10 things nobody wants to admit about Dynasty

9. Monica should have been a main character

For as big as the cast grew over the years, with new characters coming and going, it’s criminal that Wakeema Hollis never joined the cast as a series regular. She played Jeff Colby’s sister and Fallon’s best friend Monica, and for the first couple seasons, she basically was a main character.

But when Jeff and Monica’s mother Dominique arrived in Atlanta to stir the pot, Monica wound up fleeing to New York City to get away from the drama and she rarely returned. Honestly, Monica removing herself from the mess was wise, and I loved that for her. But we didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Monica in season 5!

Hollis and Gillies, who remain friends after the show ended, would have continued to steal scenes together as Fallon and Monica… if they were given something to do other than tangle every now and then. If there’s one thing I wish Dynasty would have done differently, it’s promote Wakeema Hollis to the main cast and give Monica the spotlight she deserved.

8. The CW didn’t treat the show like the hit it was

If you weren’t watching Dynasty on The CW or, for international viewers, on Netflix, then you didn’t know what the show was actually giving. You didn’t know that it was good and that it was a pretty sizable success thanks to the worldwide streaming audience. Being so, if you weren’t aware of these things, then all you saw was a low-rated show riding out its run on Fridays, the one-time “Friday night death slot.”

How was anyone to know any differently? The series was scraping by as the network’s least-watched show, rarely received any promotion (which Liz Gillies basically had to do herself on her friend Zach Sang’s radio show), and the headlines about the recastings never cast the show in a positive light. It was more like “OMG, look at that mess!” instead of “Oh, that’s the best primetime soap on television that isn’t being properly serviced by its network.”

Why wasn’t Gillies on the talk show, fan convention, or entertainment press circuit to promote the show each season? Why didn’t the network release episode previews that were longer than, I don’t know, 20 seconds max? Why did they allow it to be the butt of the ratings joke? These are questions that are applicable to multiple CW shows in its final pre-Nexstar years.

It’s true that The CW likely left the show to its own devices because the lucrative Netflix deal did the heavy lifting. But why squander what could have been a Gossip Girl-level smash and leave it to languish without support? Without Gillies’ built-in fandom and the IP name-recognition, who knows what fate the show would have suffered. Even without strenuous efforts on the part of its home network, I’m still proud of what the show and its 108 episodes were able to achieve.