On April 2, 1978, television changed forever when a little show called Dallas made its debut. No one knew what to make of it, and expected it to just ride off into the sunset after 5 episodes. As we know it did not. In fact 3 years after it premiered, around 90 million people tuned in to find out Who Shot JR?
An event we still talk about until this day. What made the series so special? Charlene Tilton said on Good Morning America today, “Just the chemistry we have off camera really came through…It wasn’t fake, it was real.” Patrick Duffy said he used to leave for work early just so he could get there and play with his coworkers.
The show was also a trailblazer on taboo topics like breast cancer and mastectomies, coming out and alcoholism. Linda Gray says she still gets letters from people today that tell her they got help for their alcoholism because of her storyline from the primetime soap. Tilton shared this tidbit about the coming out storyline, back then they were not allowed to say gay, so they had to say homosexual.
As we know, 5 years ago we lost the heart and soul of the show and they revealed how Larry Hagman was nothing like his villainous character JR. His TV wife said that he used to hate that she would tell everyone how lovely he was. Why? Because the viewers were supposed to hate him, not love him like we do. Talking about loving, Grey also revealed that he was also a bad boy because he used to eat onions or peanut butter before their kissing scenes.
Back in 1985, Bobby Ewing was killed off of the show, only to return a year later. His death was explained as a dream and the viewers did not like it. So much so that Steve Kanaly says they lost about 10% of their audience because of it.
They ended their reunion interview with one very important question, are they up for another revival of the show? Yes, they are! In this day and age, what are the networks waiting for? There is obviously a desire for it because why else would be tuning in for Empire and Dynasty? We want to watch crazy rich families go crazy and no family can out-crazy the Ewings.
