I think they an attempt to innovate in season 12. Did it work? Probably not. Still, it was the last season where I saw some type of serious attempt at innovating and no, bringing in a lot of good looking young people doesn't count. If it did then Tommy and Tracey McKay, Michelle Stevens and James Beaumont would have worked. That was a fairly obvious attempt at trying to garner more of the young demographic, but Dallas wasn't a beauty contest.
Where I saw them trying in season 12 is with the range war. It was an attempt to bring back the western feel of the show which had been so prevalent in the earlier years and had been so successful. The difference was that in the earlier years you didn't see western elements being forced into the show just to make it look like a modern day western. Characters like Jock Ewing and Punk Anderson brought a western feel to the show because they were played by actors who actually had lots of experience in western movies! Jim Davis had acted alongside John Wayne - the biggest icon there ever was in the movie industry until Clint Eastwood eventually overtook him by not only excelling in westerns but then went on to do more amore ambitious projects with great success.
The range war was something I enjoyed but people have mixed opinions on it. AlthoughI enjoyed it, the show had been so devoid of that western style in the last several years that when they suddenly re-introduced it, it seemed somewhat contrived. It had a fun storyline though and they brought in George Kennedy,who had an impressive career in acting. Finding out that Carter McKay was just a front for Westar and that Jeremy Wendell was the one who conceived of the idea to try to take section 40 that way was interesting. The ending to that storyline, where the Ewings finally got Wendell was one of my favorite episodes. That's just based on entertainment value alone. It was very satisfying to see the Ewings unite to conquer such a formidable adversary. There isn't anyone who doesn't make mistakes- not even Jeremy Wendell.
The downside of it was that took Wendell, a great character out of the picture because he got sent to prison. Nobody was watching that thinking, well, now the show is losing an important character, because they were involved in the story - not contemplating the future seasons of the show. If they'd had it to do over, as fun as it was to see Wendell get caught, I'm sure they would have preferred to have done something else so that they could keep the character of Wendell for future storylines. They thought that with George Kennedy, a more famous actor, in the role of the new adversary for the Ewings that they wouldn't need Wendell anymore but as good an actor as George Kennedy was, he never managed to do the job that William Smithers did in portraying the most capable, most threatening adversary the Ewings had ever had.
