"A family ruthless in its quest for power and passion."
October 16, 2018 5:24 PM   Subscribe

 
Who shot J.R.?
posted by Fizz at 6:36 PM on October 16, 2018


Obligatory
posted by Artw at 6:41 PM on October 16, 2018


This came at the height of my peak I'm-above-prime-time TV years ( what was I into? Space: 1999 paperbacks?) and I had a fine time looking down on anyone who cared about it. That's all well and good, but there was collateral damage, like I never watched Quincy.
posted by thelonius at 6:58 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Smart writers wrote themselves into a corner, killing off Bobby one season, didn't work, actor rehired, opening scene next year: previous season just a dream. Dynasty was better (mud cat fights!)
posted by sammyo at 7:29 PM on October 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Does Genie have a navel?
posted by Brocktoon at 7:56 PM on October 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


there was collateral damage, like I never watched Quincy.

Quincy was mostly Jack Klugman yelling TBH.
posted by hippybear at 7:58 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


There’s the title sequence with the sheet, that’s pretty good. Family fan-theory as always that he was putting on a little puppet show with organs under there.
posted by Artw at 8:05 PM on October 16, 2018


I am unable to picture watching Dallas on anything but an 1982 Magnavox console tv
posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:07 PM on October 16, 2018 [10 favorites]


Who shot J.R.?

Ohhh. My bad. Tag added!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:10 PM on October 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


This came at the height of my peak I'm-above-prime-time TV years

Funny, for me it came at the height of my needing-to-fit-in-with-my-peers years, around age 11. My family was strictly Poldark and Poirot, and I remember coming in to school and not knowing what or why this J.R. thing was so important and everyone laughed at me.
posted by Melismata at 8:30 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Fizz: "Who shot J.R.?"

I have a clear memory of Phil Donahue asking this question on his show.

Dallas was a Friday night staple for my mom.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:38 PM on October 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I got brought up on Dallas and Dynasty and I am here for this. I got nicknamed after a character I had no resemblance to but it amused me anyway.

I dunno if I'd feel the same if/when anyone tries this now, but I hated the post-Bobby season and was so delighted to have him back at the time.

"Mad Monk of Malibu?!" Tell me more plz. AND THEN THEY DO. I miss Larry Hagman so much.

“You know, I’m not worried about dying. I’ve taken so many magic mushrooms, I know what’s on the other side.”
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:48 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


We watched it on a color TV too, but the sound was broken so we listened to it on the black & white.
posted by Brocktoon at 9:47 PM on October 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


OMG Brocktoon, I knew one family in my neighborhood that did this! You weren't my neighbor, I'm sure, but it wasn't an uncommon thing. (Also, remember radios that could get TV band audio? I knew one household that was using that for TV sound.)
posted by hippybear at 9:58 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


(Also, you kidsters may not know this, but radio transmissions arrive to all available receivers at once. Streams get out of synch because they are packets, not em waves.)
posted by hippybear at 10:00 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Back in 1978, it was rare for a show’s stories to bleed from one episode to the next, for each season to end with a cliff-hanger, and for scripts to foreground a morally compromised protagonist. In 2018 that’s a standard blueprint for prestige television

It is easy to forget that the TV audience was expected to have pretty much no ability to recall plot between shows (or let alone seasons) before Dallas. I also like the detail that the show's creator only had experience of Texas from having driven through it on a childhood camping trip - and only chose the title because he knew that was where Kennedy had been shot. Should the writers bother to go and actually check out what Dallas was like before finalising the show concept? Nah - no need; they'd get to visit in due course.
posted by rongorongo at 10:41 PM on October 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


...And I love that the correct title of the the show was, of course "Houston" - you know - the place where the oil comes from.
posted by rongorongo at 10:54 PM on October 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I was unreasonably proud of myself for having figured out who shot J.R. a few hours before the answer aired. Always liked the theme song, too.
posted by bryon at 11:12 PM on October 16, 2018


I have nothing against reminiscing about popular media of the past in a general way, but, man, I wish they'd stop trying to make these things so much more important than they were/are. Changed Texas forever? Please. And the tendency towards hyperbole in the quotes chosen is also maddening.

Matt Zoller Seitz: It’s very difficult to imagine that the guy who was on I Dream of Jeannie could’ve been capable of this. It’s really an astounding transformation.

I mean, c'mon, Hagman was a fine JR, but not much less a cartoon than he was as Major Nelson. These weren't deep psychological investigations or complexly written character studies they were working with. This kind of "transformation" is pretty much what actors are paid to do. There should be nothing really surprising about it at all for someone like Seitz who writes about movies for a living.

Less exaggeration in these kinds of trendy oral history pieces would be nice and maybe serve to provide a more balanced accounting of the past rather than just hyping what and how people want to remember their younger pleasures.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:39 PM on October 16, 2018 [8 favorites]


"It is easy to forget that the TV audience was expected to have pretty much no ability to recall plot between shows (or let alone seasons) before Dallas."

It's easy to forget that millions of people watched soap operas during the day in that era. Kids, stay-at-home parents, shut-ins, seniors. This audience existed, it just hadn't been valued.
posted by goofyfoot at 12:08 AM on October 17, 2018 [22 favorites]


It's easy to forget that millions of people watched soap operas during the day in that era

Yes, Dallas started the same year General Hospital's "Luke and Laura" became a huge thing on daytime TV. The amount of coverage that relationship got was enormous and some kids even took days off school to make sure they wouldn't miss the biggest events in the show.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:16 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


My parents (who did not own a television at the time) would drive to my grandparents (who did) solely to watch Dallas.
posted by PenDevil at 2:09 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Dallas did not invent story arcs on TV, nor create an audience for it. Roots had a 50% Nielson rating.
posted by Brocktoon at 2:24 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Funny, for me it came at the height of my needing-to-fit-in-with-my-peers years, around age 11.

I had given up by then, I think
posted by thelonius at 2:59 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


This kind of "transformation" is pretty much what actors are paid to do.

Really. It's fantastic that Captain America was Johnny Storm in a previous life.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:42 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I was going for a bicycle ride through suburban Budapest when I glanced, past the trees and modest family homes, a neon decked truck stop in the middle of the neighborhood. I turned towards it, driven by curiousity and homesickness, and discovered that it was, in fact, a huge Dallas themed restaurant with full service gas station, convenience store, garage and weathered cardboard cutouts of the Ewing clan.

If you’ve ever been to Budapest, you’ll understand how this is even weirder than it sounds.
posted by Skwirl at 4:52 AM on October 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


Chrystostom: I have a clear memory of Phil Donahue asking this question on his show.

Between that and the show with the cast of Twin Peaks, I think Phil Donahue aired these shows just to have his favorite shows explained to him.
posted by dr_dank at 5:08 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Dallas basically was good for me because it helped me realize the pattern abudlsive men adhere to. This may have saved my life and my kids lives. Everyone I knew where I lived at the time ( El Paso TX and Albuquerque NM) watched, even the pot smoking hippies if they had TV.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 6:48 AM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Fizz: "Who shot J.R.?"

I have a clear memory of Phil Donahue asking this question on his show.


That question was all over the playground that year. I didn't know the story -- I wasn't allowed to watch the show* -- but I was certainly aware of it as a Huge Cultural Phenomenon. Fast forward to the following year, I was visiting relatives in Holland, I was in some department store, and they were having a big "Who shot J.R." promotion. It was instantly clear that a) this was even more of a Huge Cultural Phenomenon than I thought it was, and b) they were way behind and our teevee scene was vastly superior.

*My parents didn't allow us kids to watch American night soaps or anything which might have violence, but intense European movies like Das Boot and Fanny and Alexander? Sit in front of the tube as long as you like, kid.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:50 AM on October 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


The first time I ever heard my mother use profanity in front of me was when Dallas's Season 12 Finale was preempted by CBS's coverage of the Chinese government trying to censor Dan Rather's on-scene reporting of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. She knew that she'd have to wait through the full run of that season's re-runs to find out how the episode ended.
posted by radwolf76 at 7:04 AM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Friday nights meant Dallas and The Tommy Hunter Show at my grandparents.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:36 AM on October 17, 2018


> We watched it on a color TV too, but the sound was broken so we listened to it on the black & white

I watched it with Danish subtitles. It's probably where I learned how to say "bastard" in Danish. (It might have been Swedish, we got both.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:52 AM on October 17, 2018


First, as a Texan, let me tell you that Texas Monthly is awful.

Second, I have clear memories of my uncle saving then-novel videotapes of Dallas to send to his (well, our; his first, my first once removed) cousin, who'd moved to France, so she could watch.
posted by uberchet at 10:32 AM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


My parents didn't allow us kids to watch American night soaps or anything which might have violence, but intense European movies like Das Boot and Fanny and Alexander? Sit in front of the tube as long as you like, kid.

Contemporary directors like Fassbinder, Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, and Guillermo del Toro have all acknowledged the influence that Douglas Sirk had on them. And Sirk's movies are interesting in the context of Dallas partly because, like Dallas, his commercially successful melodramas were panned as women's entertainment, but also because a movie like Sirk's Written on the Wind practically is Dallas twenty years before its time. I mean, Written on the Wind was advertised as
"The story of a decent love ... that fought to live against the vice and immorality of an oil baron's wastrel family ... and of the ugly secret that thrust their privates lives into public view!"
And look at the trailer! Like Dallas and Dynasty everything in Written on the Wind is cranked up to 11—the colors, the passions, the artificiality of the sets, the pop-Freudianism (there's model oil derrick which sits on the patriarch's desk in WOTW which more than once acts as a visual double entendre).

Probably Dallas was the first "adult" show that I ever got into, tho I think I only really watched it religiously for a season or two.

(Years later when I was in college, I once met an Australian woman who told me that she expected everything to look like Dallas when she arrived in the States. I was like "Well I think everything in Australia looks like Crocodile Dundee.")
posted by octobersurprise at 10:48 AM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


My old coworker grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria and was somehow exposed to enough of both Dallas and Dynasty (though she often mixed up the titles) that on her one ever trip to Texas, she made a point to visit Southfork Ranch and was somewhat disappointed to find that not everyone in Dallas walked around all day wearing cowboy hats.
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:33 AM on October 17, 2018


My grandma was obsessed with this show when I was very small, and I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted on Friday nights because I inevitably fell asleep on the ugly corduroy floor pillows during grandma's stories and she'd usually just let me doze until the Tonight Show came on so that she didn't have to explain too much to me about the things wealthy adults do. However, because I was usually dozing about two feet away from the TV, my sleep was fractured and punctuated by Texan tantrums and interstitial music. So imagine the Pavlovian response I have to hearing the Dallas theme song as an adult.

Bobby in the shower was my first true exposure to the fuckery of television. Grandma had a lot of explaining to do that night.
posted by palomar at 6:31 PM on October 17, 2018


...and it just dawned on me that Dallas may be the root of my lifelong interest in Texas history and culture. That's so fucking weird.
posted by palomar at 6:34 PM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Shit. I just realized that Dallas ran until 1991. I would’ve guessed that it ended sometime in the mid-‘80s. Given, that I went from being a child to a (more or less) adult during that period, my mind is blown.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:32 PM on October 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


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