Season 9 was very glamorous, but KNOTS' producer Peter Dunne and his writers came in with the idea that DALLAS needed to be reformed. They tried to "strengthen" the women, but it was smug, PC and ineffective. There were some interesting scenes and good performances, and the season started out to be a little rawer and more experimental, but it quickly began to flounder as the plots just circled and circled and went nowhere, with too many maudlin reconciliation moments between characters who either would never reconcile
or those moments happened too soon -- eliminating any narrative tension, as the writers were just as bored by their own melodrama as the viewer was.
It was more soap than opera.
Season 10 suffered from Lorimar's new, dreadful video editing process (which made the show look optically fecal, and much worse than the DVDs) and the "I had a terrible 31 episode dream, Bobby" speech which opened the season was destructive. But the plotting of Season 10 was terrific, the Wes Parmalee arc resonant and ground zero for DALLAS, and the B D Calhoun story, which dominated the middle of the year, was also terrific. And Jeremy Wendell and Mrs Scotfield bringing down Ewing Oil was equally compelling.. Yes, the slightly campy tone took over, but they didn't go too far with it, so it worked..
Season 10 was ballsy fun, and one of the three or four best years of the entire program. It was the finest kind of "outrageous."
