Goodbye To Gaud Almighty

By RICHARD CORLISS

Pity the rich and famous. Either the tabloid press makes their lives an overexposed hell -- or, even worse, it doesn't. Case in point, the Ewings of Dallas. Remember them? They first caused a stir in the late '70s, when Ewing Oil, their mom-and-pop-and-two-sons enterprise, became the largest independent in Texas. Then in 1980 J.R. Ewing, the scheming brains and black heart of the company, was nearly gunned to death by his wife's sister. A few years later, the wife of J.R.'s brother Bobby had a yearlong hallucination that Bobby was dead -- 'til one morning he showed up in the shower. Eventually, though, America wearied of the Ewings. When word got out that they finally planned to retire, a lot of people wondered, "Are they still around?"

Dallas, Lorimar's Ewing-family saga, is still around. The Who-Shot-J.R.? mania of 1980, when 300 million viewers in 57 countries waited breathlessly for the most successful cliffhanger in entertainment history, has abated, but enough people still watch the supersoap that its rating this season is higher than, oh, thirtysomething's. On May 3, CBS will reunite many of the early cast members in a two-hour fantasy finale that leads J.R. through an It's a Wonderful Life-style tour of what Dallas would have been like without him. And tens of millions of viewers will gather to bid farewell to the most glamorously backstabbing clan since the house of Atreus. They might also pause to consider fondly what Dallas has meant to American pop culture.

In most ways, it was a conservative series, adhering to the conventions of series drama. But even in Dallas' debut, creator David Jacobs offered beguiling variations: a dozen wealthy Texans living, fighting, snarling under one ranch-house roof, a catalog of venality that included every vice but coprophilia and a leading character (J.R.) with the morals of a mink. In its second season, Dallas became a cliffhanger, and viewers hung on. By the 1979-80 season, it was the sixth most popular show on American TV, and for the next five years, it finished either first or second.

The public chose well. For here, in 356 episodes of primal prime time, were the central conflicts of American life. Country (the Ewing home at Southfork Ranch) fought with city (the Ewing Oil building in downtown Dallas). Cowboys corralled oil slickers. Sons (J.R. and Bobby) double-crossed each other for their father's love. Daughters-in-law ached for the approval of a family that would always eye them suspiciously. Add myriad business rivals, mistresses, children and newly discovered relatives, and the conflict could keep roiling in a never-ending story, with cunning variations on the time-honored themes of sex, money, power and family.

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.