"If there’s anything worse than co-starring with animals then it must be becoming one yourself!" Simon MacCorkindale made the observation. In 1983 he could be seen on the TV series, 'Manimal'. Up against 'Dallas' on Friday nights, 'Manimal' lasted 8 episodes. The last 3 were shown on Saturday nights. Melody Anderson remembered, "I play a New York City police detective. If you believe that, you will be able to believe Simon can turn himself into animals. The show has become something of a 'Perils of Pauline'. I've been bruised, bitten, kicked and spit on...The animals have done all those things, plus choosing to relieve themselves in the middle of my close-ups. Wild animals really keep you spontaneous. If you’re doing a scene with an elephant and it decides to do something, you don’t argue. You go along. Sometimes I get the feeling we're doing a kind of Marlin Perkins hour. Because they use a lot of close-ups of me in some of the animal shots, it’s not possible to use doubles. I don’t mind the scratches and little bites. We haven’t had a serious accident on the set yet."
Between 1984 and 1986, Simon co-starred on 'Falcon Crest'. Jane Wyman who played Angie could be seen on her own show between 1955 and 1958, "When it went on the air, I was already 2 weeks behind schedule. For the first year, I was always racing a deadline with never a chance to catch my breath. It was a scramble for 3 years...It was an anthology show, and that’s the worst kind. When you’re doing a continuing series, you use the same sets and characters, and the whole thing falls into a pattern. But an anthology show means a new cast and new settings every week. And each week you are faced with a new character to play. It’s like putting on a miniature movie once a week. No wonder I was exhausted!"
Also starring on 'Falcon Crest' was Lorenzo Lamas, "I was born on January 20, 1958. My father, the actor Fernando Lamas, was taping a 90-minute show with Jane Wyman, my grandmother in 'Falcon Crest'. When he heard the news, he instantly dashed off to the hospital to see me, leaving Jane and company without a second act Jane never forgave me until we became buddies on 'Falcon Crest.'" Robert L. McCullough said the pilot script of 'Falcon Crest' "was merely a reflection of Earl (Hamner's) work on 'The Waltons', and CBS wanted a show to follow 'Dallas'...My task was to take Earl's characters and make it 'hotter.'"
Ana-Alicia observed, "I think Melissa is really another version of Angie in her salad days. Power is not a male prerogative...She is power oriented...She wants the power of owing the largest vineyard in the valley."
Susan Sullivan made the comment, "On these kind of soap opera type of shows, they give you a character and then they cast it and I think they cast it so the actor sort of fill it in like a paint by number. You bring your personality and your own idiosyncrasy to the character and hopefully that makes it work." To play her role convincingly, Ana-Alicia admitted she talked to a priest, "He told me that the play started in the church and that since the beginning of time someone had played Good and someone had to play Evil to make Good look good. 'Think about it this way,' he said, 'The better you play Evil, the better Good is going to look.'"
"I’ve always felt like I have about 20 different personalities and about 20 different looks," Ana-Alicia remarked. "You can see pictures taken of me on the same day that don't even resemble each other. The one thing about me that is really distinctive is my voice. I've had people come up to me in stores and say, 'I just knew that was you talking.'" One commentator made the observation, "There are distinctive voices speaking on television, which gives the lie to the thought that it's a single, monotone, hegemonic voice." By 1990, "television has supplanted the movies as the central entertainer of society and the teller of America's consensus narrative. It attempts to articulate systems of beliefs, assumptions that are thought to be widely shared." At heart "television programs, the seemingly interchangeable comedies and dramas and dramedies that coalesce into a numbing prime-time blur, can be art, as created by a handful of writer-producers whose ideologies and passions reflect their life and times. Take a step back from your television set and you will find that it is not an opaque delivery system for mass-produced 'infotainment', but a window onto American culture, as translated by these auteurs."
