Dallas is one of the most successful television shows ever. It brought the soap opera to primetime and its influence lives on in Simpsons parodies and Family Guy codas. Even its name has influenced its many successors. The prime time soaps that have followed have maintained the place-name format. Guiding Light, The Bold and the Beautiful, those are names for daytime soaps. At night, we want to go to Knot's Landing (a direct Dallas spin-off), Beverly Hills 90210, or The O.C.

Also like those more recent programs, it is not apparent why any of the show's characters are at all recognizable, let alone likeable. The Ewings are a wealthy oil and cattle family, emphasis strongly on the oil: even they have to remind each other to remember the cattle business. Their wealth and power has not come without serious realpolitik. The Ewings are no strangers to bribery and corruption and the audience is rooting for them as they try to ward off the blasted attorneys in Austin looking to expose the family's graft. It's all very pre-Enron.

The show does not belabor a lot of subtle points, but this pan-family fraud does give Dallas an interesting morality. The antagonist and the protagonist share the same (few) professional scruples. Older brother J.R. runs Ewing Oil and does a lot of bribing of local politicians. Little brother Bobby works for Ewing Oil and diligently covers up said bribery. J.R. is played with cold calculation. Bobby with easy-going charm. Corruption and ostentatious wealth are not what makes a character unpleasant in Dallas.

In the show's first mini-series, a five-episode prelude to what would be a 13-season run, what differentiates Bobby from J.R. is his integrity as a family man, not a businessman. J.R. is a philanderer and does not meet his husbandly obligations. Bobby and his wife do not let a conversation pass without one of them suggesting a quickie while no one is looking. J.R.'s marriage is barren. Bobby's is fertile... until J.R. poisons it. J.R.'s cheating endangers the family. Bobby's devotion saves it. Both brothers are willing to cheat and steal to get ahead in business, but in their own relationship Bobby is trusting to the point of idiocy, ripe for J.R.'s deceit. J.R. doesn't trust his own family, and that's the only real sin in Dallas.

Amid all the money and power, Dallas makes a nominal claim to sentimentality. The initial mini-series is set in motion by Bobby's marriage to foxy Pamela Barnes, daughter of a rival, and defeated, family. The young couple is the foundation of the show and their charming relationship almost does expatiate all the family's wrongdoing. Pamela is not quite the independently empowered woman one might expect from a show premiering in the late '70s -- she has the political mind to frustrate J.R.'s traps but she always wields her power through Bobby -- but her marriage is paragon of trust in a Ewing-eat-Ewing world. She and Bobby are always honest with each other, even (or especially) when J.R. or some other nemesis is counting on them to gloss over the truth and confound the situation with assumption. With corruption a given, this early and selfless trust endears the couple as they navigate their Capulet/Montague marriage through discord and conniving, much of it dangerously vague.

Indeed, the politics and plotting of the show are feeble, at best. Especially compared with increasingly complex modern teevee shows, Dallas clunks along. When oversexed Ewing granddaughter Lucy skips school, letters are sent home. The writers spare us details on what the letters contain or do or how it is, exactly, they force Lucy to go back to school. The point is, she's in trouble. And when she intercepts and burns the letters, she's not in trouble. This sort of thing lends the show an oddly symbolist edge. Dallas asks its viewers to accept many totems in place of actual evidence or explanation. The show must be enjoyed because the characters make power moves, not because of anything intriguing in the moves themselves.

The pacing is also surprisingly slow. Dallas has many of the trappings of a soap opera but, because it was a weekly and not a daily, it does not have the classic tri-narrative, ongoing-storyline structure. (At least early on; this is a show famous for its cliffhangers.) Each episode in the original mini-series deals with one discrete plot. Themes and relationships carry over, but not much else. If the storyline about Lucy's truancy doesn't interest you, you're out of luck for that episode.

Unless, of course, you like car shots. From a helicopter, from the hood of a car, from the roadside, there is plenty of coverage of the Ewings behind the wheel. Probably two minutes an episode of just drivin' around. Which is only fitting. They are an oil family and the daunting gas prices of the late '70s would have been a boon, not a burden. Maybe that's why it took a few years for the show to climb to the top of the ratings. The Ewing wealth, so central and uncomplicated in the show, did not become palatable until gas prices came back down under $2. Or maybe it just took three years for people to figure out there was a soap opera, complete with sex and lies and not much else, on during primetime.

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