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There was a chastening moral here: that money was the root of all Ewings. But, really, Dallas was what it criticized. Endlessly fascinated with the lives of the rich and pretty, the show looked rich and pretty too, like a Black Forest cake. With sumptuous production values and characters who spent every available petrodollar, Dallas elevated conspicuous consumption to a secular religion: gaud almighty. It introduced viewers to the Greedy '80s, by establishing as a pop icon a Texas oilman who believed it's not what you get that matters, it's what you can get away with. In that age of winks and nudges, Trumps and Harts, the show understood that any indiscretion can be turned into a career move, because America wants its celebrities to live out their excesses as well as their successes. J.R. and his breed got carte blanche to sin, as long as they did it in public.
But how long could they do it? Not forever. Intimations of mortality started dogging the show around 1986, with Pam's dream season. Dallasites took their soap seriously, and the plot twist played like a declaration of facetiousness. After that, the show became a kind of dinner-theater version of itself -- flaccid, repetitious, drowsier than the Texas economy -- and receded discreetly into the haze of Has-Been. Even the ebullient Hagman had trouble keeping track of J.R.'s misdeeds: "I really can't remember half of the people I've slept with, stabbed in the back or driven to suicide." And why shouldn't the cast members be happy to take the money and trudge? "I'm never gonna get another job that pays this much," says Hagman, who serves as co-executive producer with Dallas mastermind Leonard Katzman. "Hell, I make as much as Jack Nicholson!"
J.R. has made -- and lost -- as much as Midas and Michael Milken put together. But finally J.R. has mellowed into a mood of valedictory twilight. Like the show he anchored, the aging Texan is again in fine form. He might have been speaking of Dallas when, in a recent episode, he mourned, "The world I know is disappearin' real fast." But it was left to his stalwart brother to put the series in perspective. "J.R.," Bobby said, "you and I have spent our entire lives tryin' to win Daddy's approval by fightin' with one another. Neither one of us givin' up until we were sure we were his favorite. Well, I've given up the fight. You are Daddy's son. The oil business is all yours, big brother. You've earned the right to Daddy's throne."
In the royal family of American melodrama, Dallas is Daddy on the throne.