Random
Extra Essay Just For Fun: Comparing and Contrasting David Paulsen’s Year on KNOTS LANDING With Peter Dunne’s Year on
Dallas
Hello all, and welcome to this unexpected and only somewhat
planned-out extra bonus essay of excitement.
The idea for this came about when we were just finishing up watching
season six of KL and about to get
started with season seven. I found
myself trying to fathom how Peter Dunne, who I had grown to love and respect
over the course of three stunningly brilliant seasons of KL, could go from three seasons that amazing and immediately run
the season of Dallas in which everything
starts to go mammothly and colossally off the rails. Now, since this is a KL blog and not a Dallas blog
(aside from those occasional Interludes in which Gary and/or Val pop in for an
appearance, and we aren’t going to be talking about another one of those for a
very long time), at first I wasn’t entirely sure I was gonna do this cuz I’m
more interested in talking KL. But then My Beloved Grammy and I got started
with season seven of KL and we had
that little Dallas Interlude entitled
The Family Ewing and I found myself
surprised by how not awful the episode was.
Make no mistake, it wasn’t great
or anything like that, but it was better than I had remembered, so then I
decided to go ahead and rewatch the ninth season (the dream season) of Dallas.
To be clear, I just did this on my own time, when I felt like it, so I
wasn’t hopping from KL to Dallas over and over again for the
entire course of the season. Rather, My
Beloved Grammy and I watched the seventh season of KL when we had time and I watched the dream season of Dallas by myself when I had time,
although I finished it long before we finished this year of KL.
This essay is going to focus more on the dream season of Dallas and what elements of it I can
spot as Dunne influences; I’ve pretty much said all my thoughts on Paulsen’s
season of KL, but one thing that I
think is interesting is that I see similar problems within both seasons of
television.
Peter Dunne ran KL during
its trilogy of brilliance that was seasons four, five, and six. To be clear, he didn’t totally run all of six, since I think the last ten
eps or so were run by a different producer (Lawrence Kasha?), but for all
intents in purposes, he ran those three seasons. I think it will surprise nobody to say that,
when all is said and done and I’ve watched and written about all 344 eps of KL, seasons four through six are going
to stand out as the very best peak seasons of the series, where everything is
just firing on all cylinders and the show is virtually flawless. Then we hit 1985 and, for whatever reason,
the two shows did their producer swap and Dunne went over to run Dallas while Paulsen went over to run KL.
The exact reasons for this producer swap I do not know and, if anyone
reading this does know, please write
in and tell me. I’d be very curious to know who came up with the idea of
swapping producers and how the two producers felt about making the switch. In any case, it was a fairly short-lived
experiment because, after the year was up, Paulsen returned to working on Dallas and Dunne went to do, um,
whatever he went on to do (according to IMDb, his next producer credit is a
1988 TV movie called Police Story: Burnout).
Obviously we begin the ninth season with Bobby Ewing’s funeral, an
ep I already covered for A Brief Dallas Interlude. Right off the bat, after being away from the
series for some time, I was surprised by how well shot the show was. To be clear, it’s never as well
shot as KL, but that opening ep was
rather colorful and had some interesting camera tricks and even a cool dissolve
near the end of the ep. At the same
time, fuck if Dallas isn’t just plain
ugly to look at. Were the prints just
not preserved well at all? Even if I’m
seeing images that are technically well shot and photographed, the transfer is
just so ugly and the picture looks very video-y, just generally unpleasant to
look at. Contrast this with KL where, even when I’m watching on my
shitty bootleg DVDs, I can still enjoy the visuals of the series. Anyway, the opening eps of the season pretty
much deal with Bobby’s death to various degrees of effectiveness. These opening eps of the season are probably
the best part of the year and I was surprised to find myself enjoying them
pretty well. In fact, even though I
started this season expecting to see the series beginning its steady decline,
I’d actually argue the opening, let us say, eight or ten eps, I’d actually
argue that those eps are pretty good and show a surprisingly willingness to
experiment with the storytelling, something I don’t normally associate with
this series. See, when I think of KL, I think of a series that is happy to
experiment with storytelling and really shake things up. Kill off Sid Fairgate at the very beginning
of the third season? No problem, let’s
do it. Give Karen, the den mother and
rock of the series, a problem with prescription pill abuse? Done.
Have Val’s babies get kidnapped and give her a bunch of weird, trippy
dream sequences about the trauma?
Affirmative. Conversely, I feel
like Dallas was always afraid to
shake things up. Once they realized that
J.R. was such a popular character, let’s face it, it kinda became The J.R. Show
and stayed that way until the end. Every
episode is basically about the same battle for Ewing Oil fought between J.R.
Ewing and Cliff Barnes and it goes on for 357 eps and never really changes or
evolves all that much. However, here at
the start of the 1985-1986 season, I’m seeing the show trying some new things
and I like what I’m seeing.
First off, I actually think having Bobby dead is a fine decision
that the show should have stuck with.
For all the problems this year has (and trust me, it has a ton), Bobby
being dead is not one of them. We had
eight seasons of Bobby being alive and being the good son to J.R.’s bad
son. That was all fine, well, and good,
but I actually really like the sad feeling that permeates the show at the start
of the season. You can see all the other
characters missing Bobby and feeling an emptiness without him, and I would
argue Bobby’s death brings out some of J.R.’s most interesting material. A lot of people say this season made J.R. too
soft, and maybe they’re right, but at least in the opening hours, I’m liking
what I’m seeing from him. When J.R.
stands at Bobby’s grave and tells him he always loved him, I believe it and I
find it fairly moving. Throughout the
next eps, we have lots of different scenes displaying J.R. unable to cope with
or even understand his grief.
Another thing the start of the season brings us is the return of
Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie after the disaster of Donna Reed during the
previous season. Now, I’ve made it
perfectly clear that I’m never an Ellie fan no matter who plays her and that
Ellie is my least favorite character from the entire original cast. That being said, I actually think this might
be her best season in terms of acting and weighty material. I think Barbara returned to the series
rejuvenated and wanting to reclaim the part as her own, so the writers give her
lots of good moments to show her emotions and give some good acting. While Ellie will quickly return to her usual
state of playing checkers and getting absolutely no interesting storylines
ever, at least for the majority of the dream season, she’s pretty solid and I’d
say this is the most I’ve ever liked the character.
In fact, while we’re on the subject of Miss Ellie, I would like to
point out that I think Peter Dunne came to Dallas
intent on actually writing some interesting material for the female
characters. One of the most lacking
aspects of Dallas pretty much start
to finish is the female characters, who generally behave more like plot devices
than characters. Dunne had just spent
three years writing for some of the finest ladies ever on television, so I imagine
he wanted to give the ladies of Texas some interesting stuff to do. Right off the bat, we see a new side of Pam
as she deals with her independence after Bobby’s death and claims her spot at
Ewing Oil, working alongside J.R. Now, I
didn’t say any of this winds up being all that exciting; I’m just saying that I
see Dunne trying to give the ladies
something to do. We also have Sue Ellen
hitting her famous rock bottom (an arc that brings me flashbacks to Gary’s rock
bottom in season four of KL, one of
the first things I spotted as an obvious Dunne influence in this dream season)
and then coming out the other side, stronger and more capable. We have Donna and Ray and their pregnancy
(more on that in a moment), and we have Miss Ellie actually doing some interesting
things. Overall, I would argue the
series gets a little estrogen boost this year and the ladies are getting more
of the focus than the men. No argument
from me there, although I can see how this change would be jarring to loyal Dallas viewers.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying these first ten eps of the season
are stunning or anything like that, especially when stacked up against the first ten eps of KL the same season.
There are still plenty of problems, starting with that eternal Dallas problem of endlessly repeating
the same storyline on a loop, a cycle of repetition that goes on and on forever
over the course of fourteen seasons. In this instance, it’s yet another boring
battle for custody of John Ross fought between J.R. and Sue Ellen. Oh snore, who even cares about this? This stuff was compelling way back in the
early years when John Ross was still just a baby, but every time they return to
this device, it becomes less interesting, and sadly this isn’t even the last
time they’re gonna do it (I recall us having to suffer through another custody
battle storyline in season twelve).
Also, even if I praise this season for giving Sue Ellen a good arc
and letting her hit rock bottom, it’s still done in such a cheesy Dallas way. Compare and contrast Gary’s two big benders
on KL (season one and season four)
and how realistic those felt (more or less, ignoring “WE’RE RUINING
LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES”) with the way Sue Ellen’s bender here is presented. She starts drinking again and five minutes
later, she’s in a back alley with a bunch of gross homeless people drinking
liquor out of a bag, complete with one of those scary homeless shopping cart ladies holding
the bottle up to Sue Ellen’s face and being like “Welcome back,” or some
equally bad piece of dialogue.
It’s just way over the top, but that’s the way I tend to think of this show. While KL would handle a storyline like this with a certain degree of realism and subtlety, the parent series has all the subtlety of a bulldozer. Oh yeah, and then the series AGAIN repeats something they’ve already done before when Sue Ellen checks into a rehab center and is immediately presented with the opportunity, courtesy of an unethical male nurse, to get some liquor smuggled into her room. Okay, fine, whatever, but this was already done in season two and I see no reason to do the exact same thing again here in season nine.
It’s just way over the top, but that’s the way I tend to think of this show. While KL would handle a storyline like this with a certain degree of realism and subtlety, the parent series has all the subtlety of a bulldozer. Oh yeah, and then the series AGAIN repeats something they’ve already done before when Sue Ellen checks into a rehab center and is immediately presented with the opportunity, courtesy of an unethical male nurse, to get some liquor smuggled into her room. Okay, fine, whatever, but this was already done in season two and I see no reason to do the exact same thing again here in season nine.
Also taking up the attention for the first third of the season is
another generally uninteresting storyline about how J.R. might lose Ewing
Oil. Jeremy Wendell (who I think is a
great and underused character) shows up and offers a bunch of money or something
like that and then we have a series of eps in which Ellie is thinking of
selling and J.R. doesn’t want her to and there are arguments about that and
it’s, you know, boring, but also nothing too terribly offensive or stupid. Offensive and stupid will come at us very
shortly after this in the form of Angelica Nero. Ah fuck, as soon as this nonsense character
enters proceedings (it’s in the seventh ep of the season, The Wind of Change), you can actually hear the entire season going
off the rails. Before she shows up, I’m
actually having a pretty good time with the season. It’s stupid in parts, it’s sloppily shot in
parts, the acting is severely lacking in parts, and it’s repeating storylines
like crazy, but it’s still pretty watchable and at least feels like it’s trying
to go for something different, trying to explore these characters in a new
way. When Angelica shows up, things just
turn stupid. On a very base level, aren’t
her outfits just stupid? Travilla did
the same two years on both series (1984 through 1986), and every now and then
he would dress one of the KL ladies
in an outfit that was a little bit silly (Cathy’s swimsuit that she wears to
the fundraiser in Phoenix Rising),
but for the most part, the costumes were cool and stylish and not too
distracting. With Dallas, you have to wonder if there was just no one to reign him
in, because the outfits he dresses Barbara Carrera in are just ridiculous, and
she’s only one character out of several that suffer from Travilla’s unfortunate
wardrobe choices. She’s always dressed
in lavish ball gowns or similarly ridiculous things, even when she’s not going
anywhere near a ball. You could have a
scene of Angelica taking a shit and I assure you that she would be dressed to
the nines in a full gown and feathered boa with fancy earrings and a hideously
huge hat.
However, stupid wardrobe aside, the entire storyline with Angelica
is dumb, boring, confusing, and goes on forever. This is the longest season of Dallas ever, with 31 eps, and I tell
you, once Angelica enters proceedings, you feel
that length. This shit goes on forever and winds up taking us away from
Texas to some island in Europe that I’m pretty sure is made up (Martinique?) so
that J.R. and Angelica can, like, dress up Dack Rambo in an outfit and fake
grey hair so that people will think he’s, like, some other guy, or
something. I’m gonna go ahead and
declare all of this stuff in the middle of the season involving Dack Rambo and
this island and the ballgowns to be the rock bottom of this season. It just keeps getting worse and worse,
stupider and stupider, and it also coincides with the other storylines getting stupider and stupider (this is all
occurring at the same time that Pam is off on her ridiculous Colombian emerald
mine adventure, leading to such awful dialogue as Cliff gazing at an emerald
and saying to himself, “Bobby’s dream….now it’s Pam’s nightmare”). The rock bottom-est of the rock bottom occurs
when we hit episode 24 of the season, Masquerade. This is the ep where J.R. gets all dressed up
for the masked ball and puts, like, a plant on his head, and then in the middle
of the ball, someone tries to kill him with a crossbow, and the sad thing is
that I’m not kidding. Not only is this
stuff dumb and taking forever to unfold, but it’s also shot like absolute ass;
the basic staging and blocking of the climactic scene with the crossbow is just
lousy and it’s kinda unbelievable that anyone thought this was acceptable to be
aired on network television considering how bad it looks.
However, after that debacle, we still have seven more eps in the
season left, and the surprising thing is I really felt things picking up in
these last batch of eps. We get away
from Martinique and return to Southfork and I honestly feel the writers and
powers-that-be are trying to fix the mess they have created, and I think they
actually do an okay job. As I got closer
and closer to the end of the season, I realized once and for all how truly
awful and irreparable the dream season resolution really is to the entire
integrity of the series. As I said
already, at no point throughout this season did I feel like the lack of Bobby
was a problem. The idea that they just had to bring him back in order to fix
the series just doesn’t fly with me; I think the show is already fixing the
problems in this last batch of eps by returning the focus to the core
characters within the family. When we
reach the season finale, Blast From the
Past, I am actually interested in several of the storylines going on and
want to see them continue into the next season, not just be flushed down the
toilet as if they never existed.
I feel like I’ve written a lot about this season, but I haven’t
even mentioned so many of the characters or their stories. Part of this is from the season being so damn
long and from me forgetting the details and part of it is that Dallas just doesn’t stick with me the
way KL does. Thinking back over the season, I need to
double check the eps to find out when certain things occurred, whereas I can
usually just remember that stuff with KL. However, I do wish to address the main story
Donna and Ray get this season, because it’s a story in which I can see major
Dunne influence. For those who have
forgotten, we begin the season with Donna pregnant and her and Ray agreeing to
get back together. Then they find out
they’re gonna have a baby with down’s syndrome (or, as the characters keep
saying, “A retarded baby”) and it becomes this big debate about whether to have
an abortion or not. We wrestle with that
decision for awhile only for the writers to do what they always do to
developing fetuses inside the wombs of their female characters: they kill it
off. Donna makes the unbelievably stupid
decision of hanging out near a bull while she is pregnant (a fine example of Dallas allowing the plot to dictate the
character behavior) and of course the bull kicks her and the baby dies and that’s
the end of that, at least for awhile.
After some time being sad, Donna decides to go to work as a teacher of
mentally challenged kids and we have a lot of footage of her working with real
special needs children and I think I
don’t like the storyline. The weird
thing is that I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong with it, except to
say that I could see it being right at home on KL and working beautifully over on that series. Don’t you guys feel like this entire
storyline could have been given to Karen and Mack over on KL? With the quality of
writing and acting on that series, I imagine this story could have been really
moving and well done, but it’s simply out of place here and generally just made
me feel kinda weird and uncomfortable.
Also, ingrained within the very fabric of the storyline are some basic
problems that continue to support my case (as if it needs supporting) that KL is inherently better than Dallas in every way. If this storyline had been done on KL, I can guarantee you if would have
been handled with some subtlety and craft. On Dallas, Donna finds out her baby has down’s syndrome and the next
scene is her flinging herself onto a couch and writhing around and shrieking
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” like Darth Vader at the end of that shitty movie. This is just the way Dallas likes to handle things, especially by this point in the
series. Why have subtlety and nuance
when you can have the character shriek and writhe around?
Another Dunne influence I spotted early on in the season occurs when we
get a very bizarre dream sequence in which Sue Ellen is holding John Ross and
running away from a car driven by J.R.
Then it gets even more bizarre when the car appears to be driving itself
and then J.R. just sorta appears in front of Sue Ellen like Jason Voorhees in
front of some camp counselor and Sue Ellen wakes up screaming and freaking out.
I remember watching this ep with my brother for the first time and being like,
“What the hell was that?” A strange,
surreal dream sequence planted at the start of a Dallas ep was just not what I was used to, but now this dream
sequence just makes me think of any number of Val’s dreams in the sixth season
of KL (her and Gary on the beach, Dr.
Ackerman and her friends coming into her bedroom to take the babies away from
her, her and Gary dancing in front of the music box). Now this Sue Ellen dream doesn’t seem so
weird. I imagine that Dunne liked the
way the dreams played on KL and
wanted to try the same thing here, but it just doesn’t work as well.
And you know what, that’s the basic problem with the season, a
problem that’s very similar to the problem Paulsen experienced working on KL for the year. In both instances, I feel these guys have
talents that are just better suited to the shows they were already working
on. Would season nine of Dallas had been better if Paulsen had
continued working on it? Yeah, probably,
although I also predict it might have been more rote and a little less
experimental. Would season seven of KL have been better if Dunne had
continued working on it? Well, duh! Even
so, Paulsen’s season of KL definitely
works a whole hell of a lot better than Dunne’s season of Dallas, and I think that just boils down to the inherent brilliance
of KL, that somehow the magic of that
series cultivates good energy and creativity around everybody involved, so even
if there are things throughout the season that are flawed, it’s still very
watchable and entertaining and the cast always comes off looking good. And let’s be real, this also boils down to
the fact that the characters on KL are
just so much more interesting than the characters on the parent series. In my little writeup, I didn’t even bother to
mention characters like Jenna Wade or Jamie Ewing and you know why? It’s because they are unbelievably boring and
nobody could possibly care about anything they do. In addition to these bores, characters so
dull they make Kenny and Ginger look interesting (almost), you also have Jack
Ewing, Angelica Nero, Grace Whatever, Nicholas Who Cares, and I’m sure there
are plenty of other boring characters I’ve forgotten to mention. Compare these non-entities with anyone in the
cast roster or recurring star roster on KL
and the spinoff series will win every time.
The last thing I want to talk about before wrapping up this random
little essay is how I feel about the resurrection of Bobby Ewing and why I hate
it and why I refuse to recognize it as canon. One of the aspects of KL season seven that I enjoyed the very most was watching Gary
react to the death of his brother. I actually think this is a huge development
in the character of Gary and one of the reasons for his behavior throughout the
season. He gets more reckless, more
dangerous, more thrill-seeking, and he loses patience for putting up with any
of Abby’s crap. I think this relates
directly to losing his brother and becoming aware of his own mortality and I
think it’s a very interesting story to watch play out, much more interesting
than anybody’s reaction to Bobby’s death over on Dallas. The fact that the Dallas folk were happy as clams to
totally erase all of this and try to shuffle it under the carpet, not even
caring about how it fucked up continuity with the KL story, well that just goes to show you how the Dallas writers dealt with things when
they wrote themselves into a corner.
They came up with a resolution so very stupid that nobody in the world
could possibly take it seriously, and they effectively ruined any credibility Dallas had spent the last nine seasons
building, plus they fucked up the storyline on the better show. Because of this and so many more reasons, I
am officially declaring that I recognize seasons one through nine of Dallas as canon and I do not recognize
any of the events of seasons ten through fourteen as canon. In Brett’s world, Bobby Ewing dies on both
series, Gary has a minor
mental breakdown because of it, Val names her baby boy after Bobby in honor of
him, and he stays dead. I just won’t
allow the continuity of the series I love so much to be fucked up by the series
I don’t care nearly as much about, so I’m officially declaring that Bobby died
in 1985 and he stayed dead.
So that does it for my thoughts on the dream season of Dallas.
To be clear, it’s still bad. This is a bad season of television that
drifts into the just-plain-terrible category for about fifteen eps or so near
the middle before beginning to improve itself in the last seven eps. I’m not really sure who to blame for this
season being so bad, but I won’t blame Peter Dunne. Part of this just boils down to my loyalty; I
can’t blame him for this season being so bad after watching him work such magic
for three glorious years (“He fed us gold,” as J.V.A. said about him). I think the problem is that he moved his
talents from a glorious work of art to a far inferior series and found himself
trying to expand the series a bit and being unable to do so successfully. Really, he moved from a highly artistically
satisfying series to a sinking ship and was expected to run that sinking ship
and that’s why it didn’t work
out. Even so, for being the showrunner
of the absolutely brilliant seasons four, five, and six of KL, Mr. Dunne will always have my eternal respect.
Alright, that oughta do it for this little compare and contrast essay. We've been on season seven for a good long time, so let's go ahead and launch into season eight with Just Disappeared.
Alright, that oughta do it for this little compare and contrast essay. We've been on season seven for a good long time, so let's go ahead and launch into season eight with Just Disappeared.
FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN MY THOUGHTS ON DALLAS, OTHER BRIEF DALLAS INTERLUDES INCLUDE:
REUNION: PART ONE, REUNION: PART TWO, SECRETS, RETURN ENGAGEMENTS, NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY: PART ONE, NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY: PART TWO, END OF THE ROAD: PART TWO, THE SPLIT, FIVE DOLLARS A BARREL, JOCK'S WILL, THE FAMILY EWING, AND CONUNDRUM.
REUNION: PART ONE, REUNION: PART TWO, SECRETS, RETURN ENGAGEMENTS, NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY: PART ONE, NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY: PART TWO, END OF THE ROAD: PART TWO, THE SPLIT, FIVE DOLLARS A BARREL, JOCK'S WILL, THE FAMILY EWING, AND CONUNDRUM.
I watched Dallas intermittently during its initial run, and then once all the way through in syndication. Its repetitive story lines and no-growth characters just didn't stand the test of time for me. I have no desire to rewatch this series, even though Larry Hagman looked great in a suit, boots and a cowboy hat :)
ReplyDeleteI'll watch any of Dallas up to the Bobby death episode any day of the week. There's nothing worth watching after that. At some point, they made Miss Ellie a crime solver. I think they were trying to present a Murder, She Wrote angle. I felt like a fool watching
ReplyDeleteI've seen all 14 seasons TWICE! How do you think that makes ME feel?
DeleteWell, I know how it makes me feel FOR you.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"This shit goes on forever and winds up taking us away from Texas to some island in Europe that I’m pretty sure is made up (Martinique?)" OMG!I can't believe you wrote that Brett! Of course Martinique exists in real life! And not in Europe my friend. It's closer to the ol'good States...in the Caribbean. So, maybe Angelica was outrageous, the Dynastier character in Dallas, but Martinique was very real!
ReplyDeleteLOL, thank you. I am very American in that I have no idea what a globe looks like and what other countries are out in the world.
Delete