In support of my latest piece at Time, here’re the notes I made for myself while looking up possible quotes/sources this past weekend. This is how my Time pieces start, with text files like this:
One of my earliest memories is of a news report about the “Who Shot JR” episode of Dallas (76% of all US televisions were tuned to that ep, the 1st of the third season) – Dallas was the television show at the time, but it had a bigger importance – It’s not clear whether the show was avatar of the ’80s or a product of the ’80s, but the two are inexplicably, eternally linked.
Jacobs:
“The pleasure of watching ”Dynasty” and ”Dallas” and ”Falcon Crest” was voyeuristic; the pleasure of watching ”Knots Landing” was vicarious. ”Dynasty” and ”Dallas” and ”Falcon Crest” were about Them. ”Knots Landing” is about us… I don’t think that ”Dallas” and ”Dynasty” would have had a prayer of succeeding in any other era, save perhaps the Harding or Coolidge Administrations.”
OPENING TITLES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCK8HB2Ouw
History of the show –
Created by David Jacobs as back-up show – He’d pitched Knots Landing first but CBS had wanted something else:
David Jacobs, creator:
“it wasn’t based on a true family, my first idea was Knots Landing and when I took it to CBS there were no shows of that kind on television and the response from CBS was that they wanted to get into a continuing drama and they said they wanted to start out with something a little richer, more of a saga. The first thing I thought of was Romeo and Juliet and the word saga suggested Texas.”
First season was 5 eps, not critically acclaimed but very popular. Earliest episodes are only vaguely recognizable as what the show became – JR was a background character while show revolved around Pam and Bobby, and show wasn’t serialized at first.
http://www.ultimatedallas.com/behind/behind9.htm
Camille Marchetta, writer/story editor:
“The writing staff was watching dailies one day and we heard Sue Ellen announce that she was pregnant. While you would think we might have realized the ramifications in advance, I can honestly say it was only then, when we heard her say it, that we realized it would be impossible to deal with that subject in a single episode, that it would take many to play it out.We spent the next few days mulling over this problem and as our discussions turned up more and more interesting story possibilities, we decided to present our case to the studio and the network for continuing in a serial format.It took some convincing, but we won.”
First prime-time serialized show since Peyton Place
Producer David Paulsen:
“The show really took off when it became serialised, when it became more of a soap opera. You know that there are certain questions out there like the Barnes/Ewing feud and so forth but details of it only come as the writers need and discover them. Suddenly you get an idea and the audience says, “Ah, now I know what that was all about!” Well it wasn’t about that until we thought it up, sometimes years later.”
JR was breakout star
WHO SHOT JR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhE1ev61Ofk
“Even as the phenomenon was occurring, I was hard put to explain what made the show, if not a symbol of the 80’s, at least a singular expression of it… J. R. Ewing’s appearance on the global TV screen coincided with the beginning of the Reagan Presidency, and J. R. was a man of his times. Like his 70’s counterpart, Archie Bunker, who gave voice to prejudices and attitudes that were no longer socially acceptable but still widely felt, J. R. proved unexpectedly appealing. His unapologetic commitment to self-interest, his unabashed belief in the corruptibility of others linked him to a generation that would soon be told that greed was O.K. and read on bumper stickers that Jesus wanted people to get rich.”
Show was astonishingly amoral (immoral?):
http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/shows/dallas
“For prime time in the late seventies, Dallas was sensational, featuring numerous acts of adultery by both J.R. and Sue Ellen, the revelation of Jock’s illegitimate son, Ray Krebs, who worked as a hired hand on Southfork, and the raunchy exploits of young Lucy, daughter of Gary, the third, largely absent, Ewing brother. It was the complicated stuff of daytime melodrama, done with big-budget glamour–high-fashion wardrobes, richly furnished home and office interiors, exteriors shot on location in the Dallas area.”
The show WASN’T about the wealth or the greed, say those who made it:
Producer David Paulson:
“DALLAS was about everything that happened around a dining room table… The core of the show is the dining room table. That’s where things happened. There was no real action on DALLAS. Virtually none.”
and
“Basically it was about interpersonal relationships. I found that generally speaking, if you took an audience of a hundred people and you asked what their favourite shows were, generally the males would fall toward DALLAS and the females toward KNOTS LANDING or DYNASTY. DYNASTY for a different reason of course. I mean so much of DYNASTY had to do with the table settings, the elegance of the gowns, the make up, which is why it did not last as long as the other two shows did.”
Jacobs again:
“”Dynasty” was a better expression of second Reagan Administration values than ”Dallas” because, while ”Dallas” was about the quest for money, ”Dynasty” was about the things that money could buy. In ”Dallas” money was a tool, a way of keeping score. In ”Dynasty” money was an end, the grail that was the goal of every quest.”
Hagman thinks it was nothing compared with what you can see today:
http://www.ultimatedallas.com/dallasinterviews/larryinterview.htm
Hagman in 2000:
“We were in bed all the time, not semi nude like you can do now in day time soap operas, it shocks me when I see what goes on there. At that time we couldn’t get away with anything like that.”
BOBBY IN THE SHOWER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMR5setaS7I
So was Dallas immoral or just immoral compared with what we were used to? Somewhere in between – The show’s melodramatic roots celebrated, glamorized and trivialized the wrong with the weird promise that, essentially, the rich ARE LIKE THAT AND CAN GET AWAY WITH IT, in the process appealing to our greed and worst instincts – For all its roots as morality play (Certaintly, its creators saw it as that), it was an uneven playing field because the most interesting, charismatic character was the bad guy – Let’s be honest, Bobby and all the other good guys were boring as shit.
Weirdly, the show’s creators on some level recognized this: Think about the crazy final episode, in which the Devil himself turned out to be interested in JR:
IT’S A HORRIBLE LIFE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0GmvctvEb0
14 years as metaphorical audition for Satan!
THE WEIRDEST ENDING TO A SHOW EVER.
And yet, think about it: Dallas may have ended up eclipsed by shows that were glitzier, tackier and more shameless than it was – A weird anachronism in the world it ended up creating – but it did better than most: Three completely classic TV moments in its entire run that lasted an amazing 14 years. Most shows could only dream of that kind of legacy.
ALso: With that in mind, YOU LET THE SHOW DIE PEACEFULLY. Let’s pretend the reunion movies never happened and it ended with JR killing himself
HYPE VIDEO FOR NEW SERIES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWMwMoVD7T8&feature=plcp
It’s all there, even though it’s not necessarily in the right place, or fully thought out just yet. Turning this into the finished piece takes a ridiculously long time, what with my tendency to massively overwrite, rewrite (Each piece has gone through at least two massive, pretty-much-starting-from-scratch rewrites, no matter how hard I try to get it right the first time) and then rework again after notes from the editor.