Never Meet Your Idols, They Say—Unless Your Idol Is Donna Mills

The reason for her departure after nine seasons? When the show lost many of its gay writers, Abby’s storylines started getting soft, she says. (As for female writers, Mills can recall maybe one or two during her entire run.) To compensate, Jacobs would call in his lead actresses for a read-through with the writers on every new script, essentially giving them a creative say in the fates of their characters each week.

Despite being one of the longest running and most popular primetime dramas in history, Knots’s distribution to new media was held up for years. The problem, apparently, was its fourth season, in which fan-favorite character Ciji, played by a heavily mulleted Lisa Hartman, delivers a series of stirring vocal performances, and securing the rights and clearances for the songs she sang presented a tangle for parent studio Warner Brothers. Until recently, you could only find the first 13 episodes—none of which included Mills—on DVD.

Then came its Amazon Prime debut, and with it, a flood of viewers like me. Whether audiences were now discovering Knots for the first time or engaging in a nostalgic binge, its over-the-top moments and one-liners have become the perfect fodder for the irreverent social media spaces in which so many of us now discuss our favorite shows.

My Instagram reel of Gary Ewing’s drunken meltdown inside a recording studio—with Ewing played by a fearless and fully committed Ted Shackelford as Mills looks on with icy contempt—racked up over 20,000 views within a few hours of being posted, and the fierce battles of words between Mills and her female costars have become campy clickbait, replete with delightfully dated one-liners. (“The next time you want to show me your gratitude, go save a whale in my name,” Mills hisses at Lee from her hospital bed after being strong-armed into donating a kidney to save her on-screen niece’s life.)