Is TNT’s “Dallas” Dead? If So, Should Another Network (CBS) Save It? – Ed Martin

One of the more unsettling things I saw during the opening week of the 2014-15 television season had nothing to do with anything on a broadcast network.

Actually, that may not be entirely true. I’m speaking of “Dallas,” which last week concluded its third season on TNT. For decades before this basic cable revival “Dallas” was remembered as one of the great broadcast dramas in the history of the medium – one credited with popularizing the end-of-season cliffhanger with the famous March, 1980 “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline, the resolution of which eight months later drew the largest audience ever for a single episode of a television series.

CBS was the home to “Dallas” for its legendary 14-season run from 1978-1991 and to several reunion movies and specials that ran in the decade that followed. Then it went dormant for another ten years or so, only to return in 2012 as a new series on TNT. Expectations were high, given the flexible content restrictions that have made basic cable the home in recent years of some of the finest television dramas ever produced, not to mention the millions of people who had enjoyed “Dallas” in their youth and young adulthood and would be able to check back in on the sizzling saga of the Ewings.

But from the beginning, the TNT revival just couldn’t get things right -- everything about it looked familiar but nothing felt the same. And last week, it managed to get just about everything wrong – including its scheduling, which was a network issue that had nothing to do with the production itself. I can only conclude that TNT was looking to kill the show, because its executives chose to end its two-hour season three finale on the opening night of the new television season, which turned out to have been one of the best nights for broadcast in quite a while.

At first blush it would seem a boneheaded decision to schedule a make-or-break episode of “Dallas,” a show that hadn’t been enjoying robust ratings in its third season, opposite such predictably formidable competition. Of course it would get clobbered in the ratings and be all but ignored by the media. This despite the surprise demise at the end of a major legacy character (spoiler alert – the individual is noted below), a move clearly (and clumsily) calculated to draw attention and perhaps motivate TNT to renew “Dallas” for a fourth season (which as of this writing has not happened).

In truth the two hours together made for a terrible episode. Perhaps TNT was hoping it would go unnoticed by scheduling it on that date. If that’s true then a) the strategy worked and b) that can’t bode well for the show’s future. If this were almost any other show I would be ignoring it, too – but over the decades I feel that I have invested entirely too much time in this franchise to sit idly by and watch it be mishandled.

Since its return in 2012, “Dallas” has suffered from a toxic blend of dark, dreary and/or campy stories, not one of them particularly enjoyable or entertaining. Bobby Ewing had gastrointestinal cancer. Sue Ellen, an improbable front-runner, lost her bid for governor, lost her ex-husband J.R. and, after decades of sobriety, hit the bottle with a vengeance and almost burned to death as a consequence. Cliff Barnes willfully put his own daughter at risk of being blown to pieces, was responsible for the deaths of his unborn grandchildren and has since been rotting away in a Mexican prison. The Ewings have become inexorably intertwined with a bizarre new family, the Rylands, lorded over by a mama’s boy who is secretly a C.I.A. agent and his drug-running psychopathic mother (played to the hilt by Judith Light, who deserves an Emmy nomination). Various members of different drug cartels have been killing people right and left, including Hunter McCay, the grandson of Carter McCay, an important character in the later years of “Dallas’” original run.

Actually, I’m making it sound better than it has been. Looking back over its three seasons on TNT, the only good thing I have to say about “Dallas” is it was a “real-time” continuation of the story of the power struggles between and among the oil-rich Ewing and Barnes families.

One of the primary reasons why “Dallas” became a phenomenon in the Eighties was that it gave the rest of us a chance every week to watch wealthy people suffer (a pastime we were also able to enjoy with “Dynasty”). As such, the show was always fun to watch. I don’t think the TNT continuation has offered five full minutes of fun, not even when Larry Hagman was still alive and charging it up as best he could as the aging but no less lethal J.R. (Even the storyline about J.R.’s death was convoluted, unconvincing and unpleasant … and not at all befitting the status of so legendary a character.)

At the end of last week’s episode, the cliffhangers that I assume were designed to pump a last blast of interest into the franchise and leave fans salivating for more had, I suspect, the opposite effect. Among them: John Ross (Josh Henderson, probably the best thing about the current show) formed an unholy alliance with crazy Judith Ryland and also learned that he has a sister he doesn’t know about, and his cousin Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe) was apparently killed in a car bomb explosion. Christopher was the good guy in the current “Dallas” equation.

Both of these plot teases were boneheaded moves. Learning that J.R. had an illegitimate daughter is all well and good (and not terribly surprising, given his insatiable appetite for the ladies) but why go there when his other two sons (by Vanessa Beaumont and Cally Harper) were never brought onto the new show to challenge John Ross and Christopher and demand their shares of their father’s fortune? For that matter, Christopher has a brother (Bobby’s son by Jenna Wade) who has never been mentioned. And where are their cousins Bobby and Betsy, the children of Gary Ewing and Valene?

As for Christopher’s probable end, remember when his father Bobby, the good guy in the original run, was killed off at the end of season eight? It derailed the show so hopelessly that the entire season that followed had to be written off as a bad dream suffered by Christopher’s mother Pam. (A fractured footnote: It was during the dream season that Sue Ellen finally bottomed out with her drinking and was institutionalized. She never drank again, until season two of the TNT revival.)

I tried to give TNT’s “Dallas” the benefit of the doubt throughout its run – and I will continue to do so until I am told that the show is officially over. How can I not after investing so much time in it? I still believe in this saga, and I still feel there are interesting stories to tell. Just not the stories we have been handed so far.

I would like TNT to continue the show, but only if the network is determined to make it better. If TNT cancels “Dallas,” I hope it will at least commission a movie that satisfyingly wraps it up once and for all. And while I’m compiling a “Dallas” wish list, if TNT cancels it wouldn’t it be great if CBS picked it up, hired a new writing team that understands what made the show so appealing in the first place, fixed everything that went wrong with it and gave it another go – on Friday nights? I have to think the CBS audience would enjoy it all over again if “Dallas” were done right.

Ed Martin is the Editor of MediaBizBloggers. He is also the television and video critic forMyersBizNet. Ed has been writing about television for over 25 years. He is a member of the Television Critics Association and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association. Follow him on Twitter at @PlanetEd.

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