I always like comparing the four wealth-based nighttime soaps of the '80s (it was almost my favorite genre, which is why I found their infamous slide mid-way through so painful and confounding) which DALLAS inspired.
There were times that all four of the shows DALLAS, KNOTS LANDING, FALCON CREST and even DYNASTY were as good -- or even better -- than each other. And that seems to do with who was producing and writing them at any given time.
All four shows were extremely well cast. And without good casting, you've got nothing but a (possibly good) script and concept.
What made DALLAS the king of the hill? Firstly, the oil business and the sheer power of it makes for a great backdrop. Also, there had been no hit nighttime serial since then-forgotten PEYTON PLACE until DALLAS.
And then there's the chancrid, ugly association everyone had around the world with the very word "Dallas" -- whenever you saw the name of city anywhere in print, it was like a six letter epithet. Because of the murder of JFK. Tens of thousands of people literally moved from the Dallas/FtWorth area in the fifteen years between 1963 and 1978 due to the association -- and the Dallas Cowboys football team didn't change the global view of it.... Only this outrageous TV series about, perhaps ironically, a corrupt Texas oil family called "DALLAS" changed the image of the city; after 'Who Shot JR?' (an unprecedented worldwide cliffhanger which was resolved 17 years almost to the day that that
earlier,
real life Dallas shooting happened) by the early-'80s, the city had become an exciting, Stetson-clad metropolis where JR and his family lived at Southfork Ranch with their wild barbecues and their pool fights and their drinks before dinner.
It's crazy, really.
But that's one of the reasons I like the 1978 "mini-series" with its drab, wintry vibe. Even the very first frame of the scene of Pam driving to meet her daddy, "Digger", in some shabby Houston Street pub, has the infamous Texas Schoolbook Depository clearly in the background, the "Hertz" sign, not removed for another year, still atop it like a raven or some gargoyle hovering. It was too quick for most viewers to spot it even then, but in retrospect, it adds to the history of the thing somehow.
But the first several episodes hinted, deliberately or not, at vile, sordid secrets -- secrets buried not so far in the past at the time -- conveniently ignored with the distraction of contemporary romantic issues and little family imbroglios. It's like this huge, dark silence in the background nobody's acknowledging. The old rivalries of the patriarchs spelled out in its earliest version the closest we get to ever looking under the Dallas rock and finding what might be there.
Anyway, Jacobs, Katzman, Paulsen and others also knew what to do with the concept, and how to extend it and find various layers to exploit.
And obviously at the center of it was Larry Hagman's interpretation of J.R. Ewing. An intelligent and sometimes brilliant actor, Hagman played all imaginable sides of this nasty, snickering sociopathically-inclined oil man, turning J.R. into a legend in his own time and one of the great villains in the annals of fiction.
Which is why Donna Reed's Mis-Ellie, the dream resolution, and the campy last two or three seasons felt like such a betrayal. Or, as Susan Howard once phrased it, "the audience abused again."
