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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kenny Coyote" data-source="post: 200870" data-attributes="member: 102">Bobby's return, while not popular here on this forum, was actually well received by the Dallas audience. The dream season, season 9, drew an 18.8 Nielsen rating. Season 10, the season of Bobby's return drew an 18.6 Nielsen rating.Dallas had suffered much worse declines previous to that. In season 4 they scored a 27.6 rating. They dropped to a 23.2 in season 5! That's huge. Not that it was their fault they lost Jim Davis, and I think they handled the loss of the head of the family as well as they could have, but they sure felt the impact of it.Then in season 6 they scored a 20.5 rating. That's a loss of 2.7. Nobody from the main cast died; there was nothing that happened that should have resulted in them losing that much but they decided to take the show in a negative direction that alienated millions of fans. Bobby and Pam were the most popular couple on Dallas with the fans, so what did the show decide to do? They split them up. Good call! Split up your most popular couple.In a show with so much dysfunction and so much negativity, Bobby and Pam's marriage was the bright spot, it was the contrast the show desperately needed to show the audience that amidst all the problems in the Ewing family, there was great happiness too. The negativity of the other things going on - Jock's death, JR and Sue Ellen's brutally dysfunctional marriage, JR's underhanded business tactics - had to be balanced out with some optimism. Bobby and Pam's marriage was what had always provided that optimism.People watch TV to be be entertained and as a temporary escape from their own problems. They watch TV to have a good time. Bobby and Pam's marriage symbolized something important. Bobby and Pam had always faced tremendous obstacles in their marriage and they always managed to over come them. People loved that! Pam and Bobby loved each other so much that there wasn't anything their marriage couldn't withstand. Then to add insult to injury, the thing that ultimately caused Pam to leave Bobby was her reaction to her mother dying in a place crash. She told Bobby that her mother died because of the contest he was having with JR. Huh? It wasn't pilot error? It wasn't the fault of the pilot of the plane that crashed into Rebecca's jet? How does that make any sense? And they're going to have that be the reason the show's most popular couple splits up. Wow.It wrecked the character of Pam. This was supposed to be the couple whose love could withstand anything and Pam leaves Bobby because of something he had nothing to do with, something he had no control over. Then to make sure they wrecked the character, they had Pam fly to France on a vacation with Mark Graison a few weeks later. The show's most popular female character has just separated from the man who was supposedly the love of her life, and she's so grief stricken over what has happened to her marriage that in the blink of an eye, she's vacationing on a beach in France with another man. Yeah, if you wanted to wreck the character, that's pretty much how you'd go about doing it.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?