Formally a wealthy, high society living bunch, Arrested Developmentbegins when George Sr.
RELATED: 'Succession’s Power Couple Is Doomed to Fail: The Problem With the Roman/Gerri RelationshipĪrrested Development (2003-2006, 2013-2019)Ī series of unfortunate events lands the criminal leaning Bluth family into some hot water. Inviting viewers into lavish homes filled with nightmares and feuds, these households give the Roys a run for their money as they highlight the worst of greed when privilege is handed down to the wrong people. As the Roys continue to rage on every Sunday night, there are countless other family-centric television series that are more than capable of filling the Succession void during the weekdays. Succession is the latest descendant that hails from a long line of dysfunctional, wealthy television families, dating all the way back to hit series like Dallas and Dynasty. A particularly nasty brood of backstabbers, the Roys have become America’s favorite family to hate.
Logan Roy is back ( Brian Cox) and nastier than ever as he rules the world’s fifth-largest media conglomerate with an iron fist, while his children fight for scraps of power. The Roy family has finally made their long-awaited return to television in the third season of HBO’s satirical drama, Succession, and they do not disappoint.
I’d definitely think about doing it.”Īnd while the thought of a post-Brexit Eldorado sounds like it could have a fair degree of dramatic tension, it looks like the last word on the soap will always belong to Marcus Tandy.Sunday nights have gone full beast mode. “The thing that people loved about Eldorado was the sunshine, and the sense of escapism,” she said. In 2013, Julie Fernandez, who played Vanessa Lockhead, and would later appear in The Office, told the BBC that the time was ripe for an Eldorado revival. While some lament its demise, Eldorado has become a byword for expensive failure.Īnd even after its demise the soap couldn’t escape the satirical cross-hairs of Chris Morris’ The Day Today, and its mock soap ‘The Bureau’. He’s an artsy-fartsy person, who prefers to be in front of the cameras by the look of it, doing intellectual programmes – which I do enjoy – but what has a man like that got to do with soap?” “But I feel that Alan Yentob was entirely the wrong person to be in charge. “The BBC have been very good to me lately,” she told the Eldorado Revisited blog in 2013. It briefly became a hotel but even that didn’t last.Īs for Yentob’s decision to wield the axe, Polly Perkins, who played Trish Valentine, knew where to point the finger. Today, the set remains a ghost town, a kind of Pompeii-style warning from history for TV commissioners everywhere. The £2 million purpose-built set in the hills near Malaga, and all of its high-tech equipment, was effectively written off, and eight of the cast took the corporation to court over alleged unpaid wages. Yentob assumed that by killing off the show, the Beeb would swiftly emerge intact from its Spanish debacle. Since its ill-fated experiment, the BBC has not launched a new soap opera in the past 25 years (unless you count its Australian commission Out of the Blue, which only ran for one series in 2008). I took it off because it wasn’t good enough and it was misconceived.”īut the ratings did improve after a desperate revamp, and the final episode of Eldorado was watched by more than ten million viewers. Yentob later told the Guardian: “I didn’t take Eldorado off because it only had an audience of four to five million. But then again, soap operas can take years to build loyalty and become a fixed part of the schedule that viewers watch through force of habit. The official reason given was poor ratings, and it was frequently well short of its target audience of ten million. It sailed off into the sunset (literally, in the case of Marcus and Pilar) almost exactly a year after its debut. Cancelled too soon?ĭespite these considerable teething problems there were still many fans dismayed when the new BBC1 controller Alan Yentob decided to axe the soap in March 1993. Eldorado relocated EastEnders-style social drama to Spain – but failed to catch onĪnd looking back, the decision to include snippets of dialogue in Spanish, French and even Swedish without subtitles was unlikely to go down well back home.Īs if all this wasn’t enough to guarantee disaster, on its launch night, after an expensive advertising campaign, Eldorado also suffered at the hands of ITV, which scheduled a special hour-long edition of the national institution that is Coronation Street, in a spiteful but successful attempt to gazump the ex-pat upstart. Kai Maurer, who played Dieter Schultz, had only appeared in small parts on stage and screen, and was singled out for criticism.