Dallas revisited: Can JR compete with today's television drama?

• Patrick Duffy, Larry Hagman and Linda Gray reunited in 2008 at a 30th anniversary party

What is DALLAS?

Dallas, a glitzy television series named after the third largest city in Texas, is the everyday story of an extended family of venal, adulterous, booze-soaked oil millionaires. It was originally broadcast from April 1978 to May 1991. The BBC bought the show in its first year and went on to air all 357 episodes.

The series became a worldwide phenomenon, dubbed into 67 languages and broadcast in more than 90 countries. When JR was shot, in what would now be called the series finale in 1980, 400 million people across the globe tuned in, including 27 million in the UK. Today, when 11 million watch EastEnders on Christmas Day, it makes the news.

Who are we talking about?

Dallas centres around JR Ewing, a duplicitous, sexually incontinent oil baron with a gleaming white stetson and even whiter teeth. Played by real-life Texan Larry Hagman, JR was initially conceived as a secondary character but his shameless tomcatting and twinkly-eyed backstabbing was so popular with audiences that he was quickly moved centre stage.

JRs hellraising led his wife, Sue Ellen, to self-medicate with vodka and extra-marital dalliances while his mother, Miss Ellie, wrung her hands in despair. The youngest Ewing, Bobby, was the white sheep of the family but, by marrying the daughter of the clan's long-term rivals, he gave the scriptwriters plenty of rich material.

Bobby also made television history after being killed in a car crash at the end of series seven, in 1985. Viewers missed him sorely and ratings dropped. After a year at home, waiting for the phone to ring, the actor Patrick Duffy was persuaded to rejoin the series. He walked out of the shower, scratch-free and breathing normally, in the first episode of series nine. Everything that had happened in the intervening period - JR's underhand dealings with businesswoman Angelica Nero, her subsequent plot to kill him and his cousin Jack, Pam's marriage to Mark Graison -was all a dream.

Hagman, Duffy and Linda Gray, who played Sue Ellen, will all return for the new series, with the now elderly JR confined to a mental asylum. They will be minor characters as the new storylines focus on the next generation of voracious Ewings and their battle for control of the family's immense fortune. TNT, the network behind the new version, has recruited prime eye candy such as Josh Henderson, from Desperate Housewives, to play JR's son John Ross. He will compete with Bobby's adopted son, Christopher, to be top oil baron and to win the heart of Elena, the luscious daughter of the Ewing ranch cook.

Who actually shot JR?

Everybody remembers the hoohah, the bumper stickers, the T-shirts. The BBC sent security guards to the US to escort the precious tape from the airport to the studio and ran the story of the shooting on the Nine O'Clock News. But only the most devoted of pub quizzers can name the assassin. It was JR's mistress, Kristin Shepard, who pulled the trigger. Bonus point if you can add that she was played by Bing Crosby's daughter Mary.

Why is the show being rebooted now?

Cinema and television executives regularly plunder the archives to find hits to remake or, to use the current industry parlance, reboot. Hawaii Five-0, Melrose Place, La Femme Nikita, Beverly Hills 90210 and The Bionic Woman have all been reinvented - or had a brand extension - for the 21st century. As Christine Geraghty, professor of film and TV studies at Glasgow University, observes: "The first episode of Dallas was based strongly on a 1950s melodrama, Written On The Wind. Cinema and television have always had a culture of remaking and readapting."

Why was it so wildly popular?

According to Dr John Cook, reader in media at Glasgow Caledonian University, Dallas took an already successful format, the daytime soap opera, bumped up its production values and put it in a prime-time slot. The first series was episodic, with self-contained plots, but as soon as they turned into a soap with long-running storylines, it took off.

Highbrow TV critics sneered at the show and questioned why the BBC was buying another expensive US import. Clive James reviewed the episode where JR was shot - or "shart", he took great joy in mocking the Texan accent. "In a week which contained a full-scale production of Hamlet, the well-known tragedy by William Shakespeare, there could be no question about what was the most important event - the long-delayed episode of Dallas in which JR got shot."

He went on: "Candidates for the honour were queuing up in the corridor. It is even possible that Miss Ellie shot him, since she has been showing increasing signs of madness, singing her dialogue instead of saying it. Don't be surprised if the sheriff turns up with a wornt for her arrest. There could be a tornt of wornts."

For the sharp pen of James, the torrid plots and grand guignol performances were an easy target. But outwith the pages of the broadsheets, it was a show in tune with the zeitgeist. Cook recalls: "Dallas's arrival coincided with the election of Mrs Thatcher and the takeover of The Sun by Rupert Murdoch. It fed into the promotion of the capitalist way of life. It also coincided with the BBC's move away from the original ethos of public service broadcasting, with its emphasis on education and information, to a channel that focused on ratings and entertainment."

Larry Hagman thought that, by giving viewers behind the Iron Curtain a taste of the oil millionaires' shoulder-pads-and-Cadillacs lifestyle, Dallas precipitated the end of communism. "I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the (Soviet] empire," he said in 1998. "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."

What did Dallas contribute to popular culture?

At beginning of the 1980s it was all-pervasive, discussed endlessly by Terry Wogan on his radio and television shows and widely covered by the tabloid press. Wogan's relentless fun-poking and Clive James's waspish TV reviews persuaded a whole new audience to tune in and see what the fuss was about. It was watercooler TV in the days before watercoolers.

Growing up in the 1970s, TV critic Helen Stewart remembers it as forbidden fruit: "My parents thought it was too racy for a nice middle-class girl like me. It was what the bad girls at school got to watch. But I still knew who the Poison Dwarf (Wogan's nickname for Lucy] was. In fact the first episode I watched was Lucy's wedding. That was a huge cultural event."

Since then, Dallas has cast a long shadow. It almost immediately attracted spin-offs and imitators: Knots Landing; the cat-fight-heavy Dynasty; then Dynasty's own spin-off The Colbys.

"It began the soapification of US drama," says Cook. "It was hugely influential; everything from The Sopranos to The Wire now has a soap element, and Dallas was the first show to introduce that to prime time."

It has also been widely parodied, most notably in The Simpsons' episode Who Shot Mr Burns?.

Will stetsons and shoulder pads now enjoy a fashion revival?

Let us hope not. Style blogger Marina Maclean has, however, long admired the femme fatale nightwear favoured by the female cast. "Dallas always makes me think of luxe night gowns and slinky dresses with huge splits. If all I had to do all day was to spat with a love rival and pour myself giant crystal tumblers of whisky I too would be tempted to wear a strange hybrid of evening dress and nightie."

Can the new Dallas compete with today's outstanding dramas and outrageous reality shows?

The original series provided drama and escapism, sunshine and swimming pools, at a time when there was precious little aspirational entertainment around. But the world has moved on since Sue Ellen's last meaningful quiver of the lip. TNT will find it hard to match the last decade's stunning American set pieces (The Sopranos, Mad Men, now Boardwalk Empire). If they want to go down the camp nonsense route, with outrageous costumes and ludicrous plot lines, they will be competing with Desperate Housewives, Cougar Town and re-runs of Sex And The City. Then there are the reality shows, too many to mention, those nightly exposes of the squalid lives of the rich, the famous, the poor, the infamous.

Helen Stewart sees the latter as a particular problem for the new Dallas. "What lifestyle is there left that we don't know about? What can the Ewings do that the Kardashians or the housewives of Orange County have not done already? And when the media covers these real people, it has more punch than covering a character played by an actor. The landscape has changed enormously and I don't think the rebooted Dallas will be an automatic success.

Of course, if it is a humiliating flop, TNT has a ready-made excuse. They can always pretend it was all just a terrible dream.