‘Dallas’ Opens With Memorial To Larry Hagman, Ends With J.R. Ewing’s Funeral

Dallas paid respects to actor Larry Hagman, who passed away in November, and his character J.R. Ewing, whom he played on an off since 1978, on Monday night’s episode.

The episode, entitled “J.R.’s Masterpiece,” tied up Hagman’s character’s arc with a shooting by an unknown culprit and a funeral. It served as an homage to Hagman’s first turn as J.R. Ewing in the original Dallas series. “Who shot J.R.?” now becomes the recycled catchphrase for the TNT reboot.

With J.R.’s death came the remembrance of Hagman’s passing, causing the Dallas executive producers to rethink the show’s opening credits. “What happened was, we were screening [the episode], and we went through the moment in the morgue when it’s yes, he’s dead, and then on came the big happy main title for Dallas, and it was like, ‘Okay, that has to change. We cannot do that this time,’” producer Michael M. Robin told Entertainment Weekly. “So we called our composer, Rob Cairns, and I said, 'This needs to be a remembrance.'"

Revamping the opening credits was perhaps a less difficult task than creating the seventh episode itself. The last scene that Hagman shot before he died was for the season’s fifth episode. The editors were called on to collect scenes that had been cut from prior episodes, and lines he’d previously recorded. After configuring J.R.’s final phone call, they had to reverse-engineer the other side of the scene.

Robin and fellow producer Cynthia Cidre explained to Entertainment Weekly that it wasn’t easy coming to the decision to recreate the story of J.R. getting shot. “You circle around after thinking about it for a week to you can’t get away from J.R. was shot,” Cidre explained after revealing the other options they considered. “So you do an homage to it. You do it again, and then you try to do it one better: Hopefully by the time we reveal the mystery, you’ll go, ‘Oh, cool.’ I’m telling you, it was really complicated to get to that place and to make people not say, ‘How can you shoot him again?’"

The memorable episode also included the return of Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval), Cally (Cathy Podewell) and Mandy Winger (Deborah Shelton). Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, Mark Cuban and Jerry Jones also came to pay their respects to the fallen J.R.

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