The ‘Dallas’ Series Finale Put a Demonic Twist on ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
Decades after the (original) end of Dallas, fans are still upset the CBS primetime soap ended the way it did. “Worst series finale ever, [in my opinion],” one Reddit user wrote last September. “An insult to the intelligence of the audience. Having said that, it was Dallas in name only at that point.”
Another viewer said, “One of the worst series finales I have ever watched. I’m still not over how ridiculous it was.”
And yes, ending one of the most successful drama series in American television with an alternate-reality storyline — and one involving the devil in a perverse inversion of It’s a Wonderful Life, no less — is certainly a choice. But to be fair to the writers, it doesn’t seem they knew the end was nigh…
Joel Grey played the devil, sharing the screen with friend Larry Hagman
At the end of Dallas’ 14th and final season, J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) feels like he has lost everything — his business, his family, and his Southfork ranch — and with a revolver in hand, he seems to be considering suicide. And in “Conundrum” — the two-part episode that ended up serving as the series finale and aired on May 3, 1991 — Joel Grey plays Adam, an emissary from the afterlife, who shows J.R. Ewing what life would be like without him.
In that alternate reality, Gary (Ted Shackelford) runs Ewing Oil into bankruptcy, leading Jock (Jim Davis) to end his life and Ellie (previously played by Barbara Bel Geddes and, coincidentally, It’s a Wonderful Life star Donna Reed) to die of a broken heart shortly thereafter; Sue Ellen (Linda Gray) becomes successful soap star in a relationship with Nicholas (Jack Scalia); Kristin (Mary Crosby) becomes a con artist; Cliff (Ken Kercheval) becomes President of the United States; and Bobby (Patrick Duffy) succumbs to a gambling addiction and can’t pay child support.
But that’s where the It’s a Wonderful Life comparisons stop. Adam isn’t from heaven, as is made abundantly clear when he changes from a white suit to a red suit and his eyes turn red to match. “Pull that trigger,” he tells J.R. “Get it over with. It’ll be, oh, so much better.” And as Bobby pulls up to the house, he hears a gunshot, and viewers see Bobby looking shocked by what he sees inside the house.
“The unusual thing about it is that Larry and I were very close friends,” Grey told The Daily Beast in 2018. “He asked me to do the role. We lived next door to each other in Malibu. He was one of my dearest friends. We were an unlikely team. Don’t forget he was Mary Martin’s son. He was in theater before moving to California to be a big TV star.”
The finale was a ratings hit
Until that point in its 14th season, Dallas had averaged a 10.8 rating a 19-percent share of the audience, but overnight ratings for the finale nearly doubled those tallies, with a 21 rating and 34 share, according to The New York Times.
“We were hoping for a share in the high 20s,” David F. Poltrack, then CBS’s senior vice president of research, told the Times. He added that the finale’s high viewership meant Dallas was “going out in style.”
But the story “went off the rails,” Patrick Duffy said
©CBS / courtesy Everett Collection
“That last episode of Dallas, in my opinion, went off the rails,” Duffy told TV Insider in 2021. “It wasn’t even Dallas at that point. And I was not in favor of that episode, so I don’t know how that happened.”
Even as late as the wrap party, the Dallas team expected to come back for a 15th season, according to Duffy. “The idea was we knew that J.R. didn’t actually shoot himself,” he said. “[Executive producer Leonard Katzman] would say, ‘The script is going to be that you come upstairs, he’s not dead. He shot the mirror.’”
At that party, however, Katzman told Duffy that CBS was canceling the show. “It didn’t come as a shock,” Duffy said. “We had pretty much worn out the storylines and it was time. It was getting tired and it was time.”
A subsequent TV movie resolved the cliffhanger
Luckily for fans, the end of the Dallas TV show was not the end of the Dallas storyline. In the 1996 TV movie Dallas: J.R. Returns, Bobby recalls finding J.R. holding a smoking gun and “babbling some nonsense about the devil,” as CBR reports. As it turns out, it was the bedroom mirror that took the bullet, not J.R.
And ahead of TNT’s Dallas revival, the show’s Facebook page shared a mock-diary entry from J.R., dated May 4, 1991. “With my boy gone to England, and with Weststar and Ewing Oil stolen out from under me, I hit a bit of a rough patch,” the entry reads. “Got a little trigger-happy with my revolver and shot a mirror. Bobby freaked out. Thinks it was some kind of cry for help. Trust me, Bobby, it wasn’t.”
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