If we'd have the power to take back the later years then we'd have the power to fix them.
Yeah, if we're playing impossible hypotheticals, rather than ending the show several years earlier I would prefer to fix those later seasons and come up with a better ending.
A great concept and one I would have traveled with especially if it involved JR. His absolute approach to having it all inevitably drove his loved ones away - one by one. In the end whether he had obtained both Southfork and Ewing Oil or lost both it would have justified the ending in The Decline and the Fall of the Ewing Empire.
Yes, once on a previous board we were asked how we would have ended the show instead of "Conundrum." I said if I could have gone back and knew in advance that the show was definitely going to be cancelled that season, I would have just reworked the last couple of episodes, ending with J.R. both winning and losing. Still keep the parts with James and Jimmy leaving and John Ross deciding to stay with his mother in London, telling his father he hates them. I'd bring Pam back, even if it's that other actress, have her explain why she stayed away, because she thought she was going to die. But now her disease is in remission. Her and Bobby reconcile to make the most of whatever time they have left, so they take Christopher and they move away somewhere, to get away from Dallas and all the drama, and Bobby hands over ownership of Southfork to J.R.. Subsequently, seeing Pam back gives Cliff a change of heart, he gives up his feud with J.R., gives him his half of Ewing Oil and seeks out Afton and they reconcile to raise their daughter together. So J.R. returns to Southfork triumphant, he owns the ranch and the company, just like he always wanted. But then when he sits down at the head of the dinner table, with a big smile on his face, he slowly looks around at all the empty seats. And without saying a word, his smile fades as a a look of revelation and sadness washes over J.R.'s face (I can picture Larry pulling this off perfectly), as it finally hits him that all of this "power" he's been fighting for his whole life is ultimately meaningless if he's alone. He's Citizen Kane, all the money and power in the world, but no one to share it with. And the camera would just slowly pull back to show him in this big empty house and then fade to black. The End.
And that still leaves room for a "J.R. Returns" reunion movie 5 years later, with J.R. coming up with a plan to reunite the family and get everyone to move back to Southfork with him.
I have to say no. I'm rewatching the show now and the decline in quality is evident just in how binge worthy the episodes are in comparison to earlier seasons, that being said though, the later years do have their moments and aren't as terrible as I remember them being. Some characters were absolutely pointless in the later years (looking at you Clayton and Miss Ellie) but others are sort of enjoyable in a way that's different to why you liked characters in the first half of the series (I'm liking Cally and April a lot but in different ways to the way I liked Sue Ellen and Pam).
We got what we got, I think the problem is the writing got lazy. I don't know if Larry and Patrick had too much control over what their characters were like or whether there was something weird going in the background, but the sharpness of the psychology of the characters was dulled later on.
Yes, this is how I feel about the later seasons. I've said here before It's not that all, or even most, of the stories were bad, it's just that they were
badly executed. As I just meantioned in another thread, the whole Haleyville storyline itself was fine, what dropped it is the lack of resolution, that J.R. didn't seek revenge. But even the later marriage to Cally, not a bad idea. In real life plenty of rich older men end up marrying much younger women. The idea of J.R. having some long lost love who gave birth to his now-adult secret son is also fine, and the "secret heir" plot is a staple of soap operas, it's just that the actors cast to play Vanessa and James were wrong for the roles. And who didn't want to see Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden on screen together again? The idea of bringing her in as a vengeful ex of J.R.'s was also a potentially good one, they just ruined the story with a lack of logic. Likewise bringing in Erika Kane herself, Susan Lucci at the height of her popularity, was also a great move, just again hindered by a lackluster storyline.
On the topic of self contained episodes, I think I'd dislike it more if they'd done that. I didn't like the style of self contained episodes at the start of the series and the show really gains something special when it becomes an ongoing, developing plot.
I remember reading about the rumor at the time and not looking forward to it either. Dallas was after all a soap opera, it was no longer the "family drama" that was in the earliest seasons. Soap operas continue from one episode to the next.
