RandallAdams
Telly Talk Active Member
This is a short piece that was contributed by James Wolcott to Texas Monthly, and I'm going to transcribe it for the forum, because I can't replicate the actual magazine image
"One theory to account for the extraordinary hold DALLAS has on America (and the world) is that the Ewing saga is really the Kennedy saga transplanted. Jock Ewing, so the theory goes, is the Joseph Kennedy figure, a begetter of ambitious sons. Barbara Bel Geddes' Miss Ellie is the Rose Kennedy matriach, down-home and plumped up with biscuits. Larry Hagman's J.R. is JFK, but without a visionary gleam in his eye or the winds of history mussing his hair.
J.R. is a crumb-bum package of Texas hormones who chases around with loose women, prefers oil to cattle and believes that in an amoral world, you've got to take that extra edge. His parental affection, however, is Kennedyesque. He loves his daddy - loved him in the wrinkled flesh, loves him as preserved in that awful oil painting at Southfork.
So when J.R. stepped out of his office and took a bullet, it was a video replay of the JFK assassination. Laid up and forced to mend, J.R. reluctantly surrendered power to the Bobby Kennedy stand-in, his younger brother. To paraphrase Karl Marx, history appears on television first as tragedy, and then as schlock."
"One theory to account for the extraordinary hold DALLAS has on America (and the world) is that the Ewing saga is really the Kennedy saga transplanted. Jock Ewing, so the theory goes, is the Joseph Kennedy figure, a begetter of ambitious sons. Barbara Bel Geddes' Miss Ellie is the Rose Kennedy matriach, down-home and plumped up with biscuits. Larry Hagman's J.R. is JFK, but without a visionary gleam in his eye or the winds of history mussing his hair.
J.R. is a crumb-bum package of Texas hormones who chases around with loose women, prefers oil to cattle and believes that in an amoral world, you've got to take that extra edge. His parental affection, however, is Kennedyesque. He loves his daddy - loved him in the wrinkled flesh, loves him as preserved in that awful oil painting at Southfork.
So when J.R. stepped out of his office and took a bullet, it was a video replay of the JFK assassination. Laid up and forced to mend, J.R. reluctantly surrendered power to the Bobby Kennedy stand-in, his younger brother. To paraphrase Karl Marx, history appears on television first as tragedy, and then as schlock."