When the miniseries dominated Primetime, their Maxist star was Richard Chamberlain.
Today we call them “limited series.” However, in the heyday of the 20th century there was a huge TV event under another inappropriate, petite miniseries. They were TV specials that made the TV special special special.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many miniseries of “Roots,” “Winds of War,” and “Loneliness Doves” ruled the dialogue and ruled the sniffed stars. But perhaps the other actors are less closely related to the genre than Chamberlain, who died in 90 on Saturday due to his star-making, a remarkable emotional role in “The General” and “The Thorn Bird.”
When the Chamberlain mini-series aired, I was young, and Dr. Kildare, a medical series from the 1960s that established him as a heartbeat, was before my time. However, his groundbreaking role helped shape my ideas about what television can do and what a TV star is.
His mini-series were gorgeous liners and time machines, whipping up the audience to other lands and ages in ways the Work A Day series couldn't. In “The General,” Chamberlain played John Blackthorn, a British navigator who captured prisoners in feudal Japan. In the soap opera “The Thorn Birds,” his priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart, wrestled with the forbidden love for a young woman from the Australian sheep farm family.
Of course, location and budget helped shape the experience, but so did Chamberlain's screen presence. The Shakespeare actor in between his television roles was able to create manners for decades or centuries before he felt warm and inhabited. He was dignified enough to carry the grandeur of the story, and expressed enough to place them as the finest grade of pulp.
He was a star of the 1980s, but Chamberlain's appeal was held in the 1960s and 1970s. He was emotional and had great traits that made beautiful canvases for enthusiasm, anguish and longing. He could be flapping with rage, but his charm was a different type of physical masculinity that defined the 1980s screen Celebrities of Stallone and Schwarzenegger.
But don't make any mistakes. He was a first-rate chunk and if you didn't know it, you had a mother or sister or uncle. Of course, he was blessed with a good look. But there was also his personal charisma. Even a morally compromised character, he worked hard to evoke charm and decency. His joke with Barbara Stanwyck in “The Thorn Birds” – “Sometimes, Mary, I think you're chasing my soul” – is refined, tasty and refined at once.
Chamberlain may have been a star of many eras, but the era he flourished had many connections with the kind of celebrities he achieved. Certainly, one of the reasons his pass is so violent today is that so many viewers shared him a few years ago. He reached Peak TV Stardom in the early 1980s, when mass television viewers reached the peak of their range before cable emerged.
Yes, he was talented, but he was able to express his talent before a larger audience than performers he had before or since. Approximately 70 million people saw his “general,” 110 million “thorn birds.” Today, a series like the remake of FX's “Shogun” can monopolize Emmys, but not the audience.
That same monoculture had a serious trade-off, and for Chamberlain there was a personal trade-off. The popular culture of the Reagan era that made him a leading man was also something he wasn't entirely himself. Chamberlain was not published as a gay person until 2003. One of his most admired roles was in “The Thorn Birds” that belonged to a man suffering from socially prohibited love.
Being a gay man in Hollywood back then when Chamberlain appeared was, in a way, playing a role even from the camera. But on-screen he has created real connections for millions of people in an age where network TV is mini and as big as ever.
