Knots Landing Star Michele Lee is Show’s Biggest Fan: “I’m you”

KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE News Service | April 5, 1992 5:00 AM ET

By Deborah Wilker

When Michele Lee debuted as Karen Fairgate in the CBS series Knots Landing, it was Christmas week 1979 and the most popular shows of the era were M*A*S*H and That’s Incredible. The lead-in for Knots provided by CBS that first season?

Barnaby Jones.

Has it really been 13 years?

Of course television looks much different now, but universal themes don’t change. Neither does intelligent acting and directing, both long the center of Knots Landing, now TV’s longest-running prime-time drama.

“I think one reason we’ve lasted so long is that we’ve always really cared about our audience,” says Lee. “There’s a familial connection between us. I really feel it because I’m a Knots viewer, too.”

Like most devotees of this durable cult-status serial, Lee says she plans to settle in at 10 p.m. this Thursday to watch the season cliffhanger. She isn’t just the show’s moral center, she’s a fan.

If Dallas was the wealth fantasy, Knots is the wife fantasy — a story of the intertwining lives on idyllic Seaview Circle, a suburban cul-de-sac near the beach in Los Angeles. Its premise has changed little over 13 years.

Thursday’s installment of KL (as loyalists call it), is titled Little Girl Lost — one of several episodes Lee has directed in recent seasons.

The show’s producer, David Jacobs (Homefront, Dallas), was so impressed with her directorial debut, season 10’s The Perfect Opportunity, he wrote a memo to CBS brass lauding her.

“Many of us who produce television tend to regard actors who direct as a pesky phenomenon to be avoided,” Jacobs’ memo reads. “This can’t be applied to Michele’s episode. It is simply too strikingly singular. And for the record: She completed the film on time, on budget and it cut like butter.”

Trailblazer

Actors who direct pop up all the time. But actresses? There are few, if any, at the helm of a huge ensemble cast and a weekly budget of about $2 million.

“I do feel unique,” Lee says. “I have a chance to portray such a positive role model for women in a show that portrays so many aspects of real life. Karen is a female who exemplifies goodness and morality and has never swayed from this.

“There aren’t too many women on TV of her strength,” she adds, speaking by phone from her Los Angeles home. “I think that’s because I’m you — I’m all those ladies out there. I am that viewer of Knots Landing.”

Think she’s kidding?

Ask her about the time she was getting ready for work one morning, but then stopped in her tracks, diverted by an old Knots rerun she caught in passing on TNT.

“It was the episode when [Karen’s husband] Sid died. I’m watching and getting more and more emotionally involved. I’m trying to get dressed, and my heart started palpitating. 

“I found myself just transported back into the episode. I stopped everything.

“I’m getting so upset. I pick up the phone and call the set and I say, ‘I’m sorry, I have to be a little late today. Please don’t be alarmed, but I’m watching Knots Landing and I cannot tear myself away.’ ”

And here’s what she does when she and longtime co-star Joan Van Ark can’t quite muster the proper motivation:

“If we’re doing a scene and we have to connect and we’re not quite there, we’ll look at each other, and I know this sounds corny, but I’ll hum the [show’s] theme song,” she says.

“There’s something in the theme that touches a note with us, just some emotional connection. I’ll hold her hand, gaze into her eyes, sing a couple notes and we’re there.”

Michele Lee is not only star, director and viewer, she is often the show’s loudest publicist, too. 

With CBS generally writing off the show as little more than a durable mainstay, rather than something to be vigorously promoted, it has been up to producer Jacobs and veteran cast members like Lee to delicately sing Knots Landing’s praises.

After new scriptwriters botched several shows at the beginning of the season, Jacobs shut down production and retooled for spring. The show’s rebound was cause for celebration — and lots of publicity, something Jacobs and production company Lorimar, did completely on their own.

Long odds

For almost all of its prime-time life, Knots has brought in top ratings while competing against some of the most formidable shows on TV: Hill Street Blues, Cheers and L.A. Law — all without the windfall of a blockbuster (or even remotely compatible) lead-in on CBS. 

Among the shows Knots has followed on CBS on Thursday nights: Hawaii Five-O, Magnum P.I., Simon and Simon, Paradise and now Street Stories.

Despite rich production values and its place in TV history, Knots was never a critical favorite — until recently. 

But even then, the show lost some of its newly attained critical status when scripts ran off-course last fall. 

Talk about lousy timing. 

After 12 years of perfection, just as the world begins to notice, the ship runs aground.

Now safely back on course, Lee wonders how much more successful Knots might have been had it received just a few of the breaks bequeathed to other shows.

“We’ve always been the little engine that could,” she says. “We’ve beaten unbeatable odds against some wonderful programming.”

Though Knots has been renewed by CBS for season 14, bringing it back may require concessions from some cast members. With longevity comes one of the highest cast payrolls on television.

“If we could all join hands together and come up with something that is equitable and fair for everybody,” Lee says of her castmates, “certainly with love in my heart I am willing to make concessions.”

With the threat of cancellation looming earlier this season, the possibility of life without Knots wasn’t easy for Lee and her castmates, who have grown as close as family. 

“I’m sure when it does happen, it will feel like a death.”

She says she would do pretty much anything to keep it going. Among the ideas being mulled for next season is a “star rotation” that would keep the higher-priced veterans out of some episodes. 

Lee, however, may be the only old-timer to sidestep the plan. She is the only cast member who has been in all 325 episodes to date, and she would like to keep her streak alive.

Family

Only two other cast members — Van Ark and Ted Shackelford (Gary Ewing) — have been with the show since Day One. But Van Ark, who actually created the role of Valene Ewing on Dallas in 1978, may soon leave to star in a new NBC sitcom.

“I love Joan,” Lee says. “In year 14 of a show, you can hardly fault someone for wanting to move on.”

Her voice cracks when she describes their long friendship.

“When we give each other birthday gifts, we have signed them to each other, ‘Love, Val’ and ‘Love, Karen.’ We really do. It’s also nice to see girlfriends exemplified on TV. I know the audience will miss her, as well as that aspect of the show.”

Lee has a similarly close relationship with TV husband Mack, played by Kevin Dobson.

“We are like husband and wife. We speak a language all our own, very much like anyone in a very long, intimate relationship.”

In real life, Lee is married to former CBS executive Fred Rappoport, now an independent producer. She has a grown son from her previous marriage to actor James Farentino.

Raised in Los Angeles, Lee first found fame on Broadway, starring in the musicals How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (with Robert Morse), and in Seesaw with Tommy Tune. 

She says she’ll go back to Broadway when — and if — Knots ever ends, but she won’t even venture a guess as to when that might be. “It could absolutely run indefinitely.”

 

ON TV

Program: Knots Landing

Stars: Michele Lee, Joan Van Ark, Ted Shackelford, Kevin Dobson, William Devane, Nicolette Sheridan, Michelle Phillips, Kathleen Noone

Airs: Thursday, 10 p.m., CBS 

 

Originally Published April 5, 1992 5:00 AM ET

Updated August 15, 2024