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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 2843" data-attributes="member: 22">An attempt to watch all the episodes of the 80s soaps in the order they originally aired and then make unfair comparisons between them.Seems fitting that the first time two different soaps aired in the same seven-day period was in the first week of the 1980s:03/Jan/80: KNOTS LANDING: Community Spirit v. 04/Jan/80: DALLAS: Power PlayI recognise a lot of the music in "Community Spirit" from the DALLAS episode "Kidnapped" that aired the year before. Then Cliff Barnes was the reluctant hero, obliged to act as a go-between for the Ewings and Bobby's kidnappers. Here, that role is taken by Gary, pressured by Karen into stopping JR from drilling for oil in the Knots Landing Ocean. (Given David Jacobs' claim that he originally conceived Karen to be the KNOTS equivalent of JR, it's ironic that Gary should find himself caught between them in this ep.)Gary's words at JR's funeral - that everything he'd ever done, good or bad, had been in response to his elder brother - are borne out in this episode. It was running away from JR that brought Gary to Knots Landing, it's standing up to him here that makes him part of a community instead of the loner he always has been.Jacobs' theory that DALLAS is about "them" and KNOTS about "us" are also neatly illustrated in "Community Spirit". As Karen and Laura observe Gary, Val and JR from the Avery window and try to figure out what's going on, they're doing what the average viewer at home was doing at the time - watching and talking about the Ewings. Karen even describes JR as "bigger than life", enforcing the idea that her world is more real than the one he comes from. JR aside, the episode gives us our first look at the dynamic between Richard and Laura: he's desperate and she's compromised. Laura also becomes the first woman in prime time soap to "do an Afton", i.e. sleep with a man she detests for the sake of her man - just as Kat Moon would do in EASTENDERS in 2004 and Ann Ewing, disappointingly, wouldn't do in New DALLAS in 2012.Foreshadow Alert 1: A crooked PR guy called Chip in KNOTS.Foreshadow Alert 2: Slant drilling is key to resolving the offshore story-line on KNOTS, just as it has been to the Oil-on-Southfork story of New DALLAS. (I got a similar frisson hearing Seth Stone pre-echo Elena Ramos's talk of salt domes in "Julie's Return".)Historic moment: Enter Serena, JR's No. 1 hooker for the next ten years (AIDS era notwithstanding). Procured by Alan Beam, she's his lasting contribution to the show.Pop culture moment: The Barnes for Congress roller disco. Disco officially started sucking almost exactly six months earlier. Looking at this scene, it's not hard to see why.Things I never noticed before: Digger Barnes wearing a hearing aid (or two). Richard Avery smoking a pipe. If he hadn't ditched that, I don't reckon he'd have ever got Donna Mills into that jacuzzi. This is my favourite period of Old DALLAS - it's lurid, pulpy, trashy and exciting. In "Power Play", everything we need to know about each of the principal characters could be summed up by two lines on the back of a sleazy novel. JR Ewing: "His daddy taught him everything he knew - except when to stop!" Lucy Ewing: "The spoiled little rich girl who grew up with everything but her parents' love - and now she'll make the whole world pay for it!" Alan Beam: "He clawed his way out of the backstreets of Chicago - now he'll stop at nothing to make it to the top in Dallas!" I love watching Alan and Kristin jockeying for position as JR's favourite (we'll glimpse something similar between Casey Denault and April in Season 10). Kristin's furious attempts to prove her indispensability to JR ($200 for that polaroid camera!) are so much fun. Like Hagman, Mary Crosby plays her character's twistedness completely straight, which just makes her all the funnier.Lucy is at her bubble-headed brainless best in the scenes where Alan dumps her and JR exposes her affair in front of the family, knowing it will goad her into accepting Alan's proposal. When Hagman and Tilton are in the same shot, it's funny on several levels at the same time: the disparity in their height, Charlene acting her little heart out while Hagman just has a ball, Lucy stomping her feet as JR run rings round her. He runs rings round Miss Ellie, Jock, Pam and Bobby too, come to that. At this point in the show, more than independently motivated characters, the others Ewings are like chess pieces to be moved around the board by JR.There's something cartoon-like about this era of DALLAS - I thinking that's what attracted me to it as a child; I remember now that I used to draw my own comic strip: DALLAS In Space. But if the characters are two dimensional, that doesn't make them bland and cardboard. Rather, they're vivid and vibrant … "Bigger than life," as Karen Fairgate would say. The KNOTS world JR enters in "Community Spirit", however, is very different. It's messy and chaotic, a world of pot luck dinners, screaming teenagers, overlapping dialogue and shaky camera footage of a grown woman in a child's dress euphorically splashing about in the ocean. JR's bewilderment when Karen abruptly excuses herself from their hotel room seduction in order to collect the kids from school and Sid's tan suit from the cleaners encapsulates the difference between their two worlds.Gary's foray into industrial espionage, i.e. offering a few mumbled excuses to JR's secretary before being granted access to his confidential files, are less convincing than anything to have occurred on DALLAS thus far, (he could have at least shown her some psychic paper) but getaway driver Val being moved on by the cops is a pure KNOTS moment.Ultimately, there's nothing much at stake for JR in "Community Spirit". Compared to the South East Asian deal that had gone down in DALLAS a few weeks earlier, which meant the difference between the Ewings becoming billionaires or losing everything, here it's about whether Ewing Oil makes a fifteen or twenty million dollar profit. Re-watching this era, more and more I'm convinced that the fine comedic line Larry Hagman treads as JR is a major part of what made the Ewings such a phenomenon. His scenes in Gary and Val's house are brilliantly funny, while never losing sight of the threat underlying his Mr. Nice Guy act.And so it comes to pass that this week's winner is … somewhat to my surprise ... KNOTS LANDING.</blockquote>

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