The gusher that was "Dallas" still has a few vintage barrels left to give.
One of the longest-running series ever, second only to "Gunsmoke," the family saga of big oil and big greed returns as a television movie Friday with its key players little changed.J.R. Ewing's appetites - for sex, for power, for manipulation - are intact. He's slowed a few steps, but he's still a crude ole boy, and Larry Hagman again plays him with relish.
"A conscience is a lot of trouble. It's like a boat or an airplane: If you ever feel you need one, rent it," Ewing advises at one point, his eyes sparkling with that J.R. zest that means folks should be watching their backs.
Let attorney Richard Fish of "Ally McBeal" spout his little sayings known as Fishisms; he's got nothing on J.R.'s capitalisms.
"Dallas: War of the Ewings," airing 9 p.m. EDT Friday on CBS, also brings back Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) as the good son and Sue Ellen Ewing (Linda Gray) as the not-so-good (but now more liberated) former wife of J.R.
The shenanigans are roughly the same as in the 1978-91 series: This time out, Bobby and Sue Ellen have control of Ewing Oil and J.R. wants it back. We also get bar fights, cattle rustling and professional women dressed in unprofessionally sexy outfits.
It seems that "Dallas" is caught in a bit of a time warp, a product of the Decade of Greed that spawned it. Executive producer Rich Heller cheerfully agrees.
"If you talk about a sexist, chauvinistic, self-serving, self-centered series, that was `Dallas,' that was what everybody wanted to see. The question becomes: Do you change it? Do you make it politically correct?" asks Heller, who answers his own questions with an emphatic "no."
That's not to say the formula can't be tinkered with a bit. "Dallas" enjoys a bit of a wink at itself, stopping just shy of parody. It's clear no one's really going to get hurt this time around. After all these years, the battles don't seem quite so urgent.
Even the oil industry, which has chafed at its sleazy "Dallas" depiction, appears to have mellowed - or to have developed a sense of humor. The first "Dallas" reunion movie in 1996 induced worried oil producers to buy air time for a pro-industry commercial in 25 states.
This time out, there was no word of a similar campaign.
The sex on "Dallas" is more sizzle than steak as well, with the tamest of bedroom scenes involving J.R. and cohort Amanda Smithfield (Tracy Scoggins). But in an era of milquetoast TV heroes and do-good angels, any J.R. is better than no J.R. at all.
Die-hard fans may agree. The show created an international frenzy with its "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger in 1980 (it turned out to be his sister-in-law, ordered by J.R. to leave town although she carried his child) and keeps recycling.
"You know, it's on cable TV three times a day," said Hagman. "We've got whole new generations of people watching it for the first time. I get a lot of mail from Bulgaria, Romania, Nigeria."
A Romanian businessman created Southfork Hermes Land, a cross between an amusement park and a resort loosely based on the "Dallas" ranch. This one, however, made room for a 132-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower.
A "Dallas"-based capitalistic venture in a formerly communist nation seems poetic justice if you consider Hagman's view of the show's influence.
"I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the Russian empire," the actor said. He explains that thousands of bootleg copies of the series were smuggled into the former Soviet Union.
"They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, `Hey, we don't have all this stuff.' I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority."
- Did you hear the latest? Jackie Collins, author of juicy, behind-the-scenes Hollywood novels (and sister of actress Joan) will be host of a daily TV series that combines entertainment features, celebrity interviews and fashion tips. "Jackie Collins' Hollywood" first appears June 15 on CBS-owned stations in New York and Los Angeles. The show, produced by CBS' Eyemark Entertainment, will be considered for national syndication if it proves itself.
CBS DROPS BRADLEY: After 10 months, the CBS news experiment with Bill Bradley as a commentator on the weekend evening news has been abandoned.
"I wouldn't use the word failed," said Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, who said he and the former senator had reached a "very amicable" decision to drop the experiment. Bradley had contributed 28 commentaries, which he called essays, since his debut last July 19, and a few more are to appear in May.
"I just think as we have been very successfully pursuing a hard-news strategy for the evening news, which spills over to the weekend evening news broadcasts, it seemed harder and harder to find a place where the essays felt comfortable," Heyward explained.
And he could not have felt terribly comfortable with the attention being paid recently to Bradley as a potential presidential candidate.
"No, it was always something we said we would try for a year and then assess," said Heyward. He also reassessed the role of Laura Ingraham, a conservative Republican who had been contributing commentaries on the weekend news for almost two years - with the same result.
"In both cases we attempted to have something beyond the traditional reporting voices on our air," he said. "But in a fast-paced hard-news broadcast, an essay with a point of view just didn't seem to fit well."
- Lawrie Mifflin, New York Times News Service