Chase's affluent, jet-set mother Jacqueline Perrault (Lana Turner) arrives from France for a visit. He and Maggie (Susan Sullivan) don't know why she is suddenly visiting them after so many years since she never did when they lived in New York City. They are less concerned about that than Lance (Lorenzo Lamas) and his grandmother Angela (Jane Wyman) are.
Angela had feuded with Jacqueline during the time the unforgettable woman was last there - married to Angela's brother Jason whom she divorced in 1951 taking her son Chase with her to live in France.
Jacqueline tries to persuade Chase to return to France and bring his wife and children with him to run a vineyard and winery there. She fears what will happen to them if they remain in Angela's cross-hairs.
Eventually we are going to get around to what really happened to Jason amongst other tender family secrets. But the characters are as reluctant as real-life families are in getting into those. More so on this show because of possible legal repercussions.
The luxury seen on the show and other night-time soaps was absent before this point in the series at least in Chase and Maggie's household. Susan Sullivan became so synonymous with that type of luxury it typecast her. But in this episode she and the rest of the family are seen doing a ton of housework before actual servants are brought in to the home to cater a dinner party hosted by Jacqueline.
The Giobertis make it evident that dressing up in formal dinner attire, for them, is not something they're used to and they embarrass themselves in front of the servants the way nouveau riche families often do. This signals a change in the direction of their respective arcs in the series. Vickie (Jamie Rose) even has an open-ended offer to join Jacqueline in France.
In TV terms The Giobertis are essentially a nuclear family version of the Waltons who pull a kind of reverse-Beverly Hillbillies moving from the big city to wine country and become a Carringtons or Ewings type family. It made for a very appealing hybrid of a TV series. Also while the Gioberti's are All-American and average they are somewhat continental and urbane too. Every effort was made to have them come off as rich people without discernible snobbery or prejudice.
Whilst never far from hard work in the field alongside the pickers Chase was raised in France by a mother who was educated in England. His career in the U.S. Air Force and job as an airline pilot took him overseas frequently and his Italian-Swedish ancestry is often referred to during the series as is the family heritage tracing back to Tuscany, Italy. A worldy man he is not necessarily a man of the world yet.
The look and feel of the series suggests it was made for European eyes as well as American. And why not? Dallas was massive in Europe at the time.
The casting of Lana Turner was good but then not so good. Jane Wyman loathed Lana Turner and as a result she only appeared in six episodes with this being the first.
Part of the formula of night-time soaps in the 1980s was the use of former Hollywood studio contract players as cast-members and guest-stars. Such performers had every bit of the kind of training and audience recognition to be successful in the genre.
Here we see Jane Wyman, Lana Turner and Mel Ferrer adding a type of sophistication that didn't come cheap for episodic television back then though TV producers were generally quit willing to shell out money for them on higher-end productions like TV movies and mini-series and consider the cost to be relatively cheap.
Angela had feuded with Jacqueline during the time the unforgettable woman was last there - married to Angela's brother Jason whom she divorced in 1951 taking her son Chase with her to live in France.
Jacqueline tries to persuade Chase to return to France and bring his wife and children with him to run a vineyard and winery there. She fears what will happen to them if they remain in Angela's cross-hairs.
Eventually we are going to get around to what really happened to Jason amongst other tender family secrets. But the characters are as reluctant as real-life families are in getting into those. More so on this show because of possible legal repercussions.
The luxury seen on the show and other night-time soaps was absent before this point in the series at least in Chase and Maggie's household. Susan Sullivan became so synonymous with that type of luxury it typecast her. But in this episode she and the rest of the family are seen doing a ton of housework before actual servants are brought in to the home to cater a dinner party hosted by Jacqueline.
The Giobertis make it evident that dressing up in formal dinner attire, for them, is not something they're used to and they embarrass themselves in front of the servants the way nouveau riche families often do. This signals a change in the direction of their respective arcs in the series. Vickie (Jamie Rose) even has an open-ended offer to join Jacqueline in France.
In TV terms The Giobertis are essentially a nuclear family version of the Waltons who pull a kind of reverse-Beverly Hillbillies moving from the big city to wine country and become a Carringtons or Ewings type family. It made for a very appealing hybrid of a TV series. Also while the Gioberti's are All-American and average they are somewhat continental and urbane too. Every effort was made to have them come off as rich people without discernible snobbery or prejudice.
Whilst never far from hard work in the field alongside the pickers Chase was raised in France by a mother who was educated in England. His career in the U.S. Air Force and job as an airline pilot took him overseas frequently and his Italian-Swedish ancestry is often referred to during the series as is the family heritage tracing back to Tuscany, Italy. A worldy man he is not necessarily a man of the world yet.
The look and feel of the series suggests it was made for European eyes as well as American. And why not? Dallas was massive in Europe at the time.
The casting of Lana Turner was good but then not so good. Jane Wyman loathed Lana Turner and as a result she only appeared in six episodes with this being the first.
Part of the formula of night-time soaps in the 1980s was the use of former Hollywood studio contract players as cast-members and guest-stars. Such performers had every bit of the kind of training and audience recognition to be successful in the genre.
Here we see Jane Wyman, Lana Turner and Mel Ferrer adding a type of sophistication that didn't come cheap for episodic television back then though TV producers were generally quit willing to shell out money for them on higher-end productions like TV movies and mini-series and consider the cost to be relatively cheap.
