As a New Orleans-based reporter in the 1990s, I sometimes found myself driving along backroads of west Louisiana, chasing some story near the Texas border. I’d always make a point of driving into Texas, if only for a mile and back. To an East Coast kid like me, Texas felt like a mythical place, full of 10-gallon hats and 50-gallon personalities, and I think that had a lot to do with “Dallas.”
I was a kid when the CBS soap first aired — in a pre-cable era when one prime-time TV show could capture the attention of the world — and despite the booze and the adultery, it was always a family event. (This is a paradox of modern entertainment: Today, we let kids stew in cartoon violence, but we shield them from the everyday havoc that grownups can wreak.) In 1980, everyone I knew was obsessed with “Who Shot J.R.” — so much so that the day after the answer was revealed, a girl named Kristen walked into our elementary school with a sign that said, “I didn’t do it!”
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More television commentary in the op/ed section. Very sad.
Meanwhile, Fox cut off an interview with Thomas Ricks (a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who specializes in national security issues) for his criticism of the network's coverage and hyping of the Benghazi story.
It's actually cultural commentary. That was one of the most popular programs of its generation, and there are still people who idolize everything that the Ewing clan embodied. There is actually a party, moribund of late, that holds them up as exemplars. Your dismissal of this as "television commentary" is telling. What's sad is that you don't get it.