TNT’s ‘Dallas’ season 2 spoilers: Producers talk J.R. Ewing’s funeral and more
In just a matter of hours, J.R. Ewing’s funeral will end up airing on TNT’s “Dallas,” and it is going to be an affair that like has people talking around the watercoolers for days and weeks to come. This is a character whose history on television extends back for decades, and the emotional attachment factor here is exceptionally high, even after the character was seemingly shot once before.
We can already tell you that the opening credits have been re-designed for Monday night to honor Larry Hagman, and this is really just the first of many surprises of the night to honor the legendary actor and his accomplishments. A
As for the actual making of this episode, it was quite a great challenge for a number of reasons. For one, the last episode Hagman actually appeared in was episode 5, but the show found a way to use a phone call from the character in episode 7 just before his death. How was this possible? It’s an interesting discussion of technology on TV, and this is something that executive producer Michael M. Robin explains in depth to Entertainment Weekly:
“When Larry passed, we weren’t ready for that on a story-level. We had all these things set up through show 5, and show 6 was written, and show 7 was written for J.R. to be doing something else. So Cynthia [Cidre, also an EP] said to the editors, ‘Okay, what scenes have been cut from something that Larry did photograph? And also, find for me all the different lines that he has said,’ because we were thinking along the lines of what kind of phone calls could we create. So we got to the phone call where he’s being shot, and she had the list of the different things Larry’s said and basically reverse-engineered the other side of the scene to be able to get J.R. to answer in the way that we needed him to. We looked at the cut, and three of the lines that we had cobbled together were from the same scene from episode 4 earlier this year. And our editor, Adam Bluming, cut those lines in against the phone call with John Ross. And then interestingly enough, there was a take [from episode 4, when J.R. hears from Frank that John Ross is in bed with Pamela], where Larry put the phone down and just looked straight ahead and had this horrified look on his face. When Adam put those things together [with a new background behind J.R. and the sound of footsteps], all the sudden we had a scene where it looks like Larry was participating in this character’s demise. So we had that [scene] but it kinda felt like we just had a little tag on the end of the hour where J.R. just showed up, and we needed a whole story. So we tried the same thing again and created a three-beat story [for episode 7] with other footage that we had. We went back and reshot the other side of scenes, reverse engineering the dialogue that made sense plot-wise for the actors that we did have so they could move it along, and we tied it in to the dialogue that we did have of Larry.”
Based on the complicated nature of the filming process here, it’s safe to say that none of this would have been even remotely possibly back when the J.R. character was shot on the show the first time.
What do you want to see moving forward on “Dallas,” and do you anticipate some major tears on your end come Monday night? If you want to take one final look at J.R.’s memorial service, be sure to head on over to the link here.
Photo: TNT