New ‘Dallas’ Remake is Anti-Drilling, Anti-Fracking, Anti-Oil Propaganda
| June 14, 2012 | Posted by Beth Shaw under Energy, Issues |
Remaking a popular prime-time television soap opera that’s central premise is about the lives of a Texas family make rich through oil in the age of Environmentalism must have been a challenge. However, the new ‘Dallas’ remake addresses this issue straight from the get-go. Now the son’s of the quarrelsome brothers J.R. and Bobby Ewing are continuing the soap opera as quarrelsome cousins.
It doesn’t take long to figure out who the good guys and who the bad guys are. The ‘good guys’ are Bobby’s family who want to change the direction of Ewing Oil towards alternative energy while J.R.’s son represents the ‘bad guys’ who wants to drain the earth of all its resources.
From HuffPo
In the new plot, John Ross schemes to develop the oil on Southfork without the consent of Bobby (still played by Patrick Duffy). Meanwhile Bobby’s son Christopher, played by Jesse Metcalfe, has founded Ewing Alternative Energy and espouses a seemingly anti-oil perspective. Like any good soap opera, everything is incestuous and intertwined. The two men battle over the affections of Elena, a buxom entrepreneurial wildcatter who is also the daughter of the Ewing’s in-house cook, even while Christopher marries another woman. JR — the senior villain still played by Larry Hagman, watches on in bemusement.
The cheese is thick enough to spread on crackers.
“So, I hear you’ve come home with some kind of alternative energy scheme to save the world,” John Ross asks Christopher, in their first major argument around the dinner table.
“Oil is the past,” Christopher replies. “Alternatives are the future.”
“I couldn’t disagree more.”
“Well this country is quickly running out of resources,” Christopher adds.
And just like that, 16 minutes into the first episode of the pilot, the fundamental dynamic of U.S. energy policy — err… I mean, of the Ewing family in Dallas TX — is laid bare. Christopher even speeds away under the high-pitched electric whine of his sleek black Tesla.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where this is going.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the show’s first episode:
We’re clearly now in an updated “Dallas,” very 21st century, with battle lines between good and evil firmly established. The opening scenes tell the story—evil comes in torrents of black, as in oil gushing from the earth, a gush that soils the faces of the cheering drillers who brought it forth. All this thanks to the ruthlessly ambitious John Ross (Josh Henderson), a third-generation Ewing, J.R.’s son, who has committed the “crime” abhorrent to environmentalists—namely drilling for oil. On the family’s land, no less. There’s also scary talk about fracking (high-volume drilling opposed by preservationists), about which you heard nary a word in the old “Dallas.” On the side of the good there’s Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe), adopted son of Bobby, another third-generation Ewing—but an enlightened and principled one, and a fervent advocate, he explains, of alternative sources of energy. Christopher is certain he’s found the answer in his plan to harvest methane—a plan he’s testing in waters off the coast of China. Don’t ask.
See, it only hurts the Earth if the resources are harvested in the clean and highly regulated United States. Getting those resources in other places in the world is a-okay!
Oh, I long for the days when we could watch television for entertainment and not be bombarded constantly with politically-correct propaganda about whatever the cool/popular issue du-jour is!
