Photo: Everett
“It was about a 10 percent audience loss, at least from that, because people were offended to see the [death] storyline just tossed,” Steve Kanaly, 77, who played Ray Krebbs on the show, told PEOPLE at a cast reunion in Palm Springs, California
As the cast reunited ahead ofDallas’s 45th anniversary in September, Kanaly noted, “I don’t want to mention them, but various cast members were pissed because their storylines were lost as a result of that. And it had a big impact.”
“We’ve got Patrick back," Kanaly recalled. “Patrick comes back in the show. How do we explain what went on for all of season 8? It was not an easy decision. I know everybody in production was looking for their way to do it, and the least confusing thing was to just throw it all out the window and say, ‘Oh, it was all a dream.’ And then you can pick up where you left off and skip that whole year.”
Patrick Duffy and Larry Hagman.Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images
“I had an answering machine message, and it was from Larry Hagman, saying ‘Patrick, I want you to come out to the house, get drunk in the jacuzzi. I want to talk to you,’” recalled Duffy, 74. “I told my wife that Larry was going to ask me to come back on the show … and I did it because Haggy asked me to.”
It was Duffy’s wife’s “literary knowledge” that helped the couple predict how his return would happen. “My wife said instantly, ‘Well, you can’t come back on the show unless that whole season was a dream,’” the actor says. “We’ve talked about what she said years and years after that, and she based it on just her literary knowledge. Half of Shakespeare’s plays have dreams.”
Emma McIntyre
Speaking on the legacy ofDallas,Linda Gray, 82, who played J.R. Ewing’s wife Sue Ellen, tells PEOPLE, “Because the show ran for so many years, the audience got to know the characters so genuinely and they really cared for [them] and the characters all went through so much.”
“And I think the fans really loved to relate to the stories that were bigger than life. I think that they were definitely bigger than life so they could live vicariously through those characters.Dallaswas so influential.”
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All 13 original seasons ofDallascan be streamed on Amazon Freevee.
source: people.com
