So, you know those movie trailers that start with some stentorian man very somberly intoning things like, “In a world, that is not our own, oxygen is a luxury one man can not afford…†and then, there’s a record-scratch effect and the voice gets all lighthearted and goofy and squeaks, “but that’s okay, because Cod Fishterton has a plan! To grow gills!†or something else equally ludicrous? Well, the first trailer for TNT’s sequel/reboot of the nighttime soap Dallas, which starts this summer, sounds exactly like that, except that it never gets purposely ludicrous. Instead, it begins with the following very serious narration: “There’s oil beneath this land, worth countless billions. Every drop has a secret buried with it and it all belongs… to the Ewings.†When that’s done, at the point when it should totally cut to girls in bikinis or shirtless dudes riding mechanical bulls, it just gets more serious. The permanently cheesy Jesse Metcalfe, playing a third-generation Ewing, growls, “All my life I’ve been trying to put the Ewing name back on top.†Then there’s some more manly man talk from Patrick Duffy, an O.G. Dallas cast member, and then the show’s other new hunky leading man (he has the mustache Bieber aspires to) chimes in, and then — and only then — does the spurting, ecstatic oil rig come into play! In short, instead of just remaking a frothy, fun nighttime soap with some of the folks who were in the original (Duffy is joined by Larry Hagman and Linda Gray), TNT would have you believe it’s remaking a very pedigreed, highly respectable program about that extremely honorable subject: filthy rich, hot people sleeping around and yelling at each other, sometimes while wearing cowboy hats. Meant to bolster this “Dallas was a reputable national treasure†framework is footage from gendered behind-the-scenes roundtables, where the cast talks about how important the show was and compliments Larry Hagman on being a great villain. It’s all very promising, in just the ridiculous way self-serious melodramas should be: no winking allowed.
