Dallas returns again?

My friend heard a new “Dallas” series is in the works. Has anyone heard anything about this?

 

Hmmm....have not heard this but I would be interested to hear more about it.

 

Good topic: remake of old TV shows that are as good or better than the originals. I can't think of any off top of head.

 

and some of the original cast members to make an appearance.

 

Seems odd that they'd revive Dallas yet again. The prior revival ended after three seasons due to a massive drop in ratings.

Ah well, if they do that's just another example of the creative bankruptcy TV, (& far too much cinema of late as well), seems cursed with.

Since they're also planning a reboot of Fraiser, perhaps they can do a crossover story arch? Having Fraiser Crane psychoanalyze the Ewing family could prove a smash hit!

 

Google says no.

Maybe your friend is a time traveler from 2012? Or just woke up from a 10-year nap?

 

Is this rumored to be developed by or on a streaming service? If so it might end up being decent. But if it is a network show, probably not. As mentioned above most of the reboots have been pretty bad, especially the ones on network TV.

 

I want to see a reboot of Quantum Leap.

 

It's not "rumored" anywhere, other than the OP and his friend.

 

I’d be very surprised if they rebooted it again so soon after the previous reboot ended. They actually had a great opportunity to continue the series 10 years ago. The setup was sound, but it was poorly cast and executed. Ratings were initially high, but it didn’t hook people. Too bad.

 

once was enough! for those inclined I'm happy for you if this comes to fruition!

 

I would at least see if a new reboot is any good. I watched all of the original episodes a couple of years ago on one of the streaming services. I don’t think I ever watched any of the follow up movies or reboots.

 

Thank you all for the feedback. I was a fan of the original "Dallas" & the 2012 reboot. I was also one of those who thought they should have kept it going a few more seasons after Larry Hagman's passing to give it a chance. Unfortunately that didn't happen so I moved on. Any reboot happening now will always be a "wait & see" thing for me. My friend is really hoping so I'm going to leave it at that.

 

I'd like to see a reboot of "The Time Tunnel" where they go back in time to where "The Time Tunnel" was about to be rebooted but they stopped it in time & it never happened.

 

The Battlestar Galactica remake demolished the cheezeball original series, most episodes of which featured plots ripped off from (better) Universal films.

 

For some reason I've been watching lot of clips from Dallas out on YouTube the past couple of months. My family watched it from the first episode back in '78, so we were following it as it went from a low-rated mid-season miniseries to the biggest thing on television and a cultural phenomena. We also watched as it kind of fell apart into a ridiculous soap opera with all the crazy, trashy trappings of its daytime counterparts, including characters whose looks radically changed due to "plastic surgery" and even a "dream season". Ugh.

The show began as kind of a modern, somewhat trashy retelling of Romeo & Juliet meets Rich Man, Poor Man. In its first few years it actually tackled serious subjects, from abortion to homosexuality to breast cancer, while keeping the characters the focus of the stories, not the moralizing or the plot. The program was really told more from Pam Ewing's viewpoint as a new arrival to this crazy family, with characters like Sue Ellen (the original Desperate Housewife) and Ray kept on the margins.

It was probably a great idea to pull those characters more into the central narrative. In particular, Linda Gray as JR's long-suffering wife Sue Ellen arguably did the program's best work, and her character had the most dramatic arc of any of the main cast. Victoria Principal's Pam Ewing wasn't as well-served in spite of her initially high-profile, enduring one agonizing loss after another after another, and going from strong survivor to perpetual victim in the process. I can see why after 10 seasons Principal was ready to hang it up, and the program - which had already strayed way too far from its initial concept and gotten downright ridiculous after writing off a Patrick Duffy-less season as a dream - should have been shut down at that point (and would have been more-fondly remembered). Instead they kept flogging a dead horse for another 4 painful, stupid years.

The continuation done a decade ago largely failed - the original cast members who returned did fantastic work, but the casting of the new characters was atrocious and the writing, from what little I saw, was wildly uneven. And apart from Linda Gray, who was virtually ageless, they were all simply too old to be clomping around as leads in a soap opera. That ship had probably sailed a decade earlier.

I don't see how a reboot could possibly translate to 2022. The whole conflict that drove '78 original was the liberated, educated Pam Ewing coming to the very parochial Southfork Ranch and being caught up in the family's insane machinations, with only her somewhat gullible, occasionally hot-headed husband and her own wits to protect her. Looming in the background was her own family's history with the Ewings and the start of the Texas oil business decades before. None of that really works in 2020, unless you set this as a period piece in the 1970s and '80s and just recast all the roles. Mad Men in Plano, essentially.

That actually could work. But I don't see anybody being crazy enough to try it, and I'm not sure if it would find an audience. That having been said, they could do worse than dusting off the scripts from the first 4-5 seasons of the program and reworking them a bit for modern sensibilities. But casting would be key, and they completely botched the last continuation, so who knows how that would go.

The reality is, the producers of the original just got really lucky with the cast they assembled, as future less-successful additions to the cast during the original show's run would go on to prove. Barbara Bel Geddes wasn't especially Texan in her portrayal of Miss Ellie - she reads as more New England than Texan most of the time, and her dowdy housefrocks don't exactly scream Texas oil money (although given her own family's background in ranching and her ambivalence about the oil business, wasn't too implausible I suppose) - but her acting chops were top notch and she had great chemistry with Jim Davis as the family patriarch as well as Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy as her boys. Hagman & Duffy both did fine work as well, even if they weren't physically believable as brothers or as kids of Jim Davis. Texan Steve Kanaly looked more like a blood relation and acted more legitimately Texan than anybody else in the cast, although Hagman was actually born in and raised around Fort Worth, ironically enough.

The real driving force of the show those first few years - apart from the sleazily manipulative Hagman as JR - were the women, Principal and Linda Gray, who gave killer performances straining against the Ewing's patriarchal straitjacket and the expectations placed on them. Gray started out as a minor supporting character in the miniseries but quickly grew to be co-equal to Principal, and her continual sparring with both JR and the bottle led to many of the best sequences across the show's first decade, including the "who shot JR" plot that transformed the program into a cultural juggernaut.

Without that cast I think there was no way Dallas went on to be the ratings powerhouse it became - the writing just wasn't that good, and it was the characters formed by those actors which led the writers to some of their most successful work beyond the miniseries. It was all lightning in a jar, and I just don't see how you recreate that for a remake of the same program in 2022, let alone a continuation at this point, which sounds like a disaster in the making.

 

Good write up there^.
But you left out Cliff Barnes involvement.
I enjoyed his character and giving JR someone else to spar against besides Bobby.
He was a bit of light relief too, and must have been well thought of as he appeared in the previous re-boot.

 

Some of the webisodes of the Wild Kingdom made from 2013-2018 are excellent and some of the Animal Planet episodes from 2002-2011 are excellent but still, the original series is what people remember.

 

Thinking more like dramas, sitcoms, etc

 

It was all a dream...

 

Battlestar Galactica

 

Ken Kercheval did a great job as Cliff, especially in the earlier seasons of Dallas. I've always thought making him a business rival to JR was a huge mistake, which was facilitated by the introduction of Cliff and Pam's long-lost mom Rebecca Wentworth, who just happened to be worth zillions. Loved Priscilla Pointer in the role (Amy Irving's mom - she's still alive at 96!), but thought it was way too soap opera and really upset the balance between the Ewings and the Barnes.

That having been said, her introduction did lead to this amazing scene, where Pam finally convinces Cliff to meet with the mother who abandoned him and fireworks ensue. He did great work here, although the static direction and cheap production values of early Dallas left him to do all the heavy lifting:



I thought it would have been much more organic to up the stakes by having Cliff rise in prominence as a politician largely funded by Ewing rivals. The original template there was the Kennedys. They should have stuck with it. Maybe have Rebecca be politically well-connected but not fantastically wealthy.

For Pam, I recall her working at a department store called just The Store, and I've always thought Dallas missed an opportunity to show her rising in the ranks there over the course of a couple of seasons, turning around the women's department or something and then encountering resistance as she tried to rise into management. It could have culminated with Bobby coming into possession of a boutique as part of his real estate dealing, needing her to run it, and then having it take off and become a sensation, making Pam and Bobby independently wealthy in the process. (Since Lucy was working as a model, it could have also given her something to do on the show as well - Pam and Lucy always interacted well on screen, and a Pam/Lucy axis would have given JR fits.)

It would have also been keeping with the somewhat feminist bent of the program, really over its entire run but especially those first few seasons where Pam, Sue Ellen, Lucy and Donna all chafed against the Ewing patriarchy and really the patriarchy in general. But Dallas didn't do that kind of long-term plotting - nothing on TV really did back then. Apart from miniseries few if any shows did prior to Babylon 5 in the mid-'90s, unless they were loosely following some literary template like the early seasons of Little House on the Prairie.

 

By the way, I thought of a great Dallas plot twist the other day - everything that happens after Pam "wakes up" in that 9th season finale is actually "the dream". The series gets a lot better that way, essentially concluding at the end of that season before it goes entirely off the rails, apart from maybe Donna Reed having already replaced Barbara Bel Geddes.

Although it has to be said, Reed actually played the role of Texas oil matriarch better I thought than Bel Geddes ever did - she got the hair, clothing, accessories and conservative attitude just perfect. Her cooler Ellie just wasn't as likable to the audience as the more-matronly Bel Geddes, who always felt like something of an underdog, but Reed was perfect as what the character probably should have been right from the start. Instead of lamenting it, the writers should have properly exploited it and made Ellie more manipulative and conniving, with arguably good intentions. It could have given Reed something to do other than sit around and look concerned all season. They should have also shown her in more social situations on her own, being appropriately catty when circumstances called for it. Those Texan heiresses have sharp tongues.

Ironically, Bel Geddes had left the program due to heart problems, but following bypass surgery and a year's rest was willing to return. Reed got unceremoniously dumped, sued to stop the production of the next season and won $1 million. Sadly, she died the next year from pancreatic cancer - the producers probably should have just waited a season. They could have avoided a ton of bad press and simply let Bel Geddes waltz back into the role she'd originated.

On a side note, I've always felt that if the producers wanted to cast a famous '50s TV mom as the matriarch of the Ewing clan, they should have picked Jane Wyatt and not Donna Reed. She was a good decade older than Bel Geddes but didn't look it, was in good health, and inherently projected more warmth than Reed. She also did indigent better and I think was just all around a better dramatic actress than Reed, as her fantastic guest performance on Star Trek's "Journey To Babel" as Spock's human mother Amanda demonstrated. She might have needed a dialog coach to perfect a Texan accent, but that would have been cheaper than a $1 million settlement with Donna Reed. Also, like Reed, Wyatt looked more like a Texan oil heiress than Bel Geddes and would have been fantastic done up to the nines in big Texan hair and Ann Richards clothes.

 

I always liked the character of Pam's step sister Katherine Wentworth.
After she shot Bobby ....... the series for me started to go downhill ......... when even as a young boy you realise they would never kill off one of the main characters.
The highlight [for me] was usually the series ending cliff hanger, my favourite other of the usual inclusions would be the annual 'Oil Baron's Ball' dust up!

 

Of course, then they did kill off one of the main characters, brought him back, then killed off another.