Word: programing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most hit shows live off habit; Dallas arouses demonstrative loyalty. Millions of Dallas T shirts, bumper stickers and buttons are festooning torsos, fenders and lapels. Haifa dozen "J.R." novelty records are heading for the charts. Society matrons are planning Dallas costume parties for the night the program returns. Politicians have climbed on the bandwagon too. Jimmy Carter, at a Dallas fund raiser, confessed with a grin: "I came to Dallas to find out confidentially who shot J.R. If any of you could let me know that, I could finance the whole campaign this fall." Perhaps not: at the Republican Convention...
...from a guilty secret to a national craze. When the BBC broadcast last season's final episode, normally congested roads were clear and pubs empty as 30 million Britons (more than half of the U.K.'s population) stayed home to watch J.R. get his. On the news program that night, the BBC replayed the shooting as a news event, and a few days later offered a weekend for two in Dallas to the person who supplied the wittiest explanation for the crime.*(This summer the network is also providing a crash course in Ewingology: a rerun...
...short, punchy scenes, Dallas tells viewers that the rich really are different: they sin more spectacularly and suffer in style. The program's high-gloss handsomeness brings a touch of class to the ruck of commercial series TV. The Ewing home at Southfork Ranch, where eight members of one of Texas' wealthiest families contrive to live under one roof, resembles a formicary of Neiman-Marcus showrooms. Every taste and no taste is represented here: satin pillowcases, china dogs, replicas of Steuben vases, gilt-framed imitations of Frederic Remington, bedroom closets that look like mink cemeteries. The budget...
...this makes the program sound like the subject for a doctorate in contemporary mythology, so be it. But Jacobs refuses to fish for a subtext. "Dallas makes no demands on the system," he says. "It is not about capitalism, Big Oil, the rich and the poor, abuse of power or any other social issues. The people are driven by very big emotions, and they're miserable...
Last year Masters and Johnson published Homosexuality in Perspective, describing a similar program for homosexuals; this time, they said, only 28% of their patients resisted a conversion to heterosexuality...