The CW’s Dynasty reboot premiered on October 11, 2017, and ran for five seasons and 108 episodes before signing off on September 16, 2022. It was developed by Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage and Sallie Patrick, and it moved the 1980s soap’s fortune-and-family warfare from Denver to Atlanta. The show never became a ratings giant. It became something more useful: a brisk, self-aware machine for watching rich people ruin each other, and it held that line for five years.
Trailer, via Netflix Malaysia.
Fallon Carrington Takes the Wheel
The central change is the lead. Where the original centered on Blake Carrington’s household at large, the reboot hands the engine to Elizabeth Gillies as Fallon, the billionaire’s daughter and a businesswoman with a plan for everything and a grudge for everyone. Grant Show plays Blake as a man who mistakes control for affection. The pilot sets the terms: Fallon and her brother Steven learn that Blake is engaged to Cristal, an employee at the family company, Carrington Atlantic. Fallon schemes to split them. The scheme backfires, costs her a promotion, and she leaves to ally with Blake’s nemesis and former employee, Jeff Colby.
That is the right way to start a soap. The premise does not ask you to admire anyone. It asks you to pick a side and then watch the side get rearranged.
The reboot also updates the original on purpose. Steven’s homosexuality is a nonissue to Blake. Sammy Jo, the original’s gold digger, becomes Sam, a gay man, played by Rafael de la Fuente. Cristal and her nephew are Latin American. Chauffeur Michael Culhane, played by Robert Christopher Riley, and the Colby family are African-American. These are not decorations. They change who gets to be a schemer and who gets to be a person with something at stake.
The Cristal Problem, Handled Twice
Dynasty had a casting problem at the center and solved it twice. Nathalie Kelley played Cristal in season one, then told E! News in June 2018 she would not return. Her explanation, later given, was blunt: “I think I wasn’t up to the challenge of a nighttime soap … I think the best thing they felt they could do is start afresh.”
I think the best thing they felt they could do is start afresh.
The CW announced in August 2018 that Ana Brenda Contreras would play “the real Cristal Flores” in season two. Daniella Alonso later took over the role. Soap operas recast all the time. What matters here is that the show kept the character’s position in the story intact while changing the face, and neither version is treated as a placeholder.
The same churn hit other roles. Nicollette Sheridan joined in November 2017 as Blake’s ex-wife Alexis Carrington and was promoted to series regular for season two; Elaine Hendrix later took over the part. James Mackay, who played Steven, was confirmed in November 2018 to be leaving as a series regular after the first four episodes of season two. Alan Dale’s majordomo Anders, Maddison Brown’s Kirby, Sam Underwood’s Adam, Michael Michele’s Dominique Deveraux, Adam Huber’s Liam Ridley and Eliza Bennett’s Amanda all arrive as the seasons roll.
A Dynasty Built on Relatives Arriving Late
The show’s real structural idea is that the family never stops growing. Season after season, more relatives turn up in Atlanta. Alexis comes back from absence. Adam, the twisted eldest son, appears. Amanda surfaces as a secret Carrington offspring. Dominique is revealed as the illegitimate daughter of Blake’s father, Thomas.
This is the oldest soap engine there is, and Dynasty runs it hard. Every new arrival resets the board. Every old grievance gets a new claimant. The show understands that a fortune is only interesting when someone shows up with a reason it should be theirs.
It also understands pacing. Five seasons and 108 episodes is not a long run by network standards, but it is long enough to build a full map of alliances, and the show rarely stalls. The Atlanta setting helps. Moving the story out of Denver gives the Carringtons a city that reads as new money and old manners at once, and the show uses it.
What the Cast Carries
Gillies is the reason any of this works. Fallon could have been a punchline, a rich girl with a smirk. Gillies plays her as competent and wounded at the same time, which is much harder. When Fallon allies with Jeff Colby against her own father, the show does not ask you to think she is right. It asks you to understand why she would.
Show’s Blake is the other load-bearing performance. He is not a monster. He is a man who has confused the two things he owns, his company and his children, and the show lets that confusion do the damage.
Around them, the ensemble does the soap work. Riley’s Michael Culhane, Sam Adegoke’s Jeff Colby, de la Fuente’s Sam, Michele’s Dominique and Brown’s Kirby all get their own angles on the same pile of money. The show’s willingness to write Steven as gay without turning it into a crisis, and to write the Colbys and Culhane as Black characters with their own claims on the Carrington world, gives the feud more surface area than the original had.
Where the Reboot Stumbles
The recasting is the show’s clearest weakness. Not because any single replacement fails, but because Dynasty asks you to invest in a face and then changes it. Alexis and Cristal both pass through more than one actor. Steven exits early in season two. A soap lives on continuity of feeling, and every swap costs a little of it.
The other problem is that the show’s self-awareness occasionally undercuts its own stakes. When everyone on screen knows they are in a soap, the betrayals can start to feel like bits. Dynasty is at its best when it plays the material straight, letting Fallon’s ambition and Blake’s need for control collide without a wink.
Neither problem is fatal. Both are the kind of thing a five-season network soap can survive, and this one did.
The Verdict on Dynasty
Dynasty is a reboot that understood its assignment. It kept the original’s premise, moved the setting to Atlanta, handed the lead to Fallon, and updated the cast so the wealth on screen looked like America now rather than America in 1981. It ran five seasons and 108 episodes, premiered on The CW on October 11, 2017, and closed on September 16, 2022. It survived a full-season pickup in November 2017, a fifth-season renewal in February 2021, and the announcement in May 2022 that the fifth season would be its last.
What it leaves behind is a clean argument for the network soap as a form. The genre does not need prestige pacing or a mystery box. It needs a fortune, a family, and a reason for both to keep moving. Dynasty had all three, plus a lead performance in Gillies that made the whole thing feel less like nostalgia and more like a machine built to run.
The recasting is a real cost, and the show’s knowing tone sometimes gets in its own way. But the reboot’s central bet, that Fallon Carrington is a better engine than her father’s boardroom, pays off across the full run. That is worth more than consistency.
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