I watched an advance preview of TNT’s Dallas season two premiere – I previewed the rebooted series and reviewed the first season and its finale last year – which airs tomorrow night. The younger crew takes center stage, as Sue Ellen Ewing runs ahead in her campaign for governor of Texas and Bobby Ewing’s wife Ann plans to reunite with her long-lost child, and we see lots of skin in a sensual swimming pool scene with the show’s leading airheads, Bobby’s environmentalist son (Jesse Metcalfe) and his girlfriend (Jordana Brewster), who celebrate a top race-car driver agreeing to race one of their company’s electric cars in competition. They also struggle with J.R.’s nasty oilman son (Josh Henderson, as slippery as ever) in the requisite evil businessman role. So, we get more of the same as the end of last season: Ewing Oil has emerged as an uneasy coalition of oil and natural gas energy interests with ecology-minded principals leading the way and anyone who wants to drill for oil as the bad guy. There is less of J.R., played to the hilt by the late Larry Hagman, whose illness is more obvious here, and seeds are planted for the Barnes/Ewing rivalry to continue in the show’s second season. But there will have to be more to this version of Dallas to succeed creatively and commercially beyond nostalgia and gorgeous babes and hairless hunks. Dallas writers assume too much investment in weak characters where they should be developing stronger values in each character amid real, sustained conflict. How do Middle East oil and Islamic terrorism and the nation’s left-wing politics play in the Lone Star state and down at Southfork? There may be meat on these bony characters, but judging by the new stuff, with J.R. soon to exit in some way, Dallas needs to beef up.
