Back at the Raunch
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television BACK AT THE RAUNCH BY MARVIN KITMAN THE QUESTION EVERYONE Seems to be asking this summer is "Who shot J.R.?" Except, of course, my readers here, who are probably still wondering,...
...As Jeannie in / Dream of..., she gave Hagman the best (2,000) years of her life...
...J.R.'s little brother and Daddy Ewing's second favorite son, Bobby had recently lost yet another sibling contest to J.R...
...I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but one Friday during the spring I visited Elaine's, the literary-cultural establishment's "in" watering hole on New York's East Side...
...Now here's the most malevolent guy to come on the scene in a long while-Charles Baudelaire is president of his fan club—and we have made him into an idol...
...Nothing gives him more pleasure than bankrupting a close friend, with the possible exception of driving Sue Ellen into an asylum...
...Just their hats...
...Fred Silverman...
...But I've held you in suspense too long...
...Ewing is TV's man of the year, or swine of the year, depending on how you look at it...
...Cliff Barnes...
...The man's meanness knows no bounds...
...Sister-in-law and J.R.'s per-sonal mistress, now also sleeping with Alan Beam, prominent slimy lawyer about town...
...He also fools around with another oil millionaire's gorgeous assistant, cheating on the one he's been cheating with...
...Sue Ellen...
...Dusty...
...In his black robes, picking up honorary degrees in Inhumane Letters by the barrel, I can hear him advising tomorrow's leaders: "Keep your back against the wall....The bottom line is this: Get them before they get you...
...c V^Jome 50,000 people in downtown Dallas alone had a motive for doing J.R...
...But this is unlikely...
...Yet this despicable person has become a national hero...
...A whole herd of naugas must must have been slaughtered to decorate the place...
...Whenever he enters, J.R...
...His heart had already been broken by Sue Ellen, and now this...
...As played impeccably by Hagman, J. R. is the most corrupt, depraved and loathsome SOB this side of Malibu beach...
...That means it's the kind of show where a guy sleeps with his wife and his sister-in-law...
...would get it in the end after all...
...Bobby...
...Knowing a good thing when they see one, the producers have decided to keep the cat in the bag until at least the third week of the new season...
...out of the way so he could take Sue Ellen to California, where his go-with-the-flow therapy belongs...
...President of NBC...
...He plants bottles of gin among her undies, and whispers sweet nothings in her ear: "Sue Ellen, you're a drunk and a tramp, and no court in the world would let you have my son...
...Just wait and see in September, if you're so smart...
...He wanted J.R...
...On our college campuses, J.R...
...Kristin...
...Meanwhile, the country is going insane...
...Strictly, he's a character played by Larry Hagman in a series called Dallas, which starts its third season next September (CBS, Fridays, 10 p.m...
...How cornball can you get...
...Then, at 10:56 p.m., in the midst of the little party he was giving for himself high up in that Dallas skyscraper, with the city lights flickering below, J.R...
...He is the Eric von Stroheim of the 1980s, the man we all love to hate...
...By the end of last season, he was triumphant...
...On a recent press junket to California, where the nation's TV critics are usually wined and dined and fed carloads of starlets by the networks and independent producers, the critics were caught going through the wastebaskets at Lorimar looking for a clue...
...The newspapers have announced he was the assailant, but to be fair I will refer to him as "the alleged perpetrator of the crime...
...He was celebrating his latest coup: the sale of the family holdings in an Asian oil operation to his best friends, knowing full well that a revolution was on the way and the oilfields would soon be nationalized...
...Dallas is one of those modern family shows being made these days...
...But I have rounded up the usual suspects, and below supply a few notes about the possibilities of their guilt or innocence...
...Sitting in a corner, trying to look like a nobody (a trick I pulled off with disconcerting ease), I overheard a truly famous person excusing himself from a group of other truly famous people: "Look, I can't rationalize this, but I have to go home to see Dallas...
...When Sue Ellen complained about the relationship, J.R- said he believed in keeping things in the family...
...had broken off Beam's engagement to Lucy Ewing and threatened to have him charged with rape...
...Lying or cheating, betraying or breaking people, he always has that Twinkie-eating grin on his face...
...In any event, you can understand why everyone was so shocked when, in the closing episode last season, it looked as if J.R...
...An average day for J.R...
...Doc Ellby...
...If a dead man can come back to shoot J.R., he could just as easily sue for false accusation...
...is going to give Twinkie-eating a bad name...
...Barbara Eden...
...the famous Dah-dum could begin to beat whenever J.R...
...Penney level found on the daytime soap operas...
...By next spring, if he survives the shooting, I predict J.R...
...phenomenon borders on a national disgrace...
...was having a drink with himself in the executive headquarters of the Ewing Oil Company...
...Alan Beam, "Pick a number," he told Kristin, "there are others in front of you...
...Having arranged for his wife's arrest on suspicion of drunken driving, he works at getting her back to the booze...
...Yet even that wouldn't stop me from loving him—as do millions of other Americans, if the number of get well cards flooding into Dallas General Hospital can be taken as any indication...
...Traditionally, we rooted for the bad guy to get it in the end, or even in the beginning...
...The Ewings live on a big Texas ranch, named Southfork, with their cattle, their oil wells and their women folk, the three things the family is into...
...I know...
...People and Us magazines have done cover stories on him...
...Don't let them fool you, though: Dallas is just plain sleaze, even if they're taking off their Guccis when they hop into the adulterous sack...
...Except in Texas, where men wear heels too...
...I suffer from that love-hate complex myself...
...Except, of course, my readers here, who are probably still wondering, "Who is J.R...
...And maybe shoes...
...I'll kill him," Kristin was heard to say in the final episode...
...Lorimar, the producers, should consider borrowing the shark-music from Jaws...
...The shrink is secretly in love with his patient...
...And hypy days are here again in the nation's press...
...This could indicate that a woman did it, or a transvestite...
...But Patrick Duffy, the former Man from Atlantis on NBC, who plays the role, has webbed fingers and cannot hold a gun properly...
...their rivalry is now 7-0...
...Two gun shots were heard, presumably from a gun...
...In classy sleaze they don't drink beer, they drink Moet champagne—albeit from a bottle, with a straw...
...shot himself because he knew he had made a lot of enemies and he couldn't stand the idea of anyone else getting all the glory and credit for doing the job...
...is pure nastiness (a breath of fresh manure, as one Western critic put it), but the hatred you feel needs some release and I always start to laugh...
...Ellby, her psychiatrist, she was seen with a pistol in her purse, alongside the gin and baby bottles...
...Identifying with the powerful, the rich and the corrupt, we want to see him triumph over good...
...Whatever happened to the white hats, the old heroes we used to admire...
...Who did it...
...No, I wouldn't say that I'm hooked per se, I just want to see what's going on...
...J.R.'s perennial archenemy and father of his son (Sue Ellen was no sweetheart either), Barnes has been plotting revenge for longer than it has taken to teach the Dallas Cowgirls to ah-one-two...
...Others say the show is high-class sleaze—the Ralph Lauren of the genre as opposed to the J.C...
...We have to put her away again," he tells Miss Elly...
...Now that's desperation...
...The character is so perfectly "defined," as they say in the university drama schools, that his own mother thinks he's a worm...
...Judging by its high ratings—it has been in the top ten all year—Dallas is right down the American people's gutter...
...Besides, people haven't come back from the dead to kill since the old soap operas on radio...
...But during the next four or five weeks we will all be suspect...
...will be delivering commencement addresses...
...On her way out of the office of Dr...
...she wouldn't do anything to hurt Tony...
...would wilt most men...
...His dear Mama, the long-suffering Miss Elly (Barbara Bel Geddes), said it best: "Why J.R., you don't have a redeeming bone in your body...
...Disgusted with J.R.'s idea of business ethics, he was leaving South-fork...
...The J.R...
...I've gone over the videotape four times and have come to the following conclusion about the crime of the century: J.R...
...So I thought I should let you know what the fuss is about...
...That's adding insult to injury...
...They never take off their clothes in Dallas, social critic Barbara Howar pointed out to me once on a TV talk show, with her hand on my knee...
...is a very busy boy, but he still finds time before lunch to break up two couples—Ray and Donna, and Bobby and Pant—and even squeezes in a few minutes to ruin two business associates and make Kristin's other lover persona non grata in law offices all the way up to Atlanta...
...Think...
...Ewing harm, making an investigation rather difficult...
...Anyway, Sue Ellen's too obvious...
...Ewing was seriously wounded...
...is a cult figure...
...Here are the known details of the crime...
...It's a jungle out there...
...pulls up in his long Texas Lincoln...
...should be treated like a chandelier: burned by night and hanged by day...
...Sue Ellen's boyfriend, he died in a plane crash only a few episodes before the crime took place...
...If she was jealous, she would probably wiggle her nose and levitate Kristin's wig, or have a poodle bite her toe...
...I swear it...
...It reflects a significant change in our values...
...On the night of March 21, J.R...
...was the gleeful evil that night...
...Who do I think did it...
...Perhaps she was disturbed at how Texas had soured her old boyfriend (who can still be seen as the cuddly, indulgent Colonel Tony Nelson, the astronaut, on other stations...
...Some say it's very modestly raunchy...
...Down in Houston on business, he cheats on his wife Sue Ellen, the alcoholic, with the help of her kid sister, Kristin, who now works as his secretary...
...Moreover, high heels were heard outside J.R.'s office immediately before the shooting...
...Well, actually there are four things: They obviously have a passion for nau-gahyde...
...It's hype...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 14
