They’ve learned nothing. It’s the 21st century, filmed in rich “Friday Night Lights” hues of dappled sunbeams, and Bobby Ewing still leads with his heart, gullible as ever. Sue Ellen Ewing, the ex-wife triumphant, never stopped looking for the ladder’s next rung, campaigning now to become Texas’ next governor. That snake J.R. Ewing — played by Larry Hagman, who has had seemingly every major organ transplanted and yet remains immortally and devilishly present — sits catatonic in a nursing home, secretly alert to every detail, coyly mounting one last scheme to regain control over the chimerical Southfork Ranch.
The question is, do you even want to go back to “Dallas?”
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
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I wasn’t entirely sure that I did, seeing as how Dallas (with or without quotation marks) is often an alternately dazzling and depressing proposition. The previews for TNT’s “Dallas” reboot (premiering Wednesday night) looked terrible at first, as appealing as an endless layover in DFW, but I lost my will to resist and let myself be seduced once more by the show’s soapy, steamy charms. After eight addictive episodes, I’m here to report that this new “Dallas” is a satisfying roll in the sentimental hay.
As a boy, I loved the show and the town, but the “Dallas” years took a memorable toll. America fell hard for the Ewings when they reigned on CBS every Friday night in the late 1970s and early ’80s; at the time, it seemed that no one fell harder for the show’s morally shallow mythology than those of us in and around Texas. You didn’t even have to watch “Dallas” to understand. It was just in the air.
The children in my world were raised in the psychic television space between Southfork and the “Knots Landing” cul-de-sac. The Ewing saga was the fictional epitome of an actual oil boom that put money — however briefly, even just peripherally — in the pockets of all our daddies, who started wearing Stetsons and bolo ties unironically and flirted hard with secretaries, stewardesses, cocktail waitresses. There was this sudden mutual need to be on the next Southwest flight to Love Field, to Houston Hobby, to Midland/Odessa, to Tulsa. Everyone’s dad had to see a guy about a deal. The disco radio stations all converted to urban cowboy hits; the Hustle became the two-step; there was a mechanical bull at the church bazaar. The parents all got divorced, one family after another, which is to say that the distance between “Who Shot J.R.?” and the decision to halt the digging of the new swimming pool seemed very short indeed. Then our local banks started to go under. Then it was all over. Pam Ewing was dreaming all along.
But “Dallas” went on and on, beyond even the Reagan years. It lasted until 1991, when surely the only people left watching it were hard-core fans, or the last of the Soviets, or space aliens with excellent antennae. A few years back, Hollywood thought about bringing “Dallas” to the big screen as one of those awful adaptations of old TV reruns. That project somehow drifted back to television development and so here we are.
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