November 21, 1980, 40 years ago: The CBS nighttime soap opera Dallas airs the episode "Who Done It," answering the question that had been on everyone's mind for 8 months: "Who shot J.R.?"
Dallas had premiered on April 2, 1978, and was originally meant to be a "Romeo and Juliet" story, as Bobby Ewing (played by Patrick Duffy) married Pamela Barnes (Victoria Principal). Each was the child of a fabulously wealthy Dallas oil baron: Bobby was the son of John Ross "Jock" Ewing (Jim Davis), and Pam was the daughter of Willard "Digger" Barnes (David Wayne, later replaced by Keenan Wynn). Jock and Digger had been partners and got rich together, but split when Digger's girlfriend, Ellie Southworth (Barbara Bel Geddes), left him over his drinking and married Jock.
The Ewings and the Barneses were arch-rivals from then onward. Jock's son, John Ross Ewing Jr., a.k.a. J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman, Broadway star Mary Martin's son, formerly a good guy on I Dream of Jeannie), and Digger's son Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval) hated each other most of all. Soon, the greedy, tomcatting, amoral J.R. -- People magazine called him "the phallus of Dallas" -- became the show's breakout character.
This changed the producers' plans. In a move that would have presaged Game of Thrones nearly 30 years later, they planned to kill Bobby off at the end of the 1st season, and make Pam the show's main focus. But with J.R. becoming the star, they decided it would be better if the show's "hero" were male, so they kept Bobby.
J.R. treated everybody badly, including his wife, Sue Ellen Shepard (Linda Gray). He cheated on her with her sister, Kristin (Mary Crosby, daughter of Bing). Sue Ellen became an alcoholic, and started cheating on J.R., first with Cliff -- and it takes a post-birth paternity test to determine that John Ross Ewing III is J.R.'s son, not Cliff's -- and later with rodeo cowboy Dusty Farlow (Jared Martin).
Hagman, one of the few real Texas natives in the cast, knowing he had become the star of the show, wanted more money for Season 4. Lorimar Productions didn't want to give him more money. So, in the Season 3 finale, "A House Divided," airing on March 21, 1980, J.R. was shot at his office at Ewing Oil in downtown Dallas. The season-ending cliffhanger had been invented.
If Lorimar -- or CBS -- wanted to show Hagman that they could get along with him, the move massively backfired. Not that CBS minded: The reruns, pored over by fans looking for clues as to the shooter's identity as if they were Beatle albums with clues to Paul McCartney's alleged death, got higher ratings than the episodes got when originally broadcast. All the attention meant that Lorimar and CBS were now making enough money that they could afford to cave in to Hagman's demands, and not care about saving face.
And so, in the Season 4 premiere, we find out that J.R. had done in 1980 what President John F. Kennedy couldn't do in 1963: Survive being shot in downtown Dallas. At first, he is paralyzed, but this is overcome within a few weeks. And, when asked by the police at the end of the Season 4 premiere, he doesn't answer. At the start of the next episode, he gives his answer, but it's unsatisfying: He said it was too dark to see the shooter.
Jock finds a gun, which turns out to have Sue Ellen's fingerprints on it. She is arrested, and begins to think that, maybe, she shot J.R. while drunk, and that's why she doesn't remember it. The entire Ewing family abandons her, leaving her to rot in jail, before Cliff bails her out -- and confesses that he had gone to Ewing Oil to kill J.R., but that someone had beaten him to it.
Sue Ellen figures it out. It had to be someone who knew her habits and J.R.'s, and could take advantage of both. "It was you, Kristin!"
J.R. was ready to call the police when he saw Sue Ellen approach him by the pool at Southfork Ranch. Now, he begins to call them, but Kristin tells him that if he does, his child would be born in prison: "I can see the headline now: 'Jock Ewing's Grandchild: Jailbaby!'" It looks like checkmate for J.R. But he closes the episode by telling Sue Ellen that will deal with Kristin himself.
"Who Done It" -- the word "Whodunit" is often a noun, a slang term for a murder mystery -- becomes the most-watched program in the history of American episodic television, with 90 million viewers, 76 percent of all TV viewers, and a Nielsen rating of 53.3. It surpasses the record set in 1967, by the final episode of The Fugitive. It only holds the record for 3 years, until the final episode of M*A*S*H. The M*A*S*H finale and "Who Done It" remain 1st and 2nd all-time, and the proliferation of cable TV networks means that this will likely remain so for as long as television is a form of entertainment.
In the next episode, we find out how J.R. has decided to "deal with Kristin": Instead of pressing charges, J.R. arranges for Kristin to move to Los Angeles with a monthly check, which she will get as long as she never returns to Dallas. But at the end of the season, she does, having had a baby boy.
And in the last scene of Season 4, Cliff visits Southfork, and sees a woman floating in the pool, and J.R. standing on the balcony, appearing to have pushed her over. Cliff thinks this is Pam, and yells up at J.R., "You bastard!"
The Season 5 premiere reveals it's not Pam: It's Kristin. J.R. didn't push her: She had a drug overdose, the cause and the location perhaps poetic justice for how she took advantage of Sue Ellen's drinking. And, as it turns out, her son Christopher is not J.R.'s son, but that of another man with the same blood type. In another twist in this show of many twists, Christopher is adopted by Bobby and Pam.
In 1986, by which point J.R. and Sue Ellen are married in law only, and have had various affairs, J.R. threw Sue Ellen's boyfriend over a balcony, killing him. Enraged, 6 years after originally being accused of it, Sue Ellen finally shot J.R. But he lived, and neither was criminally charged over these events. They finally divorced 2 years later.
The series concluded in 1991, with Bobby appearing to have found J.R. having shot himself, a "permanent cliffhanger." A 1996 reunion movie shows that this was not the case.
The sequel series that began airing in 2012 focused on the next generation, especially cousins John Ross (Josh Henderson) and Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe). Most of the original characters appeared, although Jim Davis and Barbara Bel Geddes had already been dead for a few years (Davis while still playing Jock in the original series).
But Hagman had cancer, and so a storyline was set up where J.R. would be shot one more time, this time for keeps, but by his own plan, so he could avoid a lingering death from cancer, and finally win the Ewings' war against the Barneses by framing Cliff for it. It was titled "J.R.'s Masterpiece." Hagman died on November 23, 2012, and the episode aired 4 months later.
The revived series was canceled after its 3rd season, due to declining ratings, and ended on September 22, 2014, on a permanent cliffhanger, with Christopher apparently killed by a car bomb.
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