But overall, I loved the whole thing. Despite its faults, I was so happy to see it back and with so many of the original actors and characters. I thought the way they wrote Cliff was closer to my kind of satisfaction in how he morphed into the character he became. I loved the SE/JR scenes as well as the SE/John Ross scenes. New characters like Emma, Judith, Harris and DRew as well as the brilliant Pamela Rebecca. We didn't get enough Ray, Lucy, Gary and Val stuff but I was grateful for what we got and I accepted that this was around 20 years later so not everyone would still be on the scene.
In an effort to get things back on topic, I looked through some of the earlier posts, and came across your above statement about what they did with Cliff. That's interesting to me because while I didn't like what they did with Cliff's character when TNT Dallas first aired, now I find myself thinking: yes, the Cliff they showed was very different, but it's very possible that with his constant bitterness and thirst for vengeance that those things could have really eaten away at his soul until he became the evil Cliff of TNT. We missed twenty years of seeing him make that transformation and I think that might be what shocked people, or even saddened them, but isn't possible that as a man who continually allowed negative thoughts to consume him, that what we saw would have been the end result?
I think it ties in with with the subject of the thread because while Cliff may not have been the character I thought was best written, my estimation of the way he was written in TNT is now much higher than it was. I still think Harris Ryland was the best written because I found him interesting and I found his actions to make sense based on the mindset of the character they had created. He was a dangerous adversary for the Ewings and that's critical for Dallas. If their adversaries don't pose any genuine threat, then how dramatic is that? Harris seemed to be a genuine threat and especially to how he could affect Ann's emotions. Harris continually manipulated Ann's emotions through Emma.
One thing I loved about original Dallas was that their main cast of characters all had some bad and some good in them with some having a lot more of one than the other. It was my perception that in TNT Dallas they often took away the good qualities a character had and just left the bad qualities, or at least diminished the good qualities while maintaining or even increasing the bad qualities. In original Dallas JR was a character with a lot of bad qualities, but it made JR ever so much more interesting because he did have good qualities as well!
I found JR's best quality to be how good of a father he was and the great relationship he had with John Ross. If TNT had just wanted to change that and have their relationship deteriorate that would have been one thing, an artistic choice. They did something else though; they tried to change Dallas history refusing to acknowledge JR being a good father and having a good relationship with John Ross, and went as far in rewriting Dallas history with things John Ross said about JR and JR even saying he'd failed John Ross as a father. We know what we saw!
It's an example of what I saw as TNT's fascination with removing or at least diminishing the positive qualities and amplifying the negative qualities of very well established characters. I loved the original show's balance of good and bad qualities in characters, of showing happiness and unhappiness, the light and dark, the hope and the fear. I was very disappointed that I didn't see that in TNT Dallas.
