June 11, 2012, - 3:29 pm
Say It Ain’t So, J.R.: New “Dallas” Reboot is Anti-Drilling, Anti-Fracking, Anti-Oil Propaganda
Perhaps you’ve seen the hype building to this week’s premiere of the new “Dallas” show on TNT. It’s an unnecessary resurrection of producer Leonard Katzman’s popular 1980’s prime time soap opera, starring Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy as the feuding Texas oil baron Ewing Brothers. But they got 80-year-old Hagman out of the crypt and pulled 60-year-old Duffy back to the Southfork ranch to help introduce a new, younger generation of anti-Big Oil, anti-drilling, environmentalist Ewings–all of whom look like girliemen compared to the cowboys of the ’80s series. Well, actually, the evil Ewing son–J.R. Ewing’s progeny-manifests his “evil” by supporting the continuation of oil drilling and opposing “alernative energy sources” pimped by the handsome adopted “good” son of Bobby Ewing, played by the sculpted-eyebrow-endowed pretty boy, Jesse Metcalfe. Um, there’s a reason this show stars two of the rejects from ABC’s now-defunct soap, “Desperate Housewives.” They are desperate for a job and will do anything to have one, including trying to sell us on their BS left-wing politics, just like Housewives did (it pimped us on the goodness of illegal aliens and gay marriage, among other liberal viewpoints).
Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the show’s first episode:
We’re clearly now in an updated “Dallas,” very 21st century, with battle lines between good and evil firmly established. The opening scenes tell the story—evil comes in torrents of black, as in oil gushing from the earth, a gush that soils the faces of the cheering drillers who brought it forth. All this thanks to the ruthlessly ambitious John Ross (Josh Henderson), a third-generation Ewing, J.R.’s son, who has committed the “crime” abhorrent to environmentalists—namely drilling for oil. On the family’s land, no less. There’s also scary talk about fracking (high-volume drilling opposed by preservationists), about which you heard nary a word in the old “Dallas.” On the side of the good there’s Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe), adopted son of Bobby, another third-generation Ewing—but an enlightened and principled one, and a fervent advocate, he explains, of alternative sources of energy. Christopher is certain he’s found the answer in his plan to harvest methane—a plan he’s testing in waters off the coast of China. Don’t ask.
And don’t watch, either.
Politics or not, I predict this show will fail and fail quickly, just like every other remake and reboot from the ’80s that Hollywood has thrown our way on TV. Remember “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Bionic Woman”? I hardly do because they were gone in a second. No one wants to see their treasured old shows from the ’70s and ’80s remade with crappy new millennium “stars” . . . and they certainly don’t want to watch their formerly glamorous shows remade as politically correct attacks on the ’80s, American life, and middle American conservative values.
Part of the allure and sizzle of the old “Dallas” (which I never got to watch because it ran on Friday Nights during the Jewish Sabbath), was the wealth, high fashion, and passion of the rich oil families that Americans aspired to be. Americans wanted that life. They didn’t want to see attacks on it. And, today, no one wants to see that lifestyle assaulted Barack-and-Michelle-Obama-style with a withering attack on the black liquid we all need in order to get to work. But that was the ’80s (the original series lasted from the late ’70s to the early ’90s), which has forever since been fodder for anti-Reagan lambasting by the Hollywood left. Most mainstream Americans don’t subscribe to that, since those years were far superior to than 2009-2012 Obama years. And yet it continues because that’s all tinseltown knows how to serve up, along with its bad, warmed over remake/reboot/remodels.
Drill Baby Drill. And tell the left-wing writers of the new “Dallas” to go screw themselves. Even the Dallas theme song–one of the best of all time (it’s part of my workout music – video below, but the studio prevented the embedding of the best versions of the theme song which can be found here)–can’t save them from their PC crap.
At this point, even I want to shoot J.R. And regret that Bobby Ewing’s death was just a dream. And, what, no Charlene Tilton in this new version? Damn.
Tags: anti-drilling, anti-oil, Big Oil, Bobby Ewing, Charlene Tilton, Dallas, Dorothy Rabinowitz, drilling, environmentalist, fracking, J.R. Ewing, Jesse Metcalfe, Larry Hagman, left-wing, Leonard Katzman, oil, Patrick Duffy, Southfork Ranch, TNT
The classic is the best – no one can really equal Larry Hagman’s performance ss J.R. There was a reason “Dallas” ran for a record 14 seasons.
It had nothing to do with the political correctness today’s remake tries to sell. Like the old true and trite saying has it: don’t mess around with the original.
This “Dallas” rip-off will go nowhere.
NormanF on June 11, 2012 at 3:41 pm