TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 118 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 72

Goodbye to Gaud Almighty


After 356 episodes and more dirty deals than even Larry Hagman
can count, J.R. and his Dallas clan go out in style

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Pity the rich and famous. Either the tabloid press makes
their lives an overexposed hell -- or, even worse, it doesn't.
Case in point, the Ewings of Dallas. Remember them? They first
caused a stir in the late '70s, when Ewing Oil, their
mom-and-pop-and-two-sons enterprise, became the largest
independent in Texas. Then in 1980 J.R. Ewing, the scheming
brains and black heart of the company, was nearly gunned to
death by his wife's sister. A few years later, the wife of
J.R.'s brother Bobby had a yearlong hallucination that Bobby was
dead -- 'til one morning he showed up in the shower. Eventually,
though, America wearied of the Ewings. When word got out that
they finally planned to retire, a lot of people wondered, "Are
they still around?"

    Dallas, Lorimar's Ewing-family saga, is still around. The
Who-Shot-J.R.? mania of 1980, when 300 million viewers in 57
countries waited breathlessly for the most successful
cliffhanger in entertainment history, has abated, but enough
people still watch the supersoap that its rating this season is
higher than, oh, thirtysomething's. On May 3, CBS will reunite
many of the early cast members in a two-hour fantasy finale that
leads J.R. through an It's a Wonderful Life-style tour of what
Dallas would have been like without him. And tens of millions
of viewers will gather to bid farewell to the most glamorously
backstabbing clan since the house of Atreus. They might also
pause to consider fondly what Dallas has meant to American pop
culture.

    In most ways, it was a conservative series, adhering to
the conventions of series drama. But even in Dallas' debut,
creator David Jacobs offered beguiling variations: a dozen
wealthy Texans living, fighting, snarling under one ranch-house
roof, a catalog of venality that included every vice but
coprophilia and a leading character (J.R.) with the morals of
a mink. In its second season, Dallas became a cliffhanger, and
viewers hung on. By the 1979-80 season, it was the sixth most
popular show on American TV, and for the next five years, it
finished either first or second.

    The public chose well. For here, in 356 episodes of primal
prime time, were the central conflicts of American life. Country
(the Ewing home at Southfork Ranch) fought with city (the Ewing
Oil building in downtown Dallas). Cowboys corralled oil
slickers. Sons (J.R. and Bobby) double-crossed each other for
their father's love. Daughters-in-law ached for the approval of
a family that would always eye them suspiciously. Add myriad
business rivals, mistresses, children and newly discovered
relatives, and the conflict could keep roiling in a never-ending
story, with cunning variations on the time-honored themes of
sex, money, power and family.

    There was a chastening moral here: that money was the root
of all Ewings. But, really, Dallas was what it criticized.
Endlessly fascinated with the lives of the rich and pretty, the
show looked rich and pretty too, like a Black Forest cake. With
sumptuous production values and characters who spent every
available petrodollar, Dallas elevated conspicuous consumption
to a secular religion: gaud almighty. It introduced viewers to
the Greedy '80s, by establishing as a pop icon a Texas oilman
who believed it's not what you get that matters, it's what you
can get away with. In that age of winks and nudges, Trumps and
Harts, the show understood that any indiscretion can be turned
into a career move, because America wants its celebrities to
live out their excesses as well as their successes. J.R. and his
breed got carte blanche to sin, as long as they did it in
public.

    But how long could they do it? Not forever. Intimations of
mortality started dogging the show around 1986, with Pam's dream
season. Dallasites took their soap seriously, and the plot twist
played like a declaration of facetiousness. After that, the show
became a kind of dinner-theater version of itself -- flaccid,
repetitious, drowsier than the Texas economy -- and receded
discreetly into the haze of Has-Been. Even the ebullient Hagman
had trouble keeping track of J.R.'s misdeeds: "I really can't
remember half of the people I've slept with, stabbed in the back
or driven to suicide." And why shouldn't the cast members be
happy to take the money and trudge? "I'm never gonna get another
job that pays this much," says Hagman, who serves as
co-executive producer with Dallas mastermind Leonard Katzman.
"Hell, I make as much as Jack Nicholson!"

    J.R. has made -- and lost -- as much as Midas and Michael
Milken put together. But finally J.R. has mellowed into a mood
of valedictory twilight. Like the show he anchored, the aging
Texan is again in fine form. He might have been speaking of
Dallas when, in a recent episode, he mourned, "The world I know
is disappearin' real fast." But it was left to his stalwart
brother to put the series in perspective. "J.R.," Bobby said,
"you and I have spent our entire lives tryin' to win Daddy's
approval by fightin' with one another. Neither one of us givin'
up until we were sure we were his favorite. Well, I've given up
the fight. You are Daddy's son. The oil business is all yours,
big brother. You've earned the right to Daddy's throne."

    In the royal family of American melodrama, Dallas is Daddy
on the throne.