Aaron Spelling: The commercial entertainment television shows produced by Aaron Spelling, who has died following a stroke aged 83, generated tens of thousands of screen hours in the United States and across the world over four decades, but the question remains whether he lowered standards or merely reflected public taste.
There is no doubt that he knew what constituted a popular show. Known as the "prince of prime time", he aired such mass-appeal productions as Dynasty, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. At one time he so dominated the ABC network it was known as Aaron's Broadcasting Company. He made hundreds of millions of dollars from more than 200 shows and films, and built a home in Los Angeles that was preposterous even by Tinseltown's extravagant standards.
Critics found little to praise in most of his products, but Spelling's six commendations by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People for his encouragement of black actors and of inter-racial situations outdid any other producer's.
He also supervised a pioneering television special about the onset of Aids, And the Band Played On (1993), while Day One (1989) made a fine examination of the building of the A-bomb, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976) studied a youngster suffering from allergies.
In his later years he seemed to lose his touch, although, after ABC dumped Dynasty in 1989, he demonstrated an uncanny ability, for a man then in his sixties, to attract the youth audience.
Melrose Place, about a group in their 20s living in Los Angeles, lasted seven years to 1999, and Beverly Hills 90210 about a high school just made it into the 21st century. But by late 2001, after radiation treatment on his throat, he had only two shows running and neither on ABC.
By then he was working at the fabled house in Holmby Hills. It was a 56,550sq ft "French chateau", with 123 rooms, a bowling alley, full-sized ice rink, four bars, a rose garden on top of the garage, two rooms for wrapping gifts, and a doll museum for his second wife Candy. His first wife, Carolyn Jones, was the actress who played Morticia in the horror spoof The Addams Family, but they divorced in 1965 and she died in 1983 aged 54.
Spelling was born in Dallas, the youngest of five children of David, a tailor at Sears, and his wife Pearl. The couple were eastern European Jewish immigrants and Aaron was the only Jew at his high school, where he was subjected to such anti-Semitic bullying that he collapsed with a nervous breakdown and spent a year in bed. In the second World War, he served in the air force as a pilot.
Back in Texas, he attended the Southern Methodist University where he wrote a one-act play and directed another by a black author, which got his father the sack from his job with Sears. Spelling recalled that his sister pleaded for their father's job, promising that Aaron would leave Dallas forever. Sears complied and Aaron departed with no regrets.
He arrived in Hollywood in 1953 and being slight, with large eyes and a peculiar haircut he kept all his life, he soon landed acting parts as "weirdos" as he described it, in mystery movies and westerns, and later numerous television shows.
He began writing scripts for a weekly drama show and the Zane Grey western series and, in 1959, produced his first television series in the same genre, Johnny Ringo, based on a real Arizona sheriff of the 1880s. The show lasted one year.
Next he joined the popular comedian Danny Thomas to produce his show, and then a series called the Mod Squad, a successful police drama that ran from 1968-73. Spelling was proud that for the first time on television it showed a black man kissing a white woman. Soon, however, he launched the excessively violent and exploitative SWAT series, about a quasi-military police weapons team.
Then came Spelling's golden era with the detective duo Starsky and Hutch (1975-79), Charlie's Angels (1977-81), The Love Boat, about a cruise ship (1977-86), the dreamy Fantasy Island (1978-84), and his great triumph, Dynasty, which made Joan Collins into an American star and continued from 1981-89.
It concerned Spelling's favourite subject, filthy rich people doing execrable things - a theme he returned to with Titans in 2000, but that flopped. Dynasty, however, went around the world and in 1991 ABC aired a movie called Dynasty: The Reunion, which tied up loose plot ends.
Spelling formed his own company, the Spelling Entertainment Group in a posh block on Wilshire Boulevard, where a uniformed butler would bring the great man lunch on a silver platter in his immense and palatial office. A constant pipe-smoker, as a producer he embraced the Hollywood tradition of nepotism by casting his headstrong daughter Tori and son Randy in his own shows.
Wrapped in his television world, Spelling once tried to show his children the reality outside the Spelling mansion, which was closely patrolled by armed security men, and every family member had to sign in and out.
The party proceeded in a chauffeur-driven limousine with bodyguards riding along, down to San Diego and across the Mexican border, where Spelling pointed to a barrio of tar-paper shacks. Then they drove back to Holmby Hills.
He is survived by Candy, whom he married in 1968, and his two children.
Aaron Spelling, television producer: born April 22 1923; died June 23 2006