Did You Stop Watching?

After mummy Pam vanished.......

 

I watched until the end, but I must admit the last two seasons were hard to watch. I actually liked season 12 even though the storylines (J.R in Haleyville, etc) were a bit silly, it was still an enjoyable show at times. When Barbara Bel Geddes left it was the biggest disappointment for me, the family feel of the show got lost.

 

It turns into the JR & Bobby show & not in a good way, that's all I'm gonna say.

 

The new characters they bring in are absolutely woeful.

Swami

 

I thought the beginning of the dream season was very good. It crashed when Pam left Ewing Oil and the focus was on Angelica and her hat pins. They might as well have had Beatrice Lillie in the role. Now there's a lady who knows how to wield a hat pin!

 

Angelica Nero and her goons were just like something out of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Swami

 

I wouldn't even say it turned into a JR & Bobby show - it turned into a Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy hour. There's a difference.

 

As I said above, I watched until the end. I also watched the two reunion movies in the '90s, and the TNT nuDALLAS of 2012-2014.

Although I wish most of what happened post-Bobby's shooting never happened... I was convinced back then, during the best two year period the series ever had (1982 to 1984) when DALLAS felt almost biblical, that DALLAS -- of all shows -- couldn't and wouldn't deteriorate the way it actually did.

In fact, DALLAS became almost the ultimate example of TV series deterioration, unfortunately.

But once a Lorimar executive decided in 1984 that Miss Ellie's faces were interchangeable, the Emmy winning-matriarch of the biggest drama series in global television history, then nothing was ever the same, nor could it be. It told us a virus existed somewhere behind the camera. It cast a depressive pall over the otherwise competent 1984-1985 season even before Duffy had made the decision to kill off Bobby and leave the series, as if something great had just been ruined, permanently and unnecessarily.

And that's where the show ended, at least its clarity and momentum: the arrival of a new matriarch which could not work.

From that point on, nothing was ever quite right again on DALLAS, and the fiasco just led to all the subsequent fiascos: the dream explanation, Pam's accident and her retroactive ignoring by the family, the campy wink-at-the-camera tone of the closing seasons, the forced and contrived plots for the reunion movies, the 2012 continuation series which pushed the Ewings aside so the maid's family and the new wife's ex's family could dominate.

Susan Howard once referred to it as "abuse of the audience." And after you kidnap Mama and change her face, and expect the audience to accept it (when you should have known to begin with that they couldn't) no further glaring error is unthinkable or impossible. As a result, abject absurdities became an annual event.

So the year between Bobby's shooting and his death became the series' metaphoric death, a Lance Rubin dirge that accompanies a funeral procession leading up to the burial. The muddled-but-fashionable dream season became, indeed, just a stagnant dream, one that tapped into the pointless, soapy zeitgeist of the mid-'80s. And then the season of Wes Parmalee became a blurry, majestically ghostly expression of DALLAS' ambivalent, mythological history: What's Real and Who's Who at the Oil Baron's Ball or anywhere else...

It's a banshee manifestation, the 1986-87 year. A séance at Southfork.

And it's the last period I can sit through. Everything after that feels like rolling a corpse down a street with a stick.

 

That pretty much sums up exactly how I felt and how I still feel and Susan's quote is absolutely correct in my opinion.

 

No, I didn't stop watching. But the Australian network dropped it from prime time shortly after Sue Ellen left and James turned up. They finally brought it back in a late night slot. I still watched but it was a slog getting through those last two seasons.

 

Howard wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and a woman speaking her mind on the Dallas set was frowned on (which is why VP got into trouble a lot). Every syllable Howard said was correct.

 

My memory of the TNT Dallas got wiped by the Time Lords!

So I honestly don't know why I bought season three of it!

David to Liberator. Teleport please!!

 

The characters of J.R. and Sue Ellen were just horrific in Sue Ellen’s final years. This was their only dialog:

Sue Ellen: “Where’s John Ross?!”

JR: “Where you’ll never get him!”

Sue Ellen: “You bastard!”

 

This was actually the same for me - I was born when a popular book title hit, so I only really remember the last few seasons originally.

In hindsight, they're crap. But I can still feel some weird fondness to those last crappy seasons.

 

While I kept watching here and there I agree 100%. I remember being up set with casting Donna Reed - just wishing they’d let Miss Ellie be off traveling the world. But by the time of the dream I felt betrayed. It was the only show I just couldn’t miss up until then. I saw Knots Landing when I could - school night and Falcon Crest when I could and watched Dynasty with my grandmother here and there but Dallas was every Friday come hell or high water until that point. I did actually think the finally was fitting. The movies were so so, more for old times shake then very good. The continuation was frustrating because it had so much potential it didn’t live up to - like an 80’s Rolls Royce, looked good but it was really crap.