Everyone’s so tense on Dallas this season. No wonder Emma Ryland, the tarty equestrian played by Emma Bell, is hooked on benzos. When weepy birth mom Annie Ewing (Brenda Strong) confronted her about a stash of anti-anxiety meds in her sock drawer, Emma deflected by narcing on Sue Ellen (Linda Gray), accusing her of being back on the sauce.
Emma, as shaky as Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls, went out and scored 50 more pills by “entertaining” a rodeo-riding drug dealer. We assume he stayed on her for at least eight seconds to seal the deal.
In the second half of this week's double episode, Emma was pulled over and arrested for being higher than a penthouse pigeon. She blamed a raccoon in the road, then went into a long rehash of who her character is, including reminding us that she was abducted by her birth dad at the State Fair of Texas 20 years earlier.
That's enough to make us all beg for some dolls. (Hey, cowboy, is that a pill bottle in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?)
A big weakness of the current reincarnation of the 1980s CBS TV series, now on cable’s TNT, is that the writers persist in giving every character the same angry, anxious energy. They’re all hard-charging, constantly in conspiratorial mode.
The collective facial expression is the scowl. Nobody ever relaxes or cracks a smile. It's telling that the lightest moment of the season was Sue Ellen's half-drunk eulogy over J.R.'s grave. (A performance for which Linda Gray should be worshipped forevermore.)
This week’s scowl-filled, back-to-back episodes, titled “A Call to Arms” and “Love and Family,” offered more of the same. The Ewings’ oil business is going broke, thanks to a big rig explosion in the Gulf engineered by nemesis Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval). Cliff then bought the Ewings’ upside-down loans and celebrated by telling his daughter, Pamela (Julie Gonzalo), that he’s not at all sorry she miscarried Christopher Ewing’s twins in that rig disaster because “it would have tied you to the Ewings forever.”
He’s wrong. It’s the writers of this show that keep the Ewings and Barnes trapped in a Möbius loop.
This week’s big plot bidness:
Annie does the dishes: Oddly, Southfork employs only one rarely seen servant, even though Texans half as well off as the Ewings now have English-trained butlers answering their front doors. Annie, Bobby’s Wife No. 2, is the one to wag coffee cups to the sink and cook dinner for the clan in Southfork’s retro-’80s-ugly kitchen.
If Dallas were more like Dallas, Annie would have a personal Pilates trainer, her own boutique on Lovers Lane and … some friends.
Who’ll play Pamela Barnes? For weeks, Dallas has hinted that Bobby's first wife, Pamela Barnes Ewing, played in the 1980s by Victoria “Wonderbody” Principal, is dead or “off the grid” in Abu Dhabi. But this week, somebody dug up bank records showing that a “Patricia Barrett,” whose signature looks like old Pamela’s, has been withdrawing funds from a Barnes family Swiss account since 1988. She’s alive!
Later, Bobby sees a surveillance photo of Pam and reminded us that she was “badly burned” in a long ago car wreck. Sounds like a season two cliffhanger is afoot, starring an actress who will look sort of like the 1980s Principal after a lot of cosmetic surgery. In other words, like Principal looks now.
Coots in cahoots: Gov. McConaughey (Steven Weber, wearing Rick Perry pompadour hair) and baddie Ryland Harris (Mitch Pileggi), who is also Emma’s birth daddy, were thick as thieves this week. This plot should be more interesting, especially with a hammy actor like Weber playing a sleazoid Texas politician.
But so far it’s a nothingburger. Also, somebody please coach Weber how believably to utter Texanisms like “guaran-damn-tee” and “cattywampus.”
Speaking of beef: Elena (Jordana Brewster) brought in takeout ribs from Sonny Bryan’s to the Ewing Energies office this week. As if she eats.
Local spotted: Uptown Players theater actor Bob Hess played the nervous banker who had to break it to Bobby Ewing that Cliff Barnes had bought his loan and bankrupted Southfork. Again. This same plot happened in the 1980s series.
Vocabulary lesson: Rodeo groupies are called “buckle bunnies.” Cute.
Smuggler’s blues: Harris Ryland is some kind of smuggler. Bobby Ewing followed one of his big rigs to an “East Dallas storage facility,” but all the cops found in the unit was a bunch of boxes of high-priced women’s shoes.
Bobby, who’s no Barnaby Jones, didn't nose around enough to discover that the shoes were a decoy for another storage unit filled with … sump’n bad.
Best revenge: John Ross (Josh Henderson) and Pamela Rebecca Barnes (Gonzalo) exchanged vows in a quickie wedding at the end of the second episode this week. Cliff ain’t gonna like that.
Next Monday, 7 pm, is the two-hour season finale of Dallas on TNT. Meanwhile, catch reruns online.
Emma Bella as Emma Ryland, now a pill-popping princess on TNT's Dallas.
Figure skater Mariah Bell. Getty Images