Dallas premiered thirty years ago today. The show definitely had an impact on the development of the prime time soap opera. The Washington Post writes that it also helped win the cold war:
“Dallas” wasn’t simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. Lasting nearly as long as recovering alcoholic Larry Hagman’s second liver, it helped define the 1980s as a glorious “decade of greed,” ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries. Beginning with the famous “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger at the end of Season Two, “Dallas” was either the highest or second-highest rated show in the United States for a half-decade, showing up in Abba songs and Ozzy Osbourne videos, spinning off the mega-hit “Knots Landing” and inspiring such book-length academic analysis as French academic Florence Dupont’s “Homère et ‘Dallas’: Introduction à une Critique Anthropologique.”
After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of “Cool Hand Luke” and Randle Patrick McMurphy of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Dallas” created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who’s always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu (“Dallas, you merciless universe!” ran the French lyrics added to the wordless theme song), viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.
Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie “The Grapes of Wrath” in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies’ westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies — and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. “Dallas” functioned similarly.
“I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire,” Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. “They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all this stuff.’ I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority.”
In Romania, “Dallas” was the last Western show allowed during the nightmare 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu was persuaded that it was sufficiently anti-capitalistic. By the time he changed his mind, it was already too late — he had paid for the full run in precious hard currency. Meanwhile, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap Romanian car.
If Dallas did some good in helping win the cold war, it might have also have had a terrible effect upon the United States:
Which is not to forget how “Dallas” helped shape our own little corner of the world. It would be too much to say that the show made the rise of George W. Bush possible, but it’s certainly the case that “Dallas” helped shift the center of American culture from the right and left coasts to the great cowboy middle, decentralizing the traditional sources of power elites in social and political terms. The same accent that marked Lyndon B. Johnson as a hick a generation earlier now signifies vitality and drive, if not couthness. Texas presidents may have proven disastrous for the country, but they symbolize a country less stuffy and stratified than ever.
The show was also discussed today on NPR and the decline of the show was blamed upon the manner in which Bobby Ewing was brought back from dead in the shower scene. That did leave the show open to ridicule but I don’t believe that this is what killed the show. People overly concerned with reality would already have numerous reasons not to take the show seriously even before Bobby’s death was written off as a dream. Besides, as absurd an explanation as it was, the scene has become one of the best known classics of television. It was an absurdity so big that it fit in with the atmosphere of Dallas.
The real problem is that in its later years the show lost virtually everything which made it great. The show was at its best when it dealt with both the extended Ewing family with Ewing Oil. Over the years members of the family either died or left the show, losing this aspect of the storyline. To compound matters, Ewing Oil was broken up and we no longer had J.R. and Bobby clashing over control of the company. Without his family and his company, J.R. Ewing was no longer as interesting an anti-hero to watch.
