tried to do is create a community, make the town itself a character,” he said. “Kind of like how Cicely, Alaska, was in ‘Northern Exposure.’ It’s a special place where people gravitate to and where the people live a little larger than life.”
The town also works well, Guza explained, in promoting the legend behind “Sunset Beach,” which goes something like this: “In the 1920s, a brokenhearted but handsome European aristocrat, Armando Deschanel, came to Southern California determined to start a new life. At Sunset Beach a beautiful woman dressed in black appeared at the water’s edge. Basking in the beauty of the setting sun, they fell in love. Armando built a beachfront castle as a monument to their eternal love. The castle no longer stands, but the legend continues.”
With this in mind, Spelling went about inhabiting the modern-day “Sunset Beach” with the typical daytime fare: a high-powered defense attorney (Sam Behrens) possessing the moral code of a snake, his beautiful but indifferent wife (Lesley-Anne Down), a mysterious European (Ashley Hamilton) - the spitting image of town founder Armando Deschanel, a crooked cop (Peter Barton), two male lifeguards (Casey Mitchum and Jason George) and the town’s confidant (Leigh Taylor-Young), who owns Elaine’s Waffle House and keeps the legend alive.
And let’s not forget Randy Spelling as the rebellious son of wealthy parents.
“Who’s that?” the elder Spelling asked coyly.
Randy Spelling, who also was cast in his father’s now-defunct show “Malibu Shores,” won’t confess much about his role.
“Well, my mom’s an alcoholic, I don’t get along with my father, and there is a murder that happens and I am semi a part of that. That’s all I can say,” said the 18-year-old.
Despite his TV veteran status, the elder Spelling actually admits to being a little anxious about his new project.
“I’m going to be a nervous wreck,” he said. “I hear it’s very hard to launch in daytime. We’ll find out.”
xxxx DAYTIME TV “Sunset Beach” premieres at 1:30 p.m. Monday on Spokane’s KHQ-TV, Channel 6.