Re: MY DREAM CAME TRUE- "Peyton Place" on DVD this May from Shout! Entertainment!!
You must remember that in 1964, though censrship was loosening in movies, it was quite tight in TV land. You could see James Bond in bed with every girl he could get his hand on, but Rob and Laura Petrie had to deal with twin beds! For a show like this, the writers had to be creative in getting past the dreaded censors with 'coded' dialogue, pauses (known in the soap world as 'beats') and shots that pretty much explained what was really going on. Later on in the show, a female character loses her virginity and is given advice by another character to 'be careful': from watching the scenes in question you know that there was sex involved. Back then, PP was called "The show that comes in a plain brown wrapper", and "TV's first situation orgy", making it as cutting edge in its day as Sex In The City and Queer As Folk would be decades later.
When I watched the show for the first time, I was amazed with what they actually got away with, considering the tight network restraints. The key to watching PP is watching it in its context of a show of its time: it's the mid-60s, Donna Reed was still on the air, and people had yet to hear names like Gloria Steinem, Abbie Hoffman, Linda Lovelace or Stokely Carmichael. Ronald Reagan was still acting, Vietnam was just some place the French lost in a war a decade earlier, and people could actually go out and leave their door unlocked!
