On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television PAM EWING'S BAD DREAM BY MARVIN KITMAN MY MOUTH IS still wide open in disbelief at the denouement of the Dallas (CBS, Friday, 9:00 p.m. EST) cliff-hanger revealed the night of...
...How many takes did they have to do...
...The strategy for getting people worked up into a curious dither about Dallas did succeed...
...CBS promos in May removed any doubt: Duffy would reappear in the last episode of the season, the one where Bobby's "widow" Pam was to wed her old friend Mark Graison...
...The only thing truly irreversible there is a terminal contract...
...Space limitations preclude a complete listing...
...Dallas became a replay of the Coca-Cola disaster: The new Dallas was fizzling, so CBS brought back, by popular demand, the classic formula—with Patrick Duffy...
...How were they going to make the sudden improvement in Bobby's health convincing...
...They were simply the nocturnal products of poor Pam's fevered imagination...
...He should be a Wall Street analyst: When he says buy, you sell short...
...Bobby is back because he never really went away...
...Cliff Barnes can now go back to being silly again...
...Bobby's undead...
...Either the dead one was an imposter, or the one in the shower was...
...There was also the imposter theory...
...What, no money...
...It wasacop-out...
...In fact, he had tried to sell the network to Coca-Cola—his last straw, as far as the CBS board of directors was concerned...
...Shortly before the start of the fall season, I noticed that even the CBS promos were resorting to the multiplot gambit...
...Bad ratings can be strong medicine in television...
...Even before Bobby's funeral, they reported, the producers had at least one script for Duffy's return to the series locked away in its vault...
...But his death and everything that followed was a dream, folks...
...What's worse is that the dream denouement made a mockery of my feelings...
...I know he was only a creature of bubble land...
...Not since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vaults and found nothing, not even Judge Crater, had TV let me down like this...
...She goes to his funeral, and after a suitable period of mourning, reconstructs her life, falls in love with and marries an old friend, then wakes up to find that her husband, disposed of in the dream, is still there in the shower...
...Then, in the final moments, they didthe most riveting shower scene since Psycho, leaving us to spend the summer puzzling those portentous final words, "Good morning...
...They can even bring back the dead...
...I had a sinking feeling: It was a hoax...
...then they manage to capitalize on it by merchandising their mistake...
...You've got to hand it to CBS...
...This was thirteen...
...But where had Bobby been all those months...
...Out to the 7-11 in the sky for a six-pack of Dos Equis and a microwaved tortilla...
...Gary Ewing died in Knots Landing, and he came back—after an autopsy, yet...
...The next thing you know Sue and Chuck are laughing about a weatherman's barking-dog imitation...
...Certainly the Star is more trustworthy than Lori-mar and the other TV soap producers, who lie more often than the Reagan Administration...
...Maybe...
...Nobody stays dead for very long in bubble land...
...that's $37,500 a word...
...Letting Duffy take flight was the broadcasting blunder of the century...
...My wife the psychologist supplied an explanation: "Take your average Jake or Joe, whose spouse goes to sleep one night and has a dream about his being run over by a car...
...I'm ashamed to say it now, but I mourned for Bobby when he died...
...Of all the crazy scenarios the whiz-kids at Lorimar cooked up, the dream was the hardestto swallow...
...Predictably, this titillating fact gave rise to a wave of creativity...
...It doesn't hurt that much...
...Now Executive Producer Leonard Katzman, Lorimar and CBS tell me: Sorry...
...You want to know what I think...
...But as the bride and groom kissed after pronouncing their vows, there was no sign of Bobby...
...after he left, it dropped to number seven with a bullet—aimed at the producers...
...I saw the EKG machine go to a straight line...
...Selling top-secret scenarios is probably a new way of exercising ancillary rights...
...It was all a dream...
...Eventually, there were about 15 scenarios, all of them reported as genuine by the authoritative supermarket press...
...We were only kidding...
...He was revived at the last minute...
...The slide had been gaining momentum toward the end of last season...
...I had a whole crowd of people over to watch it...
...It was starting to get a little complicated for me...
...Thesuper-market press is unimpeachable on TV soaps...
...A lot of people thought, however, that he would return as yet another illegitimate son of Jock Ewing, perhaps the evil twin brother of Bobby who was kidnapped at birth...
...It's as if everyone in the last act of Hamlet jumped up and said, "It's time for some herring sandwiches...
...All that Angelica Nero rubbish, and Sue Ellen being off the bottle...
...I experienced the sense of loss by vicariously attending the funeral, empathizing with the other characters...
...Run over...
...An atomic device can fall on Roadrunner' s head, and he gets a little headache...
...When he was around, the prime-time soap was number two in the ratings...
...Pam's snooze lasted a whole season and she didn't even have bags under her eyes...
...Nor was Bobby's resuscitation a particular cause for surprise...
...If Duffy did not do so well without Dallas, though, neither did Dallas exactly flourish without Duffy...
...The same message is sometimes conveyed in more insidious ways...
...He might be named Robby...
...I was closer to Bobby than to some of my so-called "real" relatives in Pittsburgh...
...The writers seemed to have put themselves in a tight spot: They had pulled out all the stops for Bobby's funeral, and then peppered the '85-'86 season with references to his late state, maybe three or four an episode...
...But on September 26, the 40 million who tuned in to the season premiere realized that CBS had won the Geraldo Rivera Dupe Job of the Year Award—and we were the dupees...
...Perhaps, 1 thought, we were seeing the unwitting birth of the TV version of The Night of the Living Dead—about Dallas, not Pittsburgh...
...That's too highbrow...
...The Hamlet of Pecos...
...He needed greater challenges, he said...
...It made the entire run of events last season not happen...
...Pam Ewing was having a dream...
...And what a bad dream they made...
...The man is admirably consistent...
...He was a member of my family, the brother I never had...
...Twelve is my TV limit...
...How many know he was the man in Man from A t-lantis, with those cute webbed feet and hands...
...EST) cliff-hanger revealed the night of September 26...
...Still, I liked him...
...Pam must be some heavy sleeper...
...Let's face it, Duffy was never the world's greatest actor...
...Weeks after this epochal moment in TV drama, I lay in my hammock, thinking: "Two words, $75,000...
...Cute...
...One of these is the right answer," an ad in TV Guide read: "• He's a twin...
...We were sure Bobby was going to pop up in the wedding scene itself...
...Nor was he a very big box office name before Dallas...
...Patrick Duffy, who plays Bobby, decided to quit the show a year ago because he wanted to advance his acting career...
...But that's another story...
...In fact, he would be well-advised to weigh the option of family therapy—aperson with a dream like that might one day hire a hit man...
...The rehearsals must have been awesome...
...Good morning," he casually said...
...And what the hell was Bobby doing in the shower...
...The different plot lines, I was convinced, were deliberately leaked by the producer to the Star and the Enquirer, who eagerly paid for every one of them...
...The possibility of Duffy coming back as Bobby Ewing's ghost was quickly dismissed...
...I'd like to know just how stupid they think I am at CBS...
...Not to worry...
...She probably had a pizza before she went to bed that unmomentous night, with mushrooms, anchovies, sausages, the works...
...Then a commercial: "Feeling blue...
...He looked sick...
...Well, he got them—as anyone can attest who saw him playing a maniac in an episode of Hotel, or a doctor in the mini-series Strong Medicine...
...He had already declared upon leaving Dallas that he would never come back...
...During a spring appearance on the Tonight show, Duffy fueled speculation about a possible return by denying he would ever again play Bobby Ewing...
...How many times do they think can insult my intelligence...
...TV's reliable professional journals— the Star and the Enquirer—soon assured everyone that Lorimar knew what it was doing...
...Funerals are social events on Dallas, as common as barbecues in South Fork...
...And it doesn't hurt anybody, except the poor viewers at home who want to be surprised by what they see on TV...
...She's lucky she didn't see the whole Dallas Cowboy backfield in the shower the next morning...
...I think we were all dreaming that Friday night...
...Amid the reams of socio-politico-economic analysis that got churned out over the Zta/fas-Duffy-dream-denoue-ment, I was surprised to find not a single interpretation of the Dream Itself...
...His death was a catharsis, as they say in the tragedy part of literature...
...That was the creative solution to resurrecting Bobby Ewing, the most hyped mystery since the world wondered who shot J. R? A dreaml The opening scene of the '86-'87 season repeated the final scene of the '85-'86 season last May that had stunned America: Pam Ewing walked into her bathroom, pulled open the shower door and found not Mark Graison, her new husband, but—oy gevalt (as the Texas oilmen say)—her old one, Bobby Ewing, soaping up...
...As early as April, I received word from a reliable authority—don't ask which one, but I picked it up at the supermarket checkout—that Duffy would be back with Dallas this fall...
...TV has made death not such a bad fate after all...
...Too Shakespeare...
...TomWyman, under whose auspices these high jinks took place, was certainly familiar with the Coke example...
...Get away, escape...
...Bobby and Robby...
...Bobby wasn't coming back after all...
...Maliciously...
...This Jake or Joe should consider the possibility that his mate is harboring a feeling of hostility toward him...
...I've caught three flies so far...
...It wasn't his having died and been buried that gave me a problem...
...It is impeachable on UFO's, and peachable on Big Foot and Hitler-is-Alive-in-Beverly-Hills-and-Working-as-a-Gardener-at-Aaron-and-Candy-Spelling's-Mansion stories...
...Bobby, of course, had been killed in the concluding episode of the '84-'85 season...
...Besides, the Ewings are made of stern stuff...
...Charge it with MasterCard...
...What they lack in foresight they make up for in chutzpah...
...I, along with millions of other viewers, saw him draped on Katherine Wentworth's car like a moose...
...You watch the news: 5,000 die in an Ecuador earthquake...
Vol. 69 • October 1986 • No. 14
