TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80captv.1

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                                                                                August 11, 1980

COVER STORY

TV's Dallas:  Whodunit?


Sinning and winning, J.R.'s clan is now the first family of soap


As he lay crumpled on the floor of his office, with two bullets
in his stomach, his thoughts pinwheeled off into fantasies of
his real and idealized pasts. His first word had been "Mammon."
As a child he had torn the wings off flies and sold the
insects' bodies to science. In high school he had peddled exam
answers to his fellow students, then told his teacher that they
were cheating. In college he had impregnated an entire sorority
and used the offspring to stock a black-market adoption agency.

No wonder he proved such a success when his daddy brought him
into the family business:  skewering the town's most powerful
men out of millions while he was seducing their wives. All in
all, a cause for celebration. Then why, he wondered as he
started to slide from consciousness, was his last image that of
his sainted daddy shaking his head in grim disappointment?

Fade to black.

...Until Friday, Sept. 19, that is. On that night--God and the
striking Screen Actors Guild willing--the critically wounded
body of John Ross Ewing Jr. will be sped to Dallas Memorial
Hospital, and viewers will be given their first clues to a
solution of the mystery: Who shot J.R.?  Never in the history
of cliffhanging narrative have so many people waited and
speculated on the resolution of a plot twist. At last count,
300 million souls in 57 countries shared this benign obsession.
When the Ewing family saga begins its new season, the number
is sure to be swollen by millions more who will have succumbed
to the summerlong blitz of news features, promotions and gossip.
Competing networks are advised to broadcast test patterns.

Since its debut in April 1978, Dallas' Nielsen rating has
almost doubled, until it is now the top-rated dramatic show on
U.S. television. The March 21 Dallas, which ended with the
shooting of J.R., was the year's most watched series episode.
The show's huge, steady audience (40 million a week in the
U.S.) helped CBS vault back into its familiar position as the
top prime-time network after ABC's three-year interregnum.

Most hit shows live off habit; Dallas arouses demonstrative
loyalty. Millions of Dallas T shirts, bumper stickers and
buttons are festooning torsos, fenders and lapels. Half a dozen
"J.R." novelty records are heading for the charts. Society
matrons are planning Dallas costume parties for the night the
program returns. Politicians have climbed on the bandwagon too.
Jimmy Carter, at a Dallas fund raiser, confessed with a grin:
"I came to Dallas to find out confidentially who shot J.R. If
any of you could let me know that, I could finance the whole
campaign this fall."  Perhaps not: at the Republican Convention,
Reaganites distributed buttons that read A DEMOCRAT SHOT J.R.

Gradually and purposefully, like J.R. slithering toward a
voluptuous Texas belle, Dallas has ascended the international
ratings until it rivals The Muppet Show as the world's most
popular TV series. In Johannesburg, where Dallas is No. 1 in
the ratings, Cabinet ministers refuse speaking engagements on
Tuesday nights, knowing their constituency will be at home with
the Ewings. In Hong Kong, Dallas is a hit with both the local
population and the American businessmen stationed there;
expatriates who return briefly to the States have been know to
call their wives with news of episodes aired in the U.S. but not
yet shown in the crown colony. In Australia, Network 10 quickly
ran out of its supply of I HATE J.R. badges and when it
announced that it hoped to bring Larry Hagman--J.R. himself--to
the country, the switchboard was swamped with requests for his
private phone number. Citizens of such troubled Middle East
nations as Lebanon and Jordan find the show a welcome diversion,
a fantasy land where oil-rich Americans have fun making
themselves miserable. And in Turkey, the head of the Muslim
fundamentalist National Salvation Party presented a 16-page
ultimatum that included "the elimination of Dallas from
television programs" because it is "degrading and aims at
destroying Turkish family life."

The British are supposed to be above such nonsense. After all,
their prime-time soaps (such as The Forsyte Saga, Poldark and
Upstairs, Downstairs) are to the American brand what Yardley is
to Lifebuoy. But after a slow start, Dallas grew from a guilty
secret to a national craze. When the BBC broadcast last
season's final episode, normally congested road were clear and
pubs empty as 30 million Britons (more than half of the U.K.'s
population) stayed home to watch J.R. get his. On the news
program that night, the BBC replayed the shooting as a news
event, and a few days later offered a weekend for two in Dallas
to the person who supplied the wittiest explanation for the
crime. (This summer the network is also providing a crash
course in Ewingology:  a rerun of all 54 shows, one a night.)
British bookmakers seized on the golden opportunity. William
Hill's set odds on the assailant's identity. (The favorite, at
6-4:  Dusty Farlow, the "deceased" lover of J.R.'s wife.
Others:  J.R.'s mistress, 4-1; his banker, 4-1; his mother,
8-1.)  Hagman, vacationing in England, was offered what looked
like a sure thing: L100,000 if, as he stepped on the plane
taking him home, he would reveal the culprit. Hagman blurted
out the truth:  he did not know who shot J.R., nor did any
member of the cast.

It hardly matters. The Dallas phenomenon stems from something
more complex than an interest in whodunit. If J.R. Ewing had
not committed himself to a life of stylish wickedness--and if
the part did not fit Hagman like an iron whip in a velvet
glove--few viewers would care that he was near death or trouble
themselves to ponder the assailant's identity. If the scheming
scion of Ewing Oil were not surrounded by a nest of relatives,
all pursuing their venal and venereal desires through a plot
delirious in its complexity, he would be perceived as a cartoon
villain among prime time's standard retinue of sanctified simps.
If Dallas did not offer the rarest of series commodities --
narrative surprise and character change -- the attempt on J.R.'s
life would be no more than a gimmick, instead of the logical
climax to a season of devilish intrigue.

Dallas does well what American commercial television does best:
present the viewer with a family of characters so appealing in
their hopes, their failings, their resilience that they will be
invited back into the living room week after week. The Ewings
may be scoundrels and wastrels, but they are good company.
Socially they carry themselves with the ease of Middle American
nobility. Only at the end of each visit, with kisses and
thank-yous all around, do you notice that they have made off
with the silverware and your teen-age daughter.

In many TV series, characters behave the same way from first
episode to last; that is their appeal. Dallas is different.
It makes a pact with the viewer:  tune in every week and get a
jolt. Dallas offers adventure. In most series, characters
refine themselves ever so slightly as time goes by, like an
outdoor sculpture retouched by nature; the Ewings redefine
themselves almost every week. Missing one episode means not
only losing track of the plot, but finding that someone has
acquired new alliances and enemies. It's flourish or perish
with each week's trauma.

In short, punch scenes, Dallas tells viewers that the rich
really are different:  they sin more spectacularly and suffer
in style. The program's high-gloss handsomeness brings a touch
of class to the ruck of commercial series TV. The Ewing home
at Southfork Ranch, where eight members of one of Texas'
wealthiest families contrive to live under one roof, resembles
a formicary of Neiman-Marcus showrooms. Every taste and no taste
is represented here:  satin pillowcases, china dogs, replicas
of Steuben vases, gilt-framed imitations of Frederic Remington,
bedroom closets that look like mink cemeteries. The budget for
a typical Dallas episode approaches $700,000, one of the highest
in TV, but all the money is on the screen.

Beneath the glamorous settings and soap-opera situations -- and
inextricable from them -- is a solid, suggestive foundation of
conflicting themes and characters. David Jacobs, 40, who
created the show and wrote many of its early episodes, struck
a rich vein of dramatic possibilities with one basic opposition:
the Old West vs. the New West. Dallas expresses this
opposition in countless configurations:  cattle and oil, country
and city, the land and the machine, tradition and innovation,
family and business, the Ewing ranch in rural Braddock and the
Ewing Oil office building in downtown Dallas.

The opposition is not a simple matter of Good (noble
conservatism) vs. Evil (predatory pragmatism) because one factor
is dependent on the other. The Ewing Oil empire supports the
ranch home; the business keeps the family together. J.R. may
behave like a raffish amalgam of Machiavelli and the Marquis de
Sade, but if he is evil, he is a strong, necessary evil for the
weaker family members. His ruthless devotion to expanding the
Ewing empire almost justifies his weakness for the three Bs:
booze, bribes and broads. Oil work and no play would make J.R.
a dull boy -- and would have scuttled Dallas long ago.

If this makes the program sound like the subject for a doctorate
in contemporary mythology, so be it. But Jacobs refuses to fish
for a subtext. "Dallas makes no demands on the system," he
says. "It is not about capitalism, Big Oil, the rich and the
poor, abuse of power or any other social issues. The people are
driven by very big emotions and they're miserable."

True. No Dallas watcher is likely to make the connection
between a Ewing Oil business meeting and the current price of
a gallon of gas. Southfork is a ranch out of time, and the Ewing
Oil headquarters is a castle in the air--almost literally. The
stock shot of the office tower shows a fleecy cloud reflected
on the building's facade with the surreal clarity of a painting
by Magritte. Dallas realty; Dallas fantasy. The plot is a Rube
Goldberg machine of the seven deadly sins, but performed and
acted absolutely straight. This gives the viewer options. He
can live and die with the Ewings; he can see the show as a
satire of Neanderthal capitalism; or he can appreciate Dallas
as the most adroitly plotted multigenerational saga since the
Corleones moved into the olive oil business.

In 1977 Dallas was only a wicked gleam in David Jacobs' eye.
Jacobs, a balding, cherubic man who was then story editor of
ABC's Family, had the idea for an hourlong series, "a sort of
American Scenes from a Marriage."  Richard Burger, then head of
dramatic development at CBS, suggested that Jacobs "try
something rich and Southwestern instead of middle-class and
Californian."  Recalls Jacobs:  "I went home and wrote a letter
to myself about this terribly good-looking, semitrashy lady who
marries into a rich Texas family."  Jacobs envisioned this
character, Pamela Barnes Ewing, taking on heroic proportions,
shaking off her shady past and winning the respect of the
family.

But the Ewings, even in embryo, had already begun to dominate
the lives of those around them. Says Jacobs:  "Then I had to
write a family. Before I had even got to the script, we had
complicated things too much. We had created a ranch hand who
had brought her out to the barbecue where she met Bobby [her
future husband]. We had decided that the family's father was
once partner with her father. And so on. There were just too
many people in it to concentrate solely on her."

Dallas was not conceived as a serial, for reasons that are
largely economic. TV production companies make little or no
money from the network run of their programs; the profits come
later, when the shows are syndicated to local stations. (Last
year one New York station paid an estimated $56,000 for each
episode of Three's Company.)  In the off-prime-time hours when
syndicated shows are aired, the viewing patterns are too random
for commitment to a daily dose of fast-paced story. The failure
in syndication of Peyton Place underlined the difficulties in
making money from prime-time serials. So Lee Rich, president
of Lorimar Productions, the company that produces Dallas, is
careful to cal the show a "semiserial" and to ensure that each
episode features one self-contained story.

Even at the beginning, however, Jacobs' family plot was too
intricate to be compresses into detachable episodes. The
partnership between two wildcatting oilmen -- Jock Ewing (Jim
Davis) and Digger Barnes (David Wayne, and later Keenan
Wynn) -- had dissolved when Jock ended up with the lion's share
of the profits from their wells and wooed away Digger's true
love, Ellie Southworth (Barbara Bel Geddes). Forty years later
Ewing Oil had grown into an empire, and Jock and Ellie had
produced three sons:  J.R., who took his father's place as
company president and married a former Miss Texas, Sue Ellen
Shepard (Linda Gray); Gary (David Ackroyd), who bolted the Ewing
spread, leaving behind his horny teen-age daughter Lucy
(Charlene Tilton); and Bobby (Patrick Duffy), who has wed
Barnes's daughter Pamela (Victoria Principal). Pamela's
loyalties are tested by the continuing family feud, carried on
now by J.R. and Pamela's half-brother Cliff (Ken Kercheval), who
has vowed to dispatch the Ewing empire with extreme prejudice.

These plot permutations have a biblical resonance:  Cain and
Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Noah and his sons, Sodom and Gomorrah.
No wonder then that Dallas, like most soap operas has a
"bible," a synopsis of each character and his or her development
through a year's worth of episodes. The Dallas bible is
assembled each spring by Executive Producer Philip Capice,
Producer Leonard Katzman, Executive Story Editor Arthur Bernard
Lewis and Story Editors Camille Marchetta and Rena Down. (After
the first five shows, Jacobs left and now supervises the Dallas
spin-off, Knots Landing.)  "We spend six weeks or so doing a
long-range seasonal bible," Capice explains. "Then we break
that down episode by episode. We spend hours going over each
script in all its variations. You must develop a story line so
that when the main story peaks, another variation takes over.
And there is usually an interrelationship between the main
story and the variations."

Holding the power of life or death, love and guilt over three
dozen characters has its pleasure; it is also a grind. Says
Katzman:  "We have this wonderful group of people whose lives
can go anywhere. But when you have all the story lines to plot
out, it is very depressing. You may plot the season and then
look at a character and say, 'Wait, he has nothing to do in
Episode 10.'  And at some point all the story lines have to come
together."

Often enough, the story lines come together in an apt, compact
resolution to a wondrously complex plot. Toward the end of the
past season, for example, the twine of stories looked hopelessly
snarled. Cliff Barnes, now taking his revenge as an assistant
district attorney, had Jock indicted for the murder, 28 years
earlier, of Southfork Ranch Hand Hutch McKinney. But voila!
Digger Barnes, on his deathbed, confessed to Miss Ellie that he
had shot Hutch for planning to run off with Digger's wife
Rebecca, who was carrying Hutch's child--Pamela!

A series like Dallas demands a certain kind of actor. It needs
an ensemble of performers; the story is the star. Only team
players need apply. Luckily, the actors wear their roles like
alter egos. Jim Davis, 63, a veteran of hundreds of westerns,
drawls modestly, "I'm Jock Ewing without the money."  (He may
be a bit too modest: each principal actor reportedly earns more
than $250,000 a year from the show.)  Ken Kercheval, 45, whose
Cliff Barnes is obsessed with ruining J.R., says of the murder
attempt, "Actually, I hope it is me. I'd be an instant hero
around the country."  Victoria Principal, 30, had to adapt to
the shifting of focus from Pamela to J.R., and she seems well
adjusted. She calls Pamela "a little Statue of Liberty. When
you have utter evil on one side, you can't have mediocre good
on the other."  Principal, who is herself statuesque enough to
have posed for a rearmed Venus de Milo, has been criticized by
discriminating voyeurs for changing Pamela from a sexpot to a
Gucci Two-Shoes; she replies, "I didn't want to upstage my own
performance."  Charlene Tilton, 20, plays Lucy, the Ewing niece,
as if she were really the love child of Mae West. The British
press has a nickname for this tiny terror of Southfork;  "the
Poison Dwarf." When asked her response to those who call Dallas
classy trash, she laughs with wide, wicked eyes:  "Honey, the
can call it whatever they want!  We're No. 1!"

The Dallas cast works well together: everyone knows his lines,
enjoys his work, respects his fellow actors. Irving J. Moore,
who has directed 17 episodes of Dallas, says, "You can get a lot
more done on a loose set than you can on a tight one," and the
Dallas set is as loose as J.R.'s moral code. Hagman and Patrick
Duffy serve as chief pranksters. Hagman will often go
cross-eyed in closeups, and has been known to come to work
wearing a fire hat with a revolving red light. Duffy's
character, Bobby Ewing, functions primarily as a Boy Scout
manual with muscles, picking up after everyone else's mess. One
day, the script called for him to discover the pregnant,
drunken Sue Ellen passed out in her station wagon on the side
of a road. He was to pick her up and carry her to his car. But
on the set, Duffy stood over Linda Gray and shouted, "This is
a job for Superman!"  He ripped off his clothes to reveal a full
Superman costume. He lifted Gray and raised one arm to the sky
as if to fly. Three times he tried to get off the ground, then
shrugged and said quietly, "Aw hell, we'll walk."

In the beginning, Sue Ellen was a non-character. As Gray, 36,
tells it. "I was lovingly referred to by Lenny Katzman as 'the
brunet on the couch.'  I could have been J.R.'s masseuse, I
decided that any woman stupid enough to marry J.R. had to have
a lot of things wrong with her. I have always acted with my
eyes, so when it came time for closeups of each family member,
I thought, 'I'm going to give them a look to kill.'  Venom came
out. When they saw the closeups, a phone call came, saying, 'Do
something with that part.'"

Sue Ellen festered into a major femme maudite, an alcoholic
adulteress who both loves and hates her baby. Gray blossomed
in the role, bring it passion, grandeur and a touch of raunch.
Through her soft, melodious voice, her carriage and her steely
blue eyes, she suggested Sue Ellen's lifetime of good breeding
and rude awakening, the lady whom J.R. forced to become a tramp.
Says Gray:  "I love the great broads of the world. I love
Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. I love crying and letting the
mascara run. I keep saying to the scriptwriters, 'Whatever you
do, don't make her nice!'  I've read the first four scripts of
the next season, and I'm thrilled. The conflict continues."

At the hub of virtually every conflict in Dallas is that human
oil slick, J.R.:  seducer of sisters-in-law, bankrupter of bank
executives, agent of miscarriages, avenging devil of
politicians, mortgager of his parents' home, suavely sadistic
husband -- and secretly loving father. (When J.R., after 17
episodes of malign neglect, finally embraced his infant son,
viewers responded with nearly 10,000 letters -- half saying
"Thank God!," the other half saying "Don't ruin it by reforming
him.")  Hagman developed a touch for light comedy on TV in the
'60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. He plays the villainy sotto voce
and the humor -- the infectious delight J.R. brings to the
business of malevolent oneupmanship -- fortissimo. He struts,
whinnies, talks out loud to himself; he has a grand time being
bad. His soft, smooth, surprisingly characterless face expresses
J.R.'s childishness; but those huge eyes testify to ages of
suffering given and received. He is the man we love to hate.
J.R. and Hagman deserve the country's gratitude for lighting up
Friday nights with that barracuda smile.

J.R.'s shooting was a contract job. Dallas' second full season
was to have ended with revelation of Pamela's true father, but
CBS requested two more episodes. Leonard Katzman recalls:  "We
were sitting around, and Phil Capice says, 'Let's have J.R. get
his.'  We didn't know who shot him. We said the hell with it,
let's shoot him and figure out who did it later. Then we
started eliminating and eliminating until we found the person
we wanted."

An early scenario was this:  Sue Ellen decides to kill herself
by dissolving sleeping pills in a glass of water. As she heads
to the baby's room to say goodbye to her son, J.R. comes in
drunk and gulps down the water. Sue Ellen sees this but does
not stop him. She just goes in and rocks the baby. "It was
interesting, but it wasn't as stylish as establishing five or
six suspects," says Capice. "It didn't afford us an opportunity
to bring four of five story lines together. The shooting was
a way to tie up plot threads. We established a motive in each
of the plot lines."

In last season's final episode, six characters voiced threats
against J.R.:  Sue Ellen, whom J.R. was about to commit to a
sanitarium; Kristin Shepard (Mary Crosby), Sue Ellen's vixen
sister, who had bedded and then blackmailed J.R. only to be
charged with prostitution; Alan Beam (Randolph Powell), an
unscrupulous lawyer whom J.R. used and then threatened with a
bogus rape indictment; Vaughn Leland (Dennis Patrick), J.R.,'s
banker, who was ruined when he bought into a Ewing double-deal;
Bobby Ewing, whom J.R.'s dastardly business ethics finally drove
from Southfork; and Cliff Barnes, who swore on his daddy's grave
that he would avenge the family honor and "stop J.R. for good."

The plotting here is elegant. The motives all touch on Dallas'
pervasive themes:  sex (Sue Ellen and Kristin), money (Alan Beam
and Vaughn Leland) and family (Bobby and Cliff). For the
mystery's solution to be equally impeccable, the culprit must
come from inside the family. This would permit many of the new
episodes to revolve around the altered relationships of the
assailant and the other Ewings, especially J.R., who could be
expected to devise an ingenious form of revenge. But Capice
suggests otherwise:  "The ripple effect from the revelation will
be minimal. We'll move on to other things quite quickly."

Even this could be one more false trail. Capice is not likely
to reveal the most tantalizing secret since the identity of Deep
Throat. Neither are the approximately 15 others in the know:
Dallas' producers and story editors, the major writers and
directors, the show's chief publicists and a few Lorimar and CBS
executives. All principals swear they have not even told their
spouses. The actors will not know until the crucial scene is
shot--a date propitiously delayed by the Screen Actors Guild
strike. The first two shows will be littered with red herrings,
but only one version of the "revelation" will be shot.

Throughout the summer, momentum has been building for an answer
to the mystery. Nowhere was the Mo bigger than in Dallas
itself, where the cast and crew shot location footage before the
Screen Actors Guild strike shut down the set. (If the strike
lasts much longer, the Dallas season premier may be postponed;
Lorimar has filmed pieces of a dozen episodes, but not all of
any one.)  For six weeks, thousands of Dallas addicts turned the
actual Southfork Ranch into a Texas tourist attraction second
only to the Alamo. The neighbors threatened to sue, but
Southfork Owner Joe Rand Duncan, a wealthy land developer, was
delighted with the publicity:  he plans to sell clumps of the
hallowed turf for $15 to $25 per sq. ft.

Of the events of the coming season, this much is known (readers
who wish to defer these surprises until they are revealed
on-screen are advised to proceed directly to the next
paragraph):  the Ewing family is intact. Both Sue Ellen and
Cliff will be arrested and released. While J.R. recuperates,
Bobby will assume the presidency of Ewing Oil and become
obsessed with power, thus putting a severe strain on his
marriage. Pamela will find her mother, a mysterious rich lady,
and Ray Krebbs (Steve Kanaly), the Southfork Ranch foreman, will
find his father. Cliff will establish a new political power
base from which to harass the Ewings. Lucy will get married.
As for the hundred other plot contortions the Ewings will
endure, no one who knows is telling. All in good time, Dallas
fans will learn the answers to the eternal child's question:
Daddy, what happens next?

It is a question that seems burned into the genetic code of the
race. It has goaded authors from Homer to Shakespeare to Dickens
to Margaret Mitchell to spin out cliffhangers about powerful,
tragic families. Who could blame 40 million Americans for
taking their pleasures with TV's best and baddest?  Come Friday
nights this fall, the country will become one huge eavesdropping
family, as the denizens of Dallas provide 25 more gilded,
high-gloss mirror images of domestic America. For if the show's
spectacular success proves anything, it is that when the
chemistry is right, oil and soap do mix.

He lay on a stretcher in the ambulance heading toward Dallas
Memorial, his mind struggling back to consciousness. They
could shoot down ole J.R., but they couldn't keep him down.
Already his ambition leaped to newer, more dizzying heights.
The country needed a strong leader--why not a nearly martyred
oil tycoon?  As President, he'd send Bobby to beat some sense
into that Ayatullah fella. Spread some Bs around the Kremlin;
no way those old Russkies could resist the sight of Pam in a
bathing suit. Inflation, recession, civil unrest?  No problem
at all in a Ewing dictatorship--at least not for Miss Ellie's
oldest boy.

As he slid again toward oblivion, a flash of pain jolted his
memory back to the Ewing office and eerily illuminated that
figure moving toward him in the darkness, eyes and gun blazing
bright with vengeance. Of course!  It was so obvious. Who else
could it have been but...

Fade to black.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by James Willwerth/Los Angeles

*The winner, from 10,000 entrants:  Leonora Gallantry, a widow
from Crew, Cheshire. In her scenario J.R. planned the whole
thing to escape his personal and financial problems. On his
"deathbed" he signed a paper committing his wife to a
sanitarium.