COMMENTARY : Facing Up to Life Without ‘Dallas’

Free at last! One more episode tonight and Friday nights will be mine again!

They haven’t been, for a very long time. My wife, Linda, and I have been watching “Dallas” since the fall of 1978. Our son Brandon was 1 then. This fall, he’ll be entering high school.

You could say we’ve been addicted. The show hasn’t been good for, oh, at least three years, but we’ve watched religiously, nonetheless. It’s been a habit: The Ewings had become part of our lives and, as with relatives, we couldn’t abandon them simply because they’d run out of entertaining stories to tell us. We were in this to the end.

But, my, back when it was good, it was very, very good. Melodramatic and irrelevant, to be sure, but on a grand scale. Excess was “Dallas’ ” defining virtue. What hooked me in the first episode I saw was J.R.’s disbelief at the news that his niece Lucy had discovered that the mother who’d abandoned her had quietly returned to the Dallas area: Why, he’d told Valene long ago never to set foot inside Texas again!

That epitomized the show’s tenor. J.R. didn’t just run people out of town, he ran them out of the state. Here was someone worth watching: a scoundrel with style.

The themes of “Dallas” were time-honored staples of drama--good vs. evil, feuding between families, sons taking up their fathers’ battles, romance, sex, power, retribution and reconciliation--but they were played out bigger than life. J.R.’s wheeling and dealing knew no bounds: He tried to destroy his brothers’ marriages, his mother’s remarriage, his son’s marriage; he had his first wife committed to a sanitarium and hired a psychiatrist to advise his second wife to divorce him; he mortgaged his parent’s home without their knowledge, drove poor Cliff Barnes to attempt suicide, plotted to overthrow foreign governments, blackmailed public officials and committed adultery so often he could have been elected governor on his mistresses’ votes alone.

“Once you give up integrity,” he explained to one of his blackmail victims in 1984, “the rest is a piece of cake.”

That was the other defining quality about “Dallas”: It had a sense of humor. It turned on the histrionics when it needed to--the 1985 episode in which Bobby was killed was a classic tear-jerker--but there was always a comical aside, a sly observation or the running gag of Cliff’s pedestrian love affair with Chinese food that was the equivalent of a wink from the producers to remind everyone that this was all meant in fun.

And it was: It was a kick to watch stories play out over dozens of episodes, to wonder what dastardly deed J.R. would conjure up next, to speculate on how spring cliffhangers would be resolved come fall. It was a lark to fantasize about having that much money and to see what it could buy--the cars, the jewelry, the clothes (except in Miss Ellie’s case)--and what it could not: happiness, stability or separate homes. It was a laugh to see the hairdos of Pam and Sue Ellen change each season, even though the story was picking up on the same day it had left off. And there was perverse pleasure in savoring the disparate acting styles, which ranged from polished to amateurish, with an emphasis on the latter (intentionally, you have to believe, based on the consistency over the years). Can anyone who saw them ever forget the scenes between Christopher Atkins and Charlene Tilton during the 1983-84 season?

Alas, the enjoyment plummeted with the decision to bring Patrick Duffy back in 1986 by throwing out the previous season as Pam’s dream. Though it was nice to have Bobby back as J.R.’s foil, it was a breach of faith with loyal viewers from which “Dallas” never fully recovered. Of course, by that time the show was 8 years old, and the producers had gone beyond merely devising variations of old plots to bringing in new characters and bizarre stories that took the Ewings way beyond the natural boundaries of Ewing Oil and Southfork. It only got worse. By this season, they had J.R. and Bobby in separate story lines that went for months without intersecting, and in recent weeks we’ve seen J.R. lose his fiancee, his sons, his grandson, his secretary and his bourbon and branch, topped by his handing Ewing Oil to his lifelong nemesis Cliff. What show was this ?

Still, we watched, feeling frustrated and, sometimes, foolish. Oh, there was the occasional flash--when J.R. told his new daughter-in-law, Michelle, this season that he felt about her the way he had about his former sister-in-law, Pam, she took it as a compliment, but we knew what he really meant. But the fact that we were watching a daughter-in-law rather than Pam spoke volumes about how long “Dallas” had been at its Oil Barons’ Ball. Yet having invested so much time in watching, we were unwilling to be the ones to call it a night. We wished instead that someone would do us all a favor and announce the last dance.

Now someone has. This is it. What a relief.

But you know what? I can’t wait for the reunion.