Thank you Phill Watson, wherever you are

In the mid-1980s I worked for a small IT consulting company in Toronto where I met a British ex-pat named Phill Watson. It was during the time that I knew him that he decided to move himself and his family back to Britain. I have lost contact with him, but want to thank him for something.

One day during a conversation about television, he mentioned that he and his wife were addicts of that prime time soap opera, Dallas. I was surprised to hear that and told him so. I had a low opinion of the program although I hadn’t watched it, having made assumptions about it. If you remember, that was the show that sparked the summer long “Who shot J.R.?” media frenzy, as the previous season had ended in a cliffhanger when the main “bad guy” protagonist was gunned down by an off-camera mystery shooter.

He went on to explain that I was missing the point by mistakenly judging the program using the standards of drama. His opinion was that the program was a comedy, a spoof, that it was satire and that it was a joke being played on the viewers by sophisticated writers. “Who do you think those writers are?” he asked. “They’ve read Shakespeare, they know literature”, he added. His point was that whoever they were, they were educated people who knew exactly what they were doing. He suggested that I watch the next episode and listen carefully to the dialogue. “Listen to the words that come from those actors’ mouths”, he urged, “Listen carefully and then try to tell me that those writers aren’t having the time of their lives writing that stuff.” His take was that the show was high comedy but that nobody realized it because there was no laughtrack. There were no long pauses after exaggerated punchlines that audiences had been trained to recognize as cues to laughter, the way they learned to do watching boilerplate situation comedies.

So I tried watching and I had the time of my life. The show was truly funny. Once I got in on the joke being played, I ended up enoying the program tremendously. I even got into the habit of trying to predict what nonsense would come up next and became pretty good at it. In the last couple of seasons, I think that the writers ran out of ideas and the program lost its way, rehashing old plotlines too many times. It became a little too difficult to believe that the by then older J.R. could have such a powerful sexual hold on attractive young women. You can only carry that one off for so long. I suppose that’s no different to what happened (and happens) to many television shows. American television has a tendency to milk their cows long after they’ve stopped giving fresh milk. But it was fun while it lasted.

Thanks Phill, I hope you’re still enjoying TV.